POLITICAL TOUR: Kosovo Contested narratives

What You'll See

• Gazimestan & The Tomb of Sultan Murad – Your journey begins where Ottoman and Balkan armies once collided. At the Tomb of Sultan Murad and the nearby Gazimestan monument, you will stand on the grounds of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. It was here, on the fateful date of June 28—the same day that sparked WWI in 1914 that the 1989 Milosevic speech ignited the fuse for Yugoslavia’s violent collapse.
• The path leads to Divided city of Mitrovica, a city split by the Ibër River and a living symbol of post-conflict division. Explore the northern bank, a bastion of Serbian narrative guarded by the statues of Prince Lazar and the Russian Consul assassinated in 1903. This is an immersion into “sensitive geography,” where bridges and monuments reveal the raw complexity of a divided ethnic mosaic.
• The tour culminates at The Adem Jashari Memorial Complex in Prekaz (Skenderaj), the sacred ground of Kosovo’s independence. Witness the haunting, shell-scarred ruins of the Jashari compound, where in 1998, a three-day siege by Serbian police wiped out three generations of the family, including Adem’s wife and his 13-year-old son. This sacrifice remains the definitive turning point in the struggle for liberation of Kosovo.
• In Prishtina we close the tour at the premises of the Kosovo National Library, specifically at the Serbian Orthodox Church of Christ the Savior, an unfinished and deeply controversial building that stands as a symbol of Kosovo’s contested past. Begun in the 1990s under the Milosevic regime and halted by the Kosovo War, its inauguration was marked by the presence of individuals accused of war crimes, including Arkan, highlighting the layers of pain and tension embedded in the site.