Back in Kosovo

For those of you who don't know, I'm back in Kosovo now, but only for a week. I came back to help with another proposal. This time I'm crazy busy and working so much I don't have time to see much or think about much outside of work. But I did get the chance to visit a monastery (will post picks of this soon). The monastery is Serbian Orthodox (Christian). Most Kosovars are Muslim. During the conflict, the Serbs (Christians) burned down the Albanians' mosques and vice versa. 73 churches and mosques were destroyed during the fighting. It's sad because Kosovo lost a lot of its rich cultural history and potential for tourism because of this.

Anyway, at the monastery they were selling some souvenir items and one of them was a book with a title something like "The Churches that were Burned Down by the Albanians during the Conflict." Yeah. It was a little intense. In the book they had a picture of every church when it was complete and then after it was bombed. There were pictures of bloodied people who were either dead or seriously injured. Most shocking was the fact that for each church they had a description of what happened to it and then the flag of the country's forces that was occupying the area at the time. So there were Italian, British, American, Irish, all sorts of flags and sentences like this "The American KFOR forces allowed the Albanians to burn this church." Or "After the British KFOR arrived in town x they stood by while Albanians torched the church." They even went so far as to show pictures of soldiers in churches (they appeared to just be looking around.)

This monastery survived because it was located in a predominantly Serbian town and the citizens protected it. Now it has Swedish KFOR there protecting it.

Alright, that's it...I will be heading back to Costa Rica on Tuesday and will try to post some pictures this week.