JANJEVO WALKS: A CULTURAL HERITAGE APP

The Oral History Initiative team embarked this May in Janjevo, to record and collect the stories of people of all walks of life. Having conducted twenty-five oral history interviews, and having created a rich photographic collection in collaboration with our interviewees, we have secured countless individual stories as video, image and text. The life-story approach of the oral history interviews allowed for a multitude of voices to come forward, and for their stories to become the guiding narrative to town’s abundant history and culture. 

Curated as an interactive map, Janjevo Walks mobile app has designed a single walk. The Walk Neither Town Nor Village gestures towards the cosmopolitan lifestyle that the Janjevo merchants led, and how that has found a way to express itself in the built environment and also on their natural landscape. The Walk Neither Town Nor Village takes the user throughout Janjevo, and along the route introduces video stories to watch and photographs of different time periods to browse from family photo albums. The map we have drawn and the walk we have curated rest heavily on the memories of Janjevo inhabitants. Told in their own words, their stories become a journey into the past, present and future aspirations of the town.

The interviewing process was a personal encounter with the lives of Janjevo inhabitants and the life of their town. Therefore, we would like to thank them for sharing with us their life stories, and for their kind permission to publish their interviews and private photographic archives on Janjevo Walks mobile app.

Produced by Oral History Initiative, Janjevo Walks is part of the “Inter-community Dialogue through Inclusive Cultural Heritage Preservation” project funded by the European Union’s Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP) and implemented by United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) in Kosovo.