LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES IN KOSOVO: A POSTWAR REPORT
The following is the section of the report of our Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey dealing with museums in Kosovo. The survey was conducted in October 1999, with support from the Packard Humanities Institute, as an initial, independent post-war assessment of the state of architectural heritage and cultural institutions in Kosovo.
The findings of the survey are being shared with NGOs and international bodies, such as ICOM and the Council of Europe, with a view to promoting assistance projects for cultural heritage in Kosovo. Information collected by the survey in Kosovo concerning possible violations of international law on the protection of cultural and religious heritage is also being forwarded to the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY.
The Hague tribunal last May indicted Slobodan Milosevic and five other senior Serbian and Yugoslav officials with "criminal responsibility for violations of the laws or customs of war." The tribunal's statute says this includes "seizure of, destruction, or willful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity, and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments, and works of art and science."
Andras J. Riedlmayer
Harvard University
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February 2000MUSEUMS IN KOSOVO: A FIRST POST-WAR ASSESSMENT
Andras J. Riedlmayer (Harvard University)
Like Bosnia, Croatia and other republics and autonomous regions of the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo had its own general museum, called the Kosovo Museum (Muzeu i Kosoves / Muzej Kosova i Metohije; in the 1990s downgraded to: Muzej u Pristini). The museum is housed in a 19th-century building in the old city center of Prishtina that until 1912 had served as the seat of the Ottoman provincial government. Founded in 1949, the Kosovo Museum has departments of archaeology, ethnography, and natural science, to which a department for the study of the National Liberation Struggle was added in 1959. It has sponsored archaeological excavations and other scientific work; since 1956 it has published an annual journal called _Glasnik Muzeja Kosova = Buletin e Muzeut i Kosoves_, with articles in Serbian and Albanian (with summaries in French, English or German).
In addition to the Kosovo Museum, there are also smaller local museums in Pec/Peja, Mitrovica, Gjakova/Djakovica, and Prizren. In their form of organization and content, most of these follow the same general pattern as local museums in other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Established after the second world war as museums of the National Liberation Struggle, they subsequently acquired bodies of other materials, including archaeological artefacts collected from the vicinity, as well as ethnographic and folklore items and natural science collections. The local and regional museums in Kosovo include:
* The Municipal Museum in Mitrovica (Muzeu i Qytetit, Gradski muzej).
Housed in the restored 18th-century hamam (Turkish baths)
of Zenel Bey, this museum has the second-largest archaeological
collection after the Kosovo Museum, as well as more modest
ethnographic and natural history sections and the requisite
World War II memorabilia.* The Regional Museum in Gjakova/Djakovica (Muzeu Regjional i Gjakoves).
Housed in a restored 19th-century Ottoman mansion (Konak of
Niyazi Halil Ismail Bey / Begovski konak), it is a general museum
with a small ethnographic and archaeological collection and
mementos of World War II.* The Regional Archaeological Museum in Prizren. Also housed in an
old Ottoman building, it has a collection of artefacts from
archaeological excavations at Romaja and other sites in the
Prizren area.* The Memorial Museum in Pec/Peja. Established as the Miladin Popovic
Museum after World War II in honor of a local Communist Party
leader and hero of the Partisan resistance, it subsequently
acquired the mineral collection of a local cultural and scientific
society active in Pec between the wars, along with a small
ethnographic collection. Originally housed in Miladin Popovic's
home, the museum is now in the 19th-century Konak of Mehmed
Tahir Bey, a restored Ottoman mansion that was formerly used
as the municipal public library.Other, more specialized museums include:
* The Memorial Museum of the League of Prizren -- the Ottoman-era building
where the League held its meetings in 1878, with documents and
artefacts connected with the League and with leading figures of
the 19th-century Albanian national movement.* The Museum of Oriental Manuscripts in Prizren -- housed in the
16th-century Sinan Pasha mosque and displaying treasures of
Prizren's Gazi Mehmed Pasha library (founded before 1588)
and other mosque libraries.* The Minerals and Crystals Collection of the Trepca Mines at Stari Trg.
* The Museum of Medieval Mining at Kishnica.
During our assessment survey in October 1999, we were able to visit five of these museums (the Kosovo Museum, the regional museums in Pec/Peja and Gjakova/Djakovica, the Museum of the League of Prizren, and the Museum of Oriental Manuscripts in Prizren) and have some information about the condition of all but the last two (the mining museums).
The only museum that was totally destroyed was the Memorial Museum of the League of Prizren (Muzeu Memorial i Lidhjes se Prizrenit), burned down by Serb police using shoulder-launched incendiary projectiles on 28 March 1999. Belgrade's Ministry of Information blamed the destruction on a "NATO missile". Photos of the burned-out ruins of the museum -- published in the Yugoslav government's White Book and broadcast on Serbian state television -- show the burned roof-timbers collapsed into the shell of the small, two-storey, wood-and-mudbrick building, its outer walls still intact on the ground floor level and no evidence of any explosive damage from the alleged Tomahawk missile. Curiously, however, the life-size bronze statues of Sami Frasheri and other Albanian notables of the League of Prizren that stood behind the museum had vanished -- apparently vaporized by the selective blast of the powerful NATO missile, without causing any visible damage to another Ottoman-era building barely 2 meters away. Of course, there's no real question as to who was really responsible for the destroying the museum; we talked to several Prizren residents who had witnessed the attack by Serbian security forces.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that a number of international organizations and individuals concerned with heritage protection have continued to take at face value the information put out both during and after the war by the Yugoslav authorities and by Belgrade-based groups of conservators and museum professionals, such as Mnemosina (Mnemosyne) <http://mediateka.f.bg.ac.yu/radni00.htm> and the Yugoslav national committees of ICOM and ICOMOS.
Yugoslav propaganda claims concerning heritage have been repeated uncritically in the publications of US/ICOMOS, and by senior scholars (James Wiseman, "Legacy of Medieval Serbia," _Archaeology Magazine_ vol. 52, no. 5 September/October 1999), as well as by Prof. Michael Mandel of York University, who has filed a war crimes complaint against NATO before the ICTY. Although many of these claims have no basis in fact, none of these learned professionals seem to have thought it necessary to inquire whether the allegations they have cited from Yugoslav sources are verifiable or even plausible.
Some of the now-lost collection of the Memorial Museum of the League of Prizren is described in a bilingual Albanian/Serbian exhibition catalogue, published on the centenary of the League's foundation:
Rizvanolli, Masar.
Lidhja e Prizrenit, 1878-1881 = Prizrenska liga, 1878-1881 (Prishtina:
Arkivi i Kosoves, Muzeu i Kosoves/Arhiv Kosova, Muzej Kosova, 1978).
39 + 37 pp. : ill.When we visited the site in late October 1999, work had just begun on a project to construct a facsimile of the League building. The project is being sponsored by the Prizren municipal government and shows the enormous symbolic importance attached to the League memorial, both by the Serbian authorities (this was only monument in Prizren that they singled out for destruction during the war) and by the Albanians (who have made it a priority to reconstruct the museum building, working from photographs). There is, of course, no way to restore the collection.
Other museum collections in Kosovo have also been despoiled, not by acts of deliberate destruction but by appropriation. By order of the Serbian Ministry of Culture, the most valuable prehistoric, Classical and medieval archaeological artefacts from three important museum collections in Kosovo -- the Museum of Kosovo, the Municipal Museum in Mitrovica and the Regional Archaeological Museum in Prizren -- were removed to Belgrade at the beginning of 1999, ostensibly for an exhibition. The exhibition, entitled "The Archaeological Treasures of Kosovo and Metohija: From the Neolithic to the Early Middle Ages = Arheolosko blago Kosova i Metohije: od neolita do ranog srednjeg veka", opened at the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) on March 24, the day NATO launched its air war. A glossy 747-page catalogue of the exhibition, with illustrations of 424 of the items taken from Kosovo, was published during the war by SANU. It's a safe bet that none of these items (which include artefacts of Kosovo's Dardanian/Illyrian and prehistoric cultures, held by modern Kosovars to be the roots of their own civilization), will ever be returned to their rightful owners, the museums in Kosovo.
The building of the Museum of Kosovo in Prishtina has been taken over by the European Union and other intergovernmental organizations, which use it as office space. Kosovar Albanian museum workers have been prevented from gaining access to the files (apparently upon the recommendation of the July 1999 UNESCO mission). They told us that, as far as they know, the documentation of the museum is still in place, as is at least some portion of the museum's collections, but they have not been able to do any inventories.
In Gjakova/Djakovica and Pec/Peja, local Albanian ethnographers have taken control of the two local museums. In Gjakova, the museum's collection was said to be in storage, while the building was being used as office space for the International Crisis Group and other NGOs. The museum's new Albanian director, Mr. Masar Binxhia, was on the premises and was eager to hand out copies of the English-language prospectus describing his project for an Ethnographic Museum of Gjakova (Muzeu Etnografik e Gjakoves), detailing plans for exhibits featuring the traditional folklore and crafts of the region. He told us he had 4 staff members, including 2 historians, 1 archaeologist, and 1 ethnographer - himself). He said that the museum, like most museums in Kosovo, had been closed to the public since 1990, and that he and the other Albanian staff had spent the decade unemployed. Along with some students, he had tried to carry on some ethnographic fieldwork in the '90s, but the Serb police did not view activities that focused on Albanian heritage kindly, and they had often been detained, beaten and harrassed. Mr. Binxhia's handout lists some basic exhibition and conservation supplies needed by the museum, but in fact they need virtually everything.
As was the case at other state institutions in Kosovo, the departing Serbian administration had taken away all the equipment, from typewriters, computers and printers to the museum's small professional library. Current professional literature would be especially useful to this and other museums in Kosovo (even where the libraries were left in situ, virtually no new publications had been acquired from abroad for more than a decade). Also, after a decade out of work and out of touch with the profession, Kosovar museum staff badly need to update and improve their professional education. The most cost-efficient way of doing this would be to arrange for short, intensive summer training workshops and seminars conducted by visiting experts at a central location in Kosovo.
The situation was similar at the museum in Pec/Peja, where the new Albanian director, also a folklorist, told us that if he had the wherewithal he would like to do some "salvage ethnography" in the villages and katuns (shepherds' hamlets) in the surrounding area, to collect and document what remained of the region's traditional material culture in the wake of the "ethnic cleansing" that had destroyed tens of thousands of family homes in this corner of Kosovo.
In Mitrovica, which we didn't visit due to security concerns, the building of the Municipal Museum was said to be intact as was the remaining collection (minus the items taken away to Belgrade for the SANU exhibition -- the timing of which seems to have been connected with Milosevic's plans for a spring offensive in Kosovo; one assumes he did not anticipate the NATO attack).
The collection of the Museum of Oriental Manuscripts is still on display in the Sinan Pasha mosque in Prizren. The manuscripts looked in need of conservation, but otherwise intact; we didn't manage to talk to anyone in charge. The Regional Archaeological Museum in Prizren was closed, but was also said to be intact (minus the items taken away to Belgrade).
In addition to public museums, there are also collections of artworks held by the religious communities in Kosovo, most notably the treasuries of the three major monastic institutions of the Serbian Orthodox Church: the Orthodox Patriarchate in Pec and the monasteries of Visoki Decani and Gracanica. According to information received from the church authorities, these monastic treasuries are intact and the monasteries -- which, contrary to some reports, suffered no damage during the war -- are under the protection of KFOR peacekeeping troops. Before the war some of the more valuable items were reported to have been sent to the Museum of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade.
Islamic sacral art, including both art objects and manuscripts, suffered large-scale devastation during the war, as more than 200 mosques -- comprising 1/3 of the 607 Muslim houses of worship in Kosovo -- were destroyed or seriously damaged by Serbian forces as part of "ethnic cleansing" operations carried out between May 1998 and June 1999. More information on Islamic heritage is available from Prof. Sabri Bajgora at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Prishtina.
In closing, it should be noted that crimes against cultural property were included among the charges last May when the U.N. war crimes tribunal indicted Milosevic and five other senior Serbian and Yugoslav officials for "criminal responsibility for violations of the laws or customs of war." According to the tribunal's statute, these include the "seizure of, destruction, or willful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity, and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments, and works of art and science."
Whether "seizure" in this case covers the removal of museum art objects to Belgrade is something the lawyers will have to sort out. It could be argued that, at the time these items were taken, Serbia's Ministry of Culture exercised jurisdiction over the museums in Kosovo and had a right to instruct them to hand over objects for the exhibition. It's quite another matter whether Belgrade has any legal right to hang on to those objects -- especially in the event that the future holds any change in the political status of Kosovo.
Unfortunately, precedents are not encouraging in this regard. Almost nine years after Serbian museum professionals were sent from Belgrade to "evacuate" the art collection of the Vukovar Museum to Serbia, and nearly five years after the end of hostilities, not one of those items has been returned to the Croatian museum that owns them. A number of the paintings and objects taken from Vukovar have been exhibited in museums in Novi Sad and Belgrade, and presumably the Serbian museums will continue to treat these works of art as if they had been legitimately added to their own collections. Similarly, more than half a century after the end of World War II, Russia still refuses to return the paintings and artefacts plundered by Soviet trophy commissions from public and private collections in Soviet-occupied areas of central and eastern Europe at the end of the war.
One particularly pressing concern with regard to antiquities and art treasures in Kosovo is the breakdown in law and order, which has opened up Kosovo to the predators that supply the international trade in stolen and illegally excavated works of art and archaeological artefacts. Some of the same shady actors and smuggling networks that have been spiriting stolen artworks out of Albania (including items taken from museums and churches) over the past decade have now turned their attention to Kosovo.
Associated Press reported on December 10, 1999, that police in northern Greece had arrested four people after they tried to sell what are believed to be stolen antiquities, including a Roman gravestone and ancient coins. A search of the home of one of the suspects also turned up icons and other religious art said to have been looted from Orthodox churches in Kosovo. According to the AP report:
Authorities learned of the stash after arresting a farmer
and a plumber who tried to sell three items to an undercover
police officer for 32 million drachmas (dlrs 98,700): a gravestone
from the Roman period, a small statue head and a marble sink.During police questioning, the two said they had been told to
sell the items by a man identified as Constantinos Nanos, 37,
and his wife Anna Apostoli.A search of Nanos' home revealed six 18th-century wooden printing
templates with the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, deemed
particularly valuable, as well as 17 bibles dating from the 18th and
19th centuries; six 19th-century metal crosses; two small icons and
six coins from early Christian times, police said. They also found
seven forged Albanian passports.Nanos told police he had bought the religious items in Albania
from people who claimed they had been stolen from churches
and monasteries in Kosovo. Both Nanos and his wife, who is
of Albanian origin, were arrested.These suspected art thefts point to the undeniable fact that, in addition to any political, ethnic and personal motives, one of the driving forces behind what is often called "ethnic violence" in this region is simple greed -- the opportunistic grab for easy profit at the expense of others.
Andras J. Riedlmayer
Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey
Harvard UniversityDocumentation Center
Fine Arts Library
Foggg Art Museum
Harvard University
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge MA 02138
tel. +1-617-495-3372
fax +1-617-496-4889
Could you please post the following
to ALBANEWS ?
Vielen Dank -- Andras Riedlmayer
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The following article appears in the current issue of Bosnia Report, published by the Bosnian Institute (www.bosnia.org.uk). A fuller version will appear later this month in IL: International Leads, a quarterly published by the International Relations Roundtable of the American Library Association.
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February 2000LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES IN KOSOVO: A POSTWAR REPORT
By Andras Riedlmayer
(Fine Arts Library, Harvard University)In October 1999, two architects and I spent three weeks in Kosovo conducting a postwar survey of the state of cultural and religious heritage (architectural monuments, libraries, historical archives and museums). Our Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey, supported by a grant from the Packard Humanities Institute, was undertaken, in part, to assess wartime damage and to identify projects and institutions in need of assistance.
Another goal of our survey was to collect documentation to support the investigations of the Office of the Prosecutor of the U.N. war crimes tribunal (ICTY), which has included the destruction of cultural and religious heritage in Kosovo among the charges in its war crimes indictment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and other officials.
In reading the following account, one should keep in mind that Kosovo is a small place, half the size of Slovenia but more densely populated, and was poorer in resources than other parts of the former Yugoslavia. It should also be recalled that the Milosevic regime's imposition of direct rule over Kosovo in 1989-90 was followed by a decade of systematic neglect of all public services and institutions, including libraries and archives.
Beginning in October 1990, ethnic Albanian faculty and students were ejected by Serbian police from classrooms and offices at the University of Prishtina, which became an apartheid institution reserved for ethnic Serbs only. At the same time, non-Serb readers were banned from the National and University Library, which serves as the central research library for the university and as Kosovo's national library of record. Kosovar Albanian professionals were summarily dismissed from their positions at academic and public libraries and other state-supported institutions. The acquisition of Albanian-language library materials effectively ceased. In the mid-1990s a number of library facilities in Kosovo were converted to other uses. Parts of the National and University Library building in downtown Prishtina were turned over to a Serbian Orthodox religious school; library offices were used to house Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia. For almost a decade 1.8 million Kosovar Albanians -- 90 percent of the population -- were not allowed to set foot inside libraries in Kosovo.
Libraries and Archives at War
During NATO's air bombardment of Yugoslavia (March-June 1999), the National and University Library and the building that houses the Kosovo State Archives and the Archives of the Institute of History, on a hill overlooking the city, were taken over and used as command and control centers by the Yugoslav Army.
At the State Archives, we were shown a certificate presented to the Serbian archive director by the Yugoslav Army command in recognition of the archives' cooperation with the war effort; when the Serbian administration left the archive in mid-June, the certificate was left behind. The use of protected cultural sites for military purposes is a violation of the laws of war, a breach analogous to the abuse of the Red Cross symbol.
Fortunately, neither the State Archives nor the National Library building were hit by bombs or missiles during the air war, but when the Yugoslav military departed, it left a mess behind. At the National and University Library equipment had been stolen, reading room furniture smashed, and the card catalog had been dumped in the basement. Items from special collections had been scattered throughout the building; 47 rare volumes are reportedly still missing. Discarded military uniforms, sniper rifles, and hand grenades were found in the stacks. KFOR peacekeeping troops kept the librarians out for a week while they swept the building for booby traps and explosives. An estimated 100,000 books from the National Library's reserve collection, multiple deposit copies of publications in Albanian used for exchange and for distribution to public libraries elsewhere in Kosovo, were gone -- they had been sent to the Ljipljan paper mill for pulping before the war by order of the Serbian library director.
Nevertheless, the National and University Library's central research collection of 600,000 volumes has, in the main, survived both the decade of the apartheid regime in Kosovo and the recent hostilities without major losses. Now that the war and the "ethnic cleansing" are over, Kosovar librarians and archivists have returned to reclaim their institutions and have begun to assess the damage.
Archives: The Loss of the Public Record
State institutions in Kosovo, including libraries and archives, were stripped of equipment (computers, photocopiers, fax machines, etc.) by the departing Serbian administration after the end of hostilities and the arrival of NATO troops in mid-June 1999. The equipment, much of it antiquated, can be replaced. Other losses may be harder to repair.
During the withdrawal of Serbian military and police forces, public records and archives comprising almost the entire documentary base for the orderly functioning of government and society in Kosovo were removed on orders from Belgrade. Registries of births, marriages and deaths, citizenship, probate and property records, as well as judicial and police records, and the working documents of many other state institutions were either evacuated to Serbia or burned in situ.
On 22 November, the Ministry of Justice in Belgrade announced (http://www.serbia-info.com/news/1999-11/22/15737.html) that public records in Kosovo had been removed to Serbia "to prevent the Albanian secessionists from destroying or forging [them]." Presumably, control of these records will also make it possible for the Belgrade government to selectively add to, remove or alter documentation to suit its own purposes.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Kosovars who were deprived of their personal documents when they were expelled in the spring of 1999, whose passports or licenses have expired, who wish to register a marriage, buy or sell property, settle a legal dispute or claim an inheritance, are left stranded in a legal and documentary limbo.
As was the case in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the major losses of historical archival materials in Kosovo involved bodies of older records (such as property deeds, some of them dating back to Ottoman times) that had been retained by the record-creating agencies rather than being transferred to the custody of the state historical archives.
The only public historical archive known to have been destroyed during the war was the regional archive for the district of Decani, located in the town of Junik, which was burned by Serb forces. The other regional archives lost computers and other equipment, but their collections have reportedly survived. This is a preliminary assessment, based on our visits to the regional archives in Pec (Albanian: Peja), Junik, Djakovica (Gjakova), and Vucitrn (Vushtrri) and the Kosovo State Archives in Prishtina. The International Council on Archives (ICA) sent its own mission to Kosovo in December 1999 and is expected to issue its report early this year.
Academic and Public Libraries
Some academic libraries were plundered of parts of their collections, including several of the faculty libraries of the University of Prishtina. We visited the libraries of the Faculty of Architecture, where all but two dozen volumes had been taken, and the Faculty of Law in Prishtina. A portion of the Law Faculty's 100,000-volume collection was subsequently discovered by KFOR stashed in various locations around Prishtina, boxed for shipping and marked with Cyrillic labels reading "Biblioteka."
However the main research collection of the National and University Library has survived essentially intact. The most pressing problems facing the library at this point are:
-- Missing, damaged or outdated equipment. The building's HVAC system is not operational. During our visit at the end of October 1999, we saw librarians working with their overcoats on. A colleague who visited at the end of January wrote that it was sad to see the librarians "in unheated offices, without lights or electricity trying to carry on their work. But they are determined." The conveyor-belt system used to retrieve books from the library's stacks, located on two basement levels, is also broken and beyond repair; the librarians have to hand-carry books requested by patrons up and down several flights of stairs.
-- The need to make up for a decade of neglect of collection development. In ten years, only 22,000 items were added to the collection, none of them in Albanian, the language of the overwhelming majority of the population. Checking the shelves, we saw recent books in Serbian (publication dates in the mid-1990s), while books in Albanian and in foreign languages (English, French) were old, with publication dates from the late 1980s and before. Since the end of the war, there has been no money to buy books to make up for the lost years, but the librarians told us that "every day two or three people show up" with donations for the library, "sometimes with 10 cartons of books." There is also the prospect of help from abroad. Tania Vitvitsky, Project Director at the Sabre Foundation (http://www.sabre.org), went to Prishtina in October 1999 for an assessment visit and is working with the Kosovo library, government agencies, and publishers to set up a book donation program.
-- The loss of on-line catalog records and automated systems. Before the war, the library's on-line records were distributed from a central computing facility in Belgrade, which served as the union catalog for all national libraries in the Yugoslav federation. That utility has severed its link with the Prishtina library since the war. Fortunately, the library also kept paper records (a card catalog), which can still be used by readers and staff. The library urgently needs assistance with a new automated system and reconversion of its catalog.
-- The need for professional training. While the library's current staff includes some library professionals, their training predates the 1990s and they had been cut off from the profession, unable to work for the past decade. Unfortunately, the University of Prishtina does not currently have a program in librarianship or archive studies. Until such a program can be set up, short courses and workshops by visiting experts may be the best way to fill the training gap.
-- The lack of financial support. Staff at the National and University Library and other libraries in Kosovo have been working without salary for more than six months since the end of the war. The United Nations administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) has promised support, but has been unable to provide it because member countries have not lived up to their financial commitments. At a press conference in February, UN administrator Bernard Kouchner said he had no money to pay public employees:
"Some of them have not been paid for months ... Now, there is
zero point zero zero deutschemark in the budget 2000 of Kosovo.
[...] It is the first time in the history of United Nations
peacekeeping operations that we have to deal with a budget,
with the payment of the civil servants and organise an
administration," he said. "It is why it is so important to get
not only promises, but cash." (Jerome Rivet, "UN Raises Alarm
after Money Runs out in Kosovo," Agence France-Presse, 3 February
2000.)During our stay in Prishtina, we met with the National and University Library's director, Mehmet Gerguri, and his staff. Mr. Gerguri had worked at the library since 1968 and was appointed as director in 1989. After the imposition of the Serbian apartheid regime in October 1990, ethnic Albanian librarians were dismissed and barred from the premises. Mr. Gerguri and his colleagues were able to reenter the library after the arrival of NATO forces (June 1999) and resumed the work that had been interrupted nine years previously. Among their first tasks, after cleaning up the premises, reshelving the scattered books and refiling the library's dumped card catalog, was to take stock of the condition of libraries throughout Kosovo. Although the survey was still in progress, Mr. Gerguri was kind enough to share the data in hand and has since provided me with an update.
The survey includes complete data for public libraries in 25 of Kosovo's 29 municipalities, with combined pre-war holdings of 2,015,000 volumes (as of 1990). Of the 25 main public libraries, 10 have survived intact, 12 suffered damage of varying degrees and 3 were burned down. However 62 of the 158 branch libraries serving neighborhoods and villages were completely destroyed. The combined holdings of all of these public libraries after the war were reported at 1,114,000 volumes. This represents a drop of more than 900,000 volumes from the pre-war total -- a loss of 44.7 percent of the collections held by public libraries in Kosovo.
More than 2/3 of the reported losses occurred when branch libraries in villages and small towns were burned down as part of "ethnic cleansing" operations. School libraries were also devastated -- a July 1999 UNICEF survey found 43 percent of all schools in Kosovo destroyed or severely damaged and 95 percent of schools in need of repairs. One example is the village school in Vlastica (Llashtica) in southwestern Kosovo, where a reporter found "the classrooms ransacked, the files of student records destroyed, the library of 14,000 books burned, and one of the teachers lost to the violence." (David Finkel, "Up against the Wall," Washington Post, 12 December 1999).
Libraries and Archives of Religious Institutions
The oldest libraries and archives in Kosovo are the collections of the Christian and Muslim religious communities. The three most important Serbian Orthodox institutions, the Serbian Patriarchate in Pec and the monasteries at Visoki Decani and Gracanica, have notable collections of manuscripts and documents from the medieval and Ottoman periods. These monasteries and their collections survived the war without damage and are under the protection of KFOR troops; some of the most valuable material had reportedly been moved to Serbia before the outbreak of the war. The Orthodox Church also has a seminary and theological library in Prizren (Bogoslovija Sv. Kirila i Metodija, est. 1871). Since the end of the war in June 1999, the seminary has served as a shelter for Serb refugees; we found the building intact and closely guarded by German KFOR soldiers.
The manuscript libraries and historic archives of the Islamic Community of Kosovo (KBI), which held the written record of 600 years of Islamic culture in the region, suffered terrible destruction. The most serious loss of non-governmental archives in Kosovo was the burning of the KBI's Central Archive in the center of Prishtina, housed in a building adjoining the fifteenth-century Sultan Murad Mosque. The Islamic Community archive was torched by Serbian policemen on 13 June 1999 and burned all day, the flames providing a dramatic backdrop for television camera crews covering the arrival of the first British KFOR troops in Prishtina.
The KBI's Central Archive had been established in the late Ottoman period as a provincial archive for records and deeds of religious endowments (waqf), records of the training and appointments of Islamic religious personnel and jurists (ulema), the records of Islamic schools, and other documents going back for more than 300 years. The catalog of the archive perished with the collection, which completely filled floor-to-ceiling shelving on three sides of two large rooms (ca. 168 linear meters / 550 linear feet). The fire destroyed the building and all of its contents, including the oldest part of the archive. However, about 20 percent of this archive's holdings, records of the Islamic Community from the period between the two world wars, had been transferred several years ago to the custody of the Kosovo State Archives and escaped destruction.
Six of the regional historical archives of the Islamic Community were also attacked and wholly or partially destroyed, including the KBI archives in Pec (Peja), Djakovica (Gjakova), Srbica (Skenderaj), Glogovac (Gllogoc), Suva Reka (Suhareke), and Ljipljan (Lipjan).
The Alauddin Medrese in Prishtina, an Islamic secondary school, and its theological library survived unharmed, but other Islamic manuscript collections in Kosovo were singled out for destruction by Serbian forces in March-June 1999. Among the most serious losses:
* The burning on 24 March of the library of Hadum Suleiman Aga in Djakovica (founded 1595; the building dates from 1733), with holdings of ca. 200 manuscripts and 1,300 rare books in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Aljamiado (Albanian in Arabic script), as well as the regional archives of the Islamic Community (KBI) with records going back to the 17th century. Among the unique items held by the library was a manuscript of the Albanian Mevlud (poem in praise of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad) by Hafiz Ali-Riza Ulqinaku (1855-1913).
* The destruction of the Bektashi tekke (dervish lodge) of Axhize Baba in Djakovica (Gjakova), which had one of the most valuable collections of Islamic manuscripts in the region. The fire consumed 250 manuscripts and more than 2,000 rare books; the computerized catalog was burned along with the library. The oldest codex in the collection was a 12th-century Persian manuscript. The tekke was burned to the ground at the beginning of May 1999 by Serbian troops using shoulder-launched incendiary grenades.
* The library of the Atik Medrese, an 18th-century theological school in the historic city of Pec (Peja), was also burned to the ground, with only parts of the outer walls still standing and its collection of 2,000 printed books and ca. 100 manuscript codices a total loss. Another Ottoman-era theological school, the Atik Medrese in Urosevac (Ferizaj) was also burned down and the remains leveled by bulldozer.
Two important tekke libraries in the town of Orahovac (Rahovec) survived the 1998-99 "ethnic cleansing" of the area with relatively minor damage. The manuscript collection of the 17th-century Halveti tekke in Orahovac was reportedly ransacked in April 1999 by Serbian troops looking for valuables. Books had been taken from the wall cabinets and thrown on the floor, but only a few were said to be missing. The roof of the Melami tekke, where Sheh Hilmi Maliqi established Kosovo's first Albanian-language school in the 19th century, was pierced by a projectile when Serb forces shelled the town in the summer of 1998. The hole in the roof has since been repaired and the ceiling has been patched, but the main room of the tekke, where Sheh Hilmi's books and autograph manuscripts are kept, suffered water damage and smells of mildew. In Prizren, the collection of the Museum of Islamic Manuscripts in the Sinan Pasha Mosque is in need of conservation but is otherwise intact.
Hundreds of old, hand-written Korans (mushaf) and other manuscripts and religious books in mosque libraries were destroyed when 209 mosques (1/3 of all Islamic houses of worship in Kosovo) were burned down, blown up or severely damaged by Serb forces in the spring of 1999 and during the previous summer.
Inside an old village mosque in Crnoljevo (Carraleve), damaged by explosives set off inside and vandalized by Serb forces in May 1998, we found traditional Islamic leather bindings from which the pages had evidently been ripped out by hand. Torn pages from manuscripts and old printed books in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, some scorched or smeared with excrement, were scattered amidst the fallen rubble and debris. Crude anti-Muslim and anti-Albanian graffiti in Serbian covered the walls. Of the 37 families who had been living in the village before it was "cleansed" in May 1998, seven families had recently returned and were rushing to rebuild their burned-out homes before the onset of winter. They told us they didn't know what had happened to the other 30 families, but said that a mass grave with 22 bodies had been found near the village.
Many private libraries, both religious and secular, were also lost during the "ethnic cleansing." In Pec (Peja) we visited the Kurshumli Mosque, built in the early 17th century by Merre Husein Pasha, an Albanian native of Pec who had risen to the rank of grand vizier (chief minister) of the Ottoman Empire. The mosque he built is now an empty shell with charred walls surrounding a gaping hole in the sky and roof tiles crunching underfoot. The imam of the mosque told us that he had moved his grandfather's library of 500 old books into the mosque at the beginning of the war, thinking they would be safe there ("they might burn my house, but surely they wouldn't touch the mosque ..."). The books were burned, along with the mosque. In a corner of the mosque's entrance portico still sheltered by a dome that hadn't collapsed, we saw the remains of charred pages mingled with the fallen plaster and rubble. Spray-painted on the gate was a huge Serbian cross, alongside graffiti declaring in foot-high letters: OVO JE SRBIJA ("This is Serbia").
Prof. Nehat Krasniqi teaches at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Prishtina and is in charge of rare books and manuscripts at the National and University Library. He told us he'd spent the 1990s, the years when he was without a job, having been dismissed from both the library and the university, combing the countryside for old books and manuscripts. He found more than 200, which have now been added to the National Library's collection.
He told us about his plans for a manuscript salvage project. He wanted to go out into the countryside to collect those old manuscripts still in the possession of families in rural areas. More than 500 villages in Kosovo were burned down in the spring of 1999 and hundreds of thousands of people are spending the winter in tents or other temporary shelter, or doubled up in the homes of relatives. Humanitarian agency officials say that many are likely to abandon the countryside and move to Prishtina, already at double its pre-war population. In the process, whatever family heirlooms survived the war are at serious risk. With the old people who still read and valued these manuscripts now dead or dying, it is likely that some of the old manuscripts that survived the flames and the "ethnic cleansing" may be left behind or discarded as family possessions get pared down to portable essentials.
What Prof. Krasniqi needed to undertake this salvage project was some gas money for travel and a small fund to pay those owners not willing to donate their manuscripts. In response to a preliminary version of this report, in December 1999 the executive board of IFLA provided a grant of 7000 Dutch guilders (ca. $3100) to support Prof. Krasniqi's work. Other assistance projects may follow. IFLA/FAIFE (http://www.faife.dk), in cooperation with UNESCO and the Council of Europe, is sending an expert mission to Kosovo to assess the needs of libraries (25 February-5 March 2000). Despite what they have gone through and the hardships they still face, our colleagues in Kosovo are looking to the future. Let us hope that they will find the assistance they need to restore the libraries and library services that can help the people of Kosovo build a better tomorrow.
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PHOTO CAPTIONS:(1.) The National and University Library of Kosovo, Prishtina, with a British KFOR armored vehicle in front. Photo: Tania Vitvitsky (Sabre Foundation) October 1999.
(2.) The 16th-century Library of Hadum Suleiman Aga in Djakovica (Gjakova), burned down by Serb forces in March 1999. Photo: Andras Riedlmayer (Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey, Harvard University) October 1999.
(3.) Torn-up and burned religious books and manuscripts in a village mosque, Crnoljevo (Carraleve). Photo: Andras Riedlmayer (Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey, Harvard University) October 1999.
(4.) The Serbian Orthodox Theological Seminary and Library in Prizren, guarded by German KFOR troops. Photo: Andras Riedlmayer (Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey, Harvard University) October 1999.
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