Kosovo's culture: what the language was made to carry

Why language carries what religion carries elsewhere

The 2024 census recorded 93.5% of the population as Sunni Muslim, 2.3% as Eastern Orthodox and 1.8% as Roman Catholic. Another 0.5% named a different religion, 0.5% reported no religious belief and 1.5% declined to answer. Protestants are recognised as a religious group by the government and were not represented in that count; in 2008 the pastor Artur Krasniqi, primate of the Kosovo Protestant Evangelical Church, claimed that "as many as 15,000" Kosovar Albanians had converted to Protestantism since 1985.

Those shares describe a Muslim majority inside a secular state. The constitution guarantees freedom of belief, conscience and religion and establishes no state religion, and the society the census describes is strongly secularised.

The figures predict less than they appear to, because the two large communities read identity in different registers. Kosovo Albanians define their ethnicity by language. Islam arrived in the Middle Ages with the Ottomans and Catholic Albanians remained Catholic through it, and both groups are Albanian on the same terms, by the language they speak. Among Kosovo Serbs the church itself is the distinguishing feature of identity, which is why the Orthodox monasteries in the following sections carry a weight no mosque in the country carries.

The population those registers divide is small and unevenly mixed. Of 1,586,659 people as of 1 January 2024, Albanians made up around 92%, Serbs 2.3%, Bosniaks 1.7%, Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians together 1.7% and Turks 1.2%, with Romani and Gorani each below 1%. Serbs are concentrated in the north and in municipalities such as Gračanica and Štrpce. Turks form a local majority in Mamusha, just north of Prizren, Bosniaks live mainly inside Prizren, and the Gorani are in Dragash at the southern tip of the country.

What happened when Albanian left the schools

If nationhood is carried by a language, then a fight over schooling is a fight over the nation, and Kosovo has had that fight repeatedly.

Albanian-language schools were prohibited between 1918 and 1939 under the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In November 1968 large demonstrations were put down by Yugoslav forces, with Albanian students and intellectuals pressing for an Albanian-language university and greater representation in Serbian and Yugoslav state bodies. After the protests of 1981 the rights recently granted were rescinded, including the provision of Albanian professors and Albanian-language textbooks.

The break came at the end of that decade. When Kosovo's autonomy was cut back in 1989, the response was a set of parallel structures in education and in medical care. By 1990 most Albanian schools had closed and teachers were required to sign loyalty oaths recognising Serbia instead of the self-declared Republic of Kosova; the great majority refused. By 1991 every Albanian schoolteacher and academic had been dismissed, and a parallel education system ran out of donated private homes, with living rooms serving as classrooms. Teaching in Albanian was withdrawn from the curriculum in 1992 and re-established in 1994. At the University of Pristina, understood as the centre of Kosovo Albanian cultural identity, Albanian-language instruction was abolished and Albanian teachers were sacked in bulk.

Around 350,000 Albanians left the region over the seven years that followed, under economic and social pressure, which is where the diaspora that shapes the country's economy came from. Whatever else the parallel system was, it is the clearest evidence available for the claim in the lede: when the language was removed from the buildings, the population rebuilt the schooling around it in houses.

Which Albanian the schools teach

Albanian and Serbian are official at the national level. Albanian is spoken by over 92% of the population as of 2024, and its standard written form is a blend of the two main dialects, Gheg and Tosk, while the spoken form is predominantly Gheg. That gap between the written and the spoken standard is normal in Albanian and it is felt here, because the Gheg north is where Kosovo sits.

Municipal language rights are set by a threshold. Turkish, Bosnian and Romani may be granted official status in a municipality where the linguistic community makes up at least 5% of the local population, and Turkish holds official status in the Municipality of Prizren regardless of how many Turkish speakers live there. Schooling is provided in Albanian, Serbian, Bosnian, Turkish and Croatian.

The place itself has more than one name, and each name is an argument. In Albanian the country is Kosova in the definite form and Kosovë in the indefinite. Serbian usage distinguishes the eastern part, Kosovo, from the western, Metohija, and calls the whole Kosovo and Metohija. The Albanian name for that western plateau is Dukagjin, in use since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the Sanjak of Dukakin with its capital at Peja, after the medieval Albanian Dukagjini family. Some Albanians prefer Dardania, from the Dardani, a name connected to the Proto-Albanian dardā, meaning pear, and Ibrahim Rugova backed that identity strongly enough that the presidential flag and seal still refer to it. Kosova remains the commoner usage.

The state's own symbols were assembled last. The flag and coat of arms were adopted with the declaration of independence on 17 February 2008, in blue and gold, while work on defining an anthem continued after them. The anthem the state settled on is titled Europe.

Why the heritage list is Orthodox

The only World Heritage listing on the territory belongs to the smaller community.

Medieval Monuments in Kosovo consists of four Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries founded by members of the Nemanjić dynasty. Visoki Dečani was recognised by UNESCO in 2004, and in 2006 the property was extended as a serial nomination to take in the Patriarchate of Peja, Our Lady of Ljeviš at Prizren and the Gračanica monastery. The listing describes them as a fusion of eastern Orthodox Byzantine and western Romanesque church architecture in the Palaiologan Renaissance style.

They have also been targets. Widespread attacks on Serbian cultural sites began after the 1999 conflict and the return of Albanian refugees, and during the unrest of 2004, in which 11 Albanians and 16 Serbs were killed and about 900 people injured, houses, public buildings and churches were damaged or destroyed. In 2006 the property was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, on the grounds that management and conservation were difficult in a politically unstable region, and it has stayed there.

The administrative position around the monuments is unusual. Kosovo's bid to join UNESCO in 2015 fell three votes short of the two-thirds majority required, so the state holding the four monuments in its territory is not a member of the organisation that lists them, while Serbia, which does not accept that state, is. Nothing about the conservation of a fourteenth-century monastery is settled by that, and everything about who speaks for it is complicated by it.

What the stone towers were built for

The built record of the majority is domestic, defensive and much newer than the monasteries.

A kulla is a stone tower house of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, built for a family that expected trouble, and they are concentrated in the Dukagjini region in the west. During the 1999 conflict at least 500 kullas in Dukagjini were attacked, and most of them were destroyed or damaged. That is the same event, seen from the other side, as the attacks on Orthodox sites that followed it.

Between those two layers sits the Ottoman one, five centuries deep and still standing in the town centres. Mosques and hamams survive from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Prizren keeps a well-preserved Ottoman quarter beneath a fortress of Roman construction. The tomb of the sultan Murad, killed at the battle fought on the field of Kosovo in 1389, stands on the same ground as the monasteries and the towers.

Kosovo's monuments are classified as common property that the society as a whole is responsible for maintaining, which is a legal formula written directly against the sorting the table above performs.

What the old instruments were for

The oldest object in this article is a baked-clay ocarina found at the Neolithic village of Runik, thought to be at least 8,000 years old and the first musical instrument recorded in Kosovo.

Everything after it divides along the same line as the buildings. Albanian epic poetry, sung across Kosovo and northern Albania, is accompanied by the lahutë or the çifteli, a long-necked lute of two strings. Serbian music from Kosovo was dominated by church music with its own share of sung epic verse, carried on the gusle, and songs collected from Kosovo Serbs supplied material for the twelfth song wreath of the composer Stevan Mokranjac. Turkish influence runs through both after almost five centuries of Ottoman rule.

The contemporary layer travels better than the state does. Rita Ora, Dua Lipa and Era Istrefi are all of Albanian origin and known internationally, and the guitarist Petrit Çeku comes from Prizren. At the Eurovision Song Contest, performers from Kosovo have appeared under three flags: Viktorija sang for Yugoslavia as part of Aska in 1982, Rona Nishliu finished fifth in 2012, Lindita represented Albania in 2017, and Nevena Božović represented Serbia in 2013 as a member of Moje 3 and again in 2019.

Why Prizren fills with screens each August

Film here has been nationalised, dissolved and restarted.

Kosovafilm was founded in 1969 by the parliament of Kosovo to produce, distribute and screen films. Its first director was the actor Abdurrahman Shala and its most productive period came under the poet Azem Shkreli. After seventeen feature films and a longer list of shorts and documentaries, the institution was taken over by the Serbian authorities in 1990 and dissolved. It was re-established after the Yugoslav withdrawal in June 1999.

Dokufest, an international documentary and short film festival, is held each August in Prizren. Films screen twice a day in three open-air cinemas and two conventional ones, alongside workshops, the DokuPhoto exhibitions, festival camping and concerts, and the whole town is given over to it for the run. The Prishtina International Film Festival does the equivalent job in the capital for international and regional feature cinema.

The output has been recognised outside the country. Kosovo submitted its first film for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014, Three Windows and a Hanging, directed by Isa Qosja. Shok, written and directed by Jamie Donoughue and based on events during the war, was nominated for Best Live Action Short at the Academy Awards in 2016. Actors of Albanian origin from Kosovo include Arta Dobroshi, Faruk Begolli, Bekim Fehmiu and James Biberi.

What the galleries and the cellars hold

The Kosova National Art Gallery was founded in February 1979 and is now the National Gallery of Kosovo, the country's principal institution for the visual arts, carrying the name of the painter Muslim Mulliqi. Painters born in Kosovo include Engjëll Berisha, Tahir Emra, Abdullah Gërguri, Aziz Nimani and Lendita Zeqiraj. Exposure abroad was limited through the 1990s for the same reasons the schools were: the decade removed the institutions that would have arranged it.

Pristina holds the Kosovo Museum and the Ethnological Museum, along with the clock tower, the Imperial Mosque and the grave of Ibrahim Rugova. Peja's centre is still organised around craft workshops, with tailors, goldsmiths and leather tanners trading from the same streets.

The cuisine is documented as a compound of Balkan, Mediterranean and Ottoman traditions, with Albanian and Serbian cooking practised side by side. It is the least separately recorded part of the culture, which says something about how food behaves across a line that everything else is sorted by.

Wine is better documented, because it was an export industry. The heartland is Rahovec, and the main cultivars are Pinot noir, Merlot and Chardonnay. Four state-owned facilities operated at a scale closer to factories than to wineries: the Rahovec plant alone held about 36% of the vineyard area and could handle around 50 million litres a year, and at its peak in 1989 it shipped 40 million litres, mostly to the German market. Kosovo still exports wine to Germany and the United States.

Why the medals arrived so late

Competitive sport for a state recognised in 2008 begins with the paperwork.

Kosovo first entered the Olympic Games in 2016 and won its first medals there, with Majlinda Kelmendi taking the country's first Olympic gold in judo. Judo has accounted for most of the medals since, with Distria Krasniqi, Nora Gjakova, Loriana Kuka, Laura Fazliu and Akil Gjakova among the athletes involved. Kosovo has competed at the European Games since 2015, winning four medals, and at the Mediterranean Games since 2018, winning ten, and is scheduled to host the Mediterranean Games in 2030.

Football took until 2016 to gain full membership of UEFA and FIFA, which is what made qualifying competitions possible. The team's clearest result came in the 2018 to 2019 UEFA Nations League, where it finished top of its League D group unbeaten, with four wins and two draws, and was promoted.

Before any of that, players born in Kosovo represented Yugoslavia: Aziz Salihu, Vladimir Durković, Fahrudin Jusufi and Milutin Šoškić. Since then Lorik Cana has played for Albania, Adnan Januzaj for Belgium, and Valon Behrami, Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka have been prominent elsewhere in European football. Two lists of names exist, one for the national team and a longer one for the players who were already committed when it arrived, and together they record exactly how late the state was relative to the people it is made of.