Kosovo: Prizren  

I got to Prizren early in the morning. I came on a night bus from Belgrade and didn't sleep much. I was quite tired, but also very excited to discover Kosovo.

I went to the bus station café and waited there until sunrise.
There were buses leaving to Austria and Germany.

I could have a first contact with some locals while having some coffee.
People at the station café are used to see foreigners, as many international organizations have offices in Prizren.

But a tourist in Kosovo is a less common sight.
So I seated in a table with 5 people, including the owners of the place, and had a nice talk for about an hour.

The bus station is maybe 2 kilometers away from the center so I decided to go walking.
On my way I found the building of the Municipality of Prizren, where Kosovo thanks all the countries that have recognized it as an idependent country.

Kosovo declared independence on February 17 2008. I was visiting the country less than a year after that.
The USA and the NATO played a big role on this and Kosovo is very thankful towards them. Of course Serbia isn’t.

There were a lot of posters on the street thanking the USA in a way or another. The one you see on the left is just an example.
It uses the Thanksgiving celebrations to thank the USA.

When building a new country, new heroes arise, and others disappear.
You'll have trouble finding a Tito statue in Kosovo. Instead you have other monuments, like this sculpture of Ismet Jashari in Prizren, Kosovo.

Note that on the back there's the Albanian and not the Kosovar flag.

Ismet Jashari was also known as Komandant Kumanova. This Albanian man left Switzerland to join the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UÇK in Albanian) and fight against Yugoslav forces for Kosovo's independence. He died in 1998.

OK, he was Albanian. But if he fought for Kosovo, why keep the flag of Foreign Country?

The strange thing about Kosovo being independent is their lack of national symbols.

When Kosovo declared independence they didn’t even have a flag! People of the streets were waving the Albanian flag.

Isn’t that a lack of identity on its own?

OK, everything has a start and it's normal that Albanians wave an Albanian flag.

But the troubling thing is that even today (When I visited, a year later), when wandering in Kosovo, there are Albanian flags in every corner…But you’ll have a hard time looking for a Kosovo flag…

There are very few Kosovo flags around, and most of the time they’re side by side with an Albanian one...

Albanians are today the main ethnic group of Kosovo and of course a lot of people would like their country to be part of Albania.
But this is not likely to happen, as it would create very serious problems between Albania, Serbia... and even the rest of Europe.

So, Kosovo chose independence, because they didn't want to be part of Serbia and could't be part of Albania.

But it’s hard to create a country without any symbols of its own. It's hard to create a country where there's never been one before...

When Kosovo declared independence, they didn’t have a national anthem either. Now they do: the government organized a contest to compose one.
Guess what! Kosovo's National Anthem's name is Europa, and it has no lyrics.

The name is supposed to represent the multi-ethnic character of Kosovo.
Well, I find a bit pretentious that a partially recognized country names his national anthem after his continent.
I mean... Your national anthem is supposed to represent your country, not the country of everyone around you...