Kulla (Mansion) of Jashar Pasha,

Peja/Pec.
Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.
108

Monument and Crime:

The Destruction of
Historic Architecture
in Kosovo
ANDREW HERSCHER AND ANDRS RIEDLMAYER

While international accords prohibit the targeting of cultural

artifacts during warfare, this legal protection implies that
war is not waged over questions of culture and thus, that cultural artifacts can unproblematically be distinguished from
legitimate military targets.1 The 1998-1999 conflict in
Kosovo, however, was sanctioned by recourse to little else
than culture; competing versions of Kosovos cultural identity were staged as the bases for competing claims for sovereignty over the province, and cultural artifacts were
presented as precise evidence of those claims. The entanglement of the cultural and the political that led to the widescale destruction of historic architecture in Kosovo, then,
was less an avoidable anomaly of the conict than one of the
conicts constituent elements. As such, the war in Kosovo
is characteristic of a new form of conflict that is produced
not out of geopolitical or ideological disputes, but out of the
politics of particularist identities. In this new form of conict, behavior that was proscribed according to the classical
rules of warfare and codified in the laws of war in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as atrocities
against non-combatants, sieges, destruction of historic
monuments, etc., now constitutes an essential component. 2
The recruitment of cultural heritage as evidence in support of a political project is, if not inevitable, a prevalent
dimension of discourse on that heritage. The situation in
Kosovo, however, can be distinguished by the degree to
which culture, and specifically, architecture, wasand
remainsthe symbolic centerpiece of Serb nationalist
claims to the province. Kosovos Serbian Orthodox buildingsboth surviving medieval monuments and the products
of twentieth-century church construction programs
have served as proxy for a Serb population to substantiate
Serbian state sovereignty over Kosovo, the population of
which has been predominantly Albanian since Serbia
claimed Kosovo as a province in 1912. Reciprocally, architectural heritage associated with Kosovos Albanian majority
has been subjected to institutionalized disregard in the
management of Kosovos cultural heritage and, during the
1998-1999 conflict, catastrophic destruction. While this
destruction constitutes a war crime in violation of the Hague
Grey Room 01, Fall 2000, pp. 108122. 2000 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

109

and Geneva Conventions, it is also the counterpart to a sanctioned cultural heritage policy carried out for decades before
the war.
When the Kingdom of Serbia wrested control of Kosovo
from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, it set out three justifications for Serbian rule in the province: the moral right of a
more civilized people, the ethnographic right of a people
who originally constituted Kosovos majority population,
and the Serbs historic right to the place which contained the
Patriarchate buildings of the Serbian Orthodox Church.3
While these buildings directly substantiated the third of
these justications, they also were scripted as evidence for
the preceding two claims; the medieval architecture of the
Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo testied both to the Serbs
level of civilization and to their past presence in the province.
Between the world wars, this patrimony of medieval
architecture was supplemented by an extensive churchbuilding campaign in Kosovo; this campaign led both to the
reconstruction of ruined Serbian Orthodox churches and the
construction of new ones. Signicantly, it is often difcult to
distinguish between the two procedures, as what was termed
a reconstructed (obnovljena) church was sometimes
located on a site where a medieval chronicle or charter
attested that a church once existed, even if no elements of
the original building remained. This equivocation between
reconstruction and construction reflected the manner in
which Serbian Orthodox architecture in Kosovo was endowed
with a continuous existence on an ideological level as a
marker of Serb presence in the province, whether or not this
architecture actually existed on a material level. To reinforce
the same historical continuity, churches built in this period,
in both Kosovo and Serbia, utilized a historicist architectural
vocabulary drawn from medieval Serbian Orthodox churches.4
Indeed, as prominent historic churches in Kosovo, such as
the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin at Gra`canica
Monastery, were often used as direct models for contemporary
churches elsewhere in Serbia, the merging of the historicist
with the historic mirrored the intended merging of Kosovo
with Serbia proper.
While the construction of religious buildings in Yugoslavia
was restricted from the establishment of Titos Communist
government in 1945 until the relaxation of church-state relations in the mid-1970s, the Institute for the Protection of
Cultural Monuments of Kosovo, founded in 1952, institutionalized the production of cultural heritage in Kosovo and
provided another field on which an ideology of culture
would play itself out.5 By the time of last years war, some
210 Serbian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and gravesites
were listed as protected historic monuments in Kosovo,
including over forty churches built between the 1930s and
the 1990s. In contrast, only fteen of the more than six hundred mosques in Kosovo were listed as historic monuments,
110 Grey Room 01

even though well over half of these mosques date from the
Ottoman era (fourteenth through nineteenth centuries).6 As
the criteria for considering mosques as historic monuments were far more restrictive than those for Serbian
Orthodox buildings, Kosovos cultural heritage was materially transformed: while listed buildings received all funds
designated for historic preservation, the renovation of unlisted
mosques was undertaken without the Institutes supervision
and frequently resulted in the damaging or destruction of
original architectural elements.7
Beginning after the death of Tito in the 1980s, the resurgence of Serb nationalism and the formation of new relations
between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Belgrade government led to the initiation of a new program of church
building in Kosovo. New Serbian Orthodox churches constructed in the 1990s were prominently positioned in the
centers of cities such as Prishtina and Djakovica, while
dozens of smaller churches were also constructed in provincial towns and villages, many with the patronage of prominent members and supporters of the Milo`sevic regime. At the
same time, Albanian resistance to Serbian control of Kosovo
was sometimes expressed through the vandalism of precisely those artifacts by which that control was legitimated:
historic and contemporary Serbian Orthodox churches and
monasteries.8 This vandalism was heavily publicized in the
state-controlled media as part of a campaign charging
Kosovos Albanians with genocide against Kosovos Serbs
and their cultural heritage. Monument protection was seized
upon by the Serbian government as one of the pretexts for its
decision to impose direct rule on Kosovo, a province that
had in Titos era received considerable control over its own
internal affairs; if architecture legitimated Serbias claim to
Kosovo, then damage to that architecture became damage
to that claim.
The revocation of Kosovos autonomy in 1989, the declaration of a state of emergency in the province, the forced
removal of ethnic Albanians from all public institutions, and
a series of human rights abuses perpetuated by Serb security
forces in the province led to escalating tensions between the
provinces ethnic Albanian majority and the Serb government.9 Increasing repression and the evident failure of
non-violent resistance to bring about change led to the formation of an armed insurgency, the Kosovo Liberation Army,
and the outbreak of open conflict between the KLA and
Serbian government forces in 1998. Serb forces initiated a
counterinsurgency campaign in March 1998, directed against
the KLA and Kosovos ethnic Albanian population. In this
campaign, as large numbers of Kosovos Albanian population were forcibly deported from their homes, the historic
architecture associated with that population was systematically targeted for destruction. This targeting took place both
as groups of people were being expelled from their places of
Herscher and Riedlmayer | The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

111

residence, apparently to diminish these peoples incentive

to return to their hometowns and villages, but also after expulsions took place, apparently to remove visible evidence of
Kosovos deported Albanian community.10
The primary buildings singled out by Serb forces for
destruction in 1998 and 1999 were mosques; at least 207 of
the approximately 609 mosques in Kosovo sustained damage
or were destroyed in that period.11 Other architectural
targets of Serb forces were Islamic religious schools and
libraries, more than 500 kullas (traditional stone mansions,
often associated with prominent Albanian families), and
historic bazaars. Three out of four well-preserved Ottomanera urban cores in Kosovo cities were also severely damaged,
in each case with great loss of historic architecture.
The damage sustained by these buildings was not collateral. Damaged and destroyed monuments were often situated in undisturbed or lightly-damaged contexts, and the
types of damage which monuments received (buildings
burned from the interior, minarets of mosques toppled with
explosives, anti-Islamic and anti-Albanian vandalism) indicate that this damage was deliberate, rather than the result
of monuments being caught in the cross-re of military operations. In a number of cases, eyewitnesses have also been
able to precisely describe attacks on historic monuments.
While the United Nations High Commission on Refugees
has estimated that 70,000 homes were destroyed in Kosovo
from March to June 1999, the destruction of historic architecture has a unique significance in that it signifies the
attempt to target not just the homes and properties of individual members of Kosovos Albanian population, but that
entire population as a culturally dened entity.
The United Nations Security Council resolution that
authorized the United Nations administration in Kosovo following the end of the war in June 1999 allows official
Yugoslav and Serbian personnel in Kosovo for certain limited
purposes: to mark and clear minefields, to provide liaison
with the international security mission, and to maintain a
presence at Serb patrimonial sites.12 Although international
peacekeeping forces took measures to guard the most famous
medieval Serbian Orthodox sites, less well-known churches
and monasteries in rural areas abandoned by the eeing Serb
minority population became the targets of revenge attacks by
returning Albanians. In the weeks after the war, more than
seventy buildings were vandalized or destroyed; while most
were built in the twentieth century, some dated from the
medieval period and were listed monuments. 13
The Serbian government has used these attacks as the
basis to petition the United Nations to allow the return of its
troops and police to Kosovo to guard historic monuments.
While this petition was unsuccessful, the postwar attack on
Serbian cultural heritage has been appropriated by Serbian
cultural institutions as a means to deect attention from the
112 Grey Room 01

assault on Albanian cultural heritage that preceded it. These

institutions have reported only on the postwar damage sustained by Serbian Orthodox heritage and these reports have
been regarded as neutral and objective assessments by international cultural heritage institutions.14 As a result, there has
been little awareness of or concern for the damaged cultural
heritage of Kosovos Albanian majority. The only official
acknowledgment by the Serbian government that damage
was done to Albanian cultural heritage in Kosovo was made
in the frame of an assessment of NATO war crimes, which
ostensibly included the aerial bombardment of several
Albanian historic monuments.15
The international community in Kosovo has also been
reluctant to acknowledge the damage that was done to
Albanian cultural heritage in Kosovo. The initial UNESCO
report on the state of cultural heritage in Kosovo after the
war was based primarily on information supplied by Serbian
cultural heritage institutions.16 More generally, however, the
international community has conceived of its mission in
Kosovo as simply a humanitarian triage to provide for the
basic needs of Kosovos ravaged postwar population, a population which is dealt with less as peoples with distinct and
valuable cultural heritages than as generic refugees. As some
commentators have pointed out, the NATO intervention in
Kosovo was based on an ideology of victimization: when
NATO intervened to protect Kosovar victims, it ensured at
the same time that they would remain victims, inhabitants
of a devastated country with a passive population.17 The
same ideology also underlays the bracketing-off of cultural
heritage from what is called the reconstruction of Kosovo.

Herscher and Riedlmayer | The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

113

Village Mosque, Lismir/Dobri Dub. Constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Photo: Andrew Herscher.
Informant statement: On April 4, 1999, all residents of the
village were expelled by Serb paramilitaries and the village
was burned. We spent the rest of the war in refugee camps in
Albania. When we returned in August, we found the village
destroyed and the mosque burned out. To keep children
from getting hurt by falling rubble, we cleared away the
ruins. The minaret still stands, but we have no money to
rebuild the mosque.
114 Grey Room 01

Top: Before destruction. Mosque of Halil Efendi, Dobran/

Constructed in the seventeenth century, restored
Dobrcane.
in the nineteenth century. Photo: Raif Virmica.
Informant statement: The imam of the mosque, Nusret
Hajdari, was taken from his house next door to the mosque
and was killed in front of the mosque with his family watching. Then the mosque was burned down. This was done by
Serb paramilitaries on June 13, 1999, the day before the rst
KFOR troops arrived in the village. The paramilitaries wore
military-style camouage uniforms and red bandannas tied
around their heads. The imam had been called into the Serb
police station and threatened almost daily during the war.
Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Andrew Herscher.
Herscher and Riedlmayer | The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

115

Top: Before destruction. Market Mosque and Old Market,

Constructed in the fteenth century, restored
Vushtrri/Vucitrn.
in the nineteenth century. Photo: Raif Virmica.
Informant statement: Two days after the start of the NATO
bombing, Serb paramilitaries burned down the Market
Mosque and looted and burned 50 shops in the old bazaar
next to the mosque. The paramilitaries wore masks and were
led by a Serb nationalist politician, the local boss of Arkans
political party. They bulldozed the entire site that Sunday
(March 28, 1999). My house is the one across the street. They
burned it down after they burned the mosque. My family
name is Mejzini (son of the muezzin). My father and his father
were muezzins; they called the people of this town to prayer
from that mosque. Now its all gone. I am leaving Vushtrri and
not coming back. Theres nothing left for me here.
Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Andr s Riedlmayer.
116 Grey Room 01

Top: Before destruction. Orthodox Monastery Church of the

Presentation of the Holy Virgin, Dolac. Founded in the late
fourteenth century, restored in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Photo: Slobodan Mileusnic, Svetinje Kosova i Metohije
1999).
(Novi Sad: Pravoslavna rec,
Informant statement: This church is genuinely old. I know
the place because I worked here years ago on a project to
restore the frescoes. The site is even older just look at the
huge stones at the base of the wall encircling the hilltop.
That was an archaic fortress, dating back to Classical
Antiquity and even earlier to prehistoric times. This church
was built with the traditional technique that both Serbs and
Albanians in this area use for their houses and their
churches: stone walls, the roof made out of thick slabs of
slate. Someone must have set off explosives inside to make
the church collapse like this under the weight of the roof.
This was done by Albanians. They thought they were taking
revenge. But those who did it are ignorant people.
Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Andrew Herscher.
Herscher and Riedlmayer | The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

117

Kulla (Mansion) of Jashar Pasha, Peja/Pe c.

Constructed in
1803; restored in the twentieth century. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.
Informant statement: This kulla had been restored just
before the war by the doctor whose family it belongs to. It
was a famous landmark, where the Albanian League of Peja
rst met in 1899; you can see the ofcial historic marker next
to the door. It was burned in May 1999 by local Serbs, led by
civilians. It took them several days. Three or four times they
tried to set a re inside but it didnt burn, so they set up ladders and had a man climb up on the roof and throw buckets
of gasoline into the house and burn it from the top down.
The man who set the re was an employee with the municipal
roads department; he got the ladders from where he worked.

118 Grey Room 01

Old Market, Gjakova/Djakovica. Constructed in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.
Informant statement: On the rst night of the NATO air war,
on the 8:00 p.m. newscast on Serbian state television, the
announcer said that Belgrade, Novi Sad, Prishtina, and the
center of Djakovica had been bombed by NATO. I thought
this was strange since I had not seen or heard any explosions
nearby, even though I live in the middle of the old town.
Four hours later, around midnight, Serb police and paramilitaries began setting re to the old market district around the
Hadum Mosque and killing people in their houses.

Herscher and Riedlmayer | The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

119

Kulla (traditional stone mansion), Junik. Constructed in the

eighteenth century. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.
Informant statement: This kulla has been my familys home
for many generations. It was burned by Serb paramilitaries.
They poured gasoline all over the kulla before setting it
alight last April 14. They used that large jerry can you can
still see lying in the rubble. We were living inside until the war.
This is a historic monument. It is very, very old. The room
for male guests on the top floor was especially splendid
a rare example of Albanian architectural heritage. The walls
are very old, perhaps they were here even before the Turks
arrived. We want to rebuild, but we need help to rebuild the
stone walls and especially a new roof. A kulla without a roof
will quickly fall apart.

120 Grey Room 01

Top: Before destruction. Old Market, Peja/Pec.

Constructed
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Photo: Institute for
the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Kosovo.
Informant statement: All the shops and houses in the old
market district around the Bajrakli Mosque were looted and
burned, and anything still left standing wrecked with bulldozers by local Serb police and civilians. There were a lot of
valuable goods taken, especially from the goldsmiths shops and
from the shops of the argjendart, Catholic Albanian silversmiths who specialize in ligree work. Among the shops next
to the mosque that were burned were two dozen that belonged
to the charitable foundations of the local Islamic community.
Bottom: After destruction. Photo: Xhavit Lokaj.
Herscher and Riedlmayer | The Destruction of Historic Architecture in Kosovo

121

Notes

1. On international accords on the protection of cultural property in

Toman, The Protection of Cultural Property in the Event
warfare, see Ji r
of Armed Con ict (Paris: UNESCO, 1996).
2. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8.
3. See Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York
University Press, 1998), xlvii.
4. On early twentieth-century Serbian historicist architecture, see
Bratislav Pantelic , Nationalism and Architecture: The Creation of a
National Style in Serbian Architecture and Its Political Importance,
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 1 (March 1997):
1641.
5. The early history of this institutionoriginally, the Institute for the
Protection and Study of Cultural Monuments in the Autonomous Province
of Kosova-Metohijais given in Ratomir Karakus
evic, Rad Zavoda za
i proucavanje

zastitu
spomenika kulture AKMO od svog osnivanja do
danas, Glasnik Muzeja Kosova i Metohije, 1 (1956): 357365.
6. On listed historic monuments in Kosovo, see Mileta Milic , ed.,
Cultural Heritage of Kosovo and Metohija (Belgrade: Institute for the
Protection of Cultural Monuments of the Republic of Serbia, 1999).
7. See Haki Kasumi, Bashksit fetare n Kosov (Prishtina: Instituti i
Historis s Kosovs, 1988), 114.
8. A partial list of vandalized Serbian Orthodox sites is given in William
Dorich, Kosovo (Alhambra, Cal.: Kosovo Charity Fund, 1992).
9. For an account of this period in Kosovo, see International Helsinki
Federation for Human Rights, International Helsinki Federation Responses
to Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Violations in Kosovo (Vienna:
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 1999).
10. Nearly half (47 percent) of Kosovar refugees reported seeing
places of worship destroyed before they left Kosovo; see Physicians for
Human Rights, War Crimes in Kosovo: A Population-Based Assessment
of Human Rights Violations Against Kosovar Albanians (Boston, MA:
Physicians for Human Rights, 1999), 86.
11. This and the following data on damage sustained by cultural heritage
in Kosovo are from a survey carried out by the authors in the fall of 1999,
publication forthcoming.
12. See United Nations Resolution 1244, Annex 2, sec. 6
(www.un.org/docs/scres/1999/99sc1244.htm).
13. For a documentation of postwar attacks on Serbian Orthodox sites,
see Destroyed and Desecrated Christian Orthodox Shrines in Kosovo and
Metohija (www.decani.yunet.com).
14. For example, reports from the International Council on Monuments
and Sites (ICOMOS) in Yugoslavia and the Society of Conservators of
Serbia were consolidated in War Damage in the Balkans, US/ICOMOS
Newsletter (March-April 1999).
15. See NATO Crimes in Yugoslavia: Documentary Evidence 24
March-24 April 1999 (Belgrade: Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 1999), 226-228. In two cases (Djakovica
bazaar and Prizren League Museum in Prizren) in which NATO is alleged
to have destroyed Albanian historic monuments in Kosovo, however, the
damage sustained by these monuments is incompatible with the damage
produced by aerial bombing.
16. See Colin Kaiser, Report on Mission to Kosovo, 4-14 July 1999
(Paris: UNESCO, 1999).
zek,
Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism, in
17. Slavoj Zi
London Review of Books 21, no. 21, 28 (October 1999): 14.

122 Grey Room 01