Return to Sender: One Hundred Years of Postcards from Kosovo

What do we remember of the victory against Nazi-Fascism in Europe, seventy-five years ago? Images of monuments to the Second World War provide us with traces of memory: of Yugoslavia’s promise of brotherhood and unity among different nations, of Kosovo’s dream to become modern and prosperous, and of rising artists’ promotion of a modernist aesthetic.

Built in the 1960s, those monuments were since destroyed or rendered invisible by neglect. Thanks to the collectors who preserved and exchanged them, postcards restitute them to public view after a half century.  As we look at the monuments, we cannot avoid thinking of their absence, which is not absence of memory as much as the counter-memory of contestation and alienation.

The Boro-Ramiz Memorial, Landovica (Prizren)

The memorial was dedicated to partisan heroes Boris (Boro) Vukmirović and Ramiz Sadiku, executed in Landovica by the Italian Fascists on April 10, 1943. Unveiled in 1963, it was designed by Miograd Pecić and Svetomir Arsić –Basara (1928, Sevc, Ferizaj). The mosaic, depicting the scene of the execution, was by Hilmija Ćatović (Rozaja, 1933-2017). 

In this postcard, the message is “Greetings from Pristina.” The monument has transcended its location near Prizren to reaffirm the broader symbolism of brotherhood and unity. 

Only postcards now revive the memory of the Boro-Ramiz Memorial, which was destroyed in the recent war and replaced by a cemetery to the fallen of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).  The old Memorial was altar-like, a homage to the two comrades, whom the Fascists, according to Yugoslav lore, tried unsuccessfully to separate, offering the Albanian Ramiz to be spared execution as they shot the Serb Boro. But it was  also used for recreational purposes and its sculpture was a symbol of modernity as much as the car Fića, popular in the 1960s. 

In greeting postcards from Prizren,  portrayed alternatively as modern or old, the Landovica Memorial is featured at the center of multi-views portraits of the city. It appears  with the late-Byzantine, UNESCO protected Serbian Orthodox Church of Sveta Bogorodica Ljeviska and the seventeenth century Sinan Pasha Mosque, but also with the postwar motels and restaurants Vllazrini, Liria, and Sputnik.  

One postcard of Prizren views includes, beside the Landovica Memorial, another memorial to the Second World War located on a wall of the House of Culture.  Built in 1982, as demands for a Kosovo Republic were brutally repressed, this memorial shows six busts of fallen partisans as a reaffirmation of the partisan legacy at the foundation of a unitary Yugoslavia. The memorial was destroyed soon after and nobody remembers it. Shkelzen Maliqi helped recognize some of partisans:  Xhevdet Doda and Jovanka Radivojević-Kica from Prizren and Ganimete Tërbeshi and Emin Duraku from Gjakova.

Brotherhood and Unity Monument, Pristina

Dedicated to the common heroes of the Anti-Fascist National Liberation Movement, the memorial was designed by Miodrag Živković (Leskovac, Serbia, 1928), and completed in 1961. It symbolizes the unity of the three main nations living in Kosovo and active in the partisan war: Albanian, Montenegrins and Serbs, each of them represented by a  22 meter pillar of concrete and rebar. The memorial has fallen into disrepair and occasionally becomes the subject of debates over its role.  

In this postcard dating back to the 1960s, the Brotherhood and Unity Monument is featured as an imposing representation of both modernity and political will against the backdrop of the old parliament.  Since 2000, high-rises such as the government building just behind the parliament, have dwarfed the Monument. No longer Brotherhood and Unity Square, the landing on which the monument still stands is now called Adem Jashari, after the greatest hero of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

A postcard from the 1970s shows  Brotherhood and Unity Square as the gate to the urban center from the still very rural hill of Dragodan. The street that seems to begin with the monument is what remains of what once was the main east-west axis linking Constantinople to Rome [Divan Yoli in Turkish, Divanjolli in Albanian, literally the Road to the Imperial Council], which was destroyed to make room for the new square in the 1950s.

In the 1970s, Pristina still maintained the look of a small town, with the Brotherhood and Unity Monument featuring as a signpost of the main public space, a modernist construction blending with old Ottoman buildings such as  the fifteenth century Bazaar (Tas) Mosque and the Big Mosque.

Greetings postcards from Pristina include the monument together with images of the fourteenth century Serbian Orthodox Church in Gračanica and the turbe [mausoleum] of Sultan Murat I in nearby Mazgit. The turbe contains the entrails of  the Sultan, killed in the immediate aftermath of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, while the rest of his remains are buried in Bursa (Turkey). 

In this Greetings from Pristina postcard, the Brotherhood and Unity Monument appears with the other WWII modernist memorial of Velania and the Tower of Gazimestan, a tribute to the Serb heroes fallen against the Ottomans during the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, built in 1953 during the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. 

The Tower of Gazimestan replaced an older monument to the Serb fallen in Kosovo, an obelisk built by the Kingdom of Serbia after WWI, whose religious connotation was perhaps disliked by Communist Yugoslavia. The older monument established a connection between the medieval heroes of the 1389 Battle with those who fought to conquer Kosovo from the Ottomans in the campaign of 1912.

In many postcards, the monument to Brotherhood and Unity appears with exclusively modern views of the residential city. This shows the outdoor pool at the start of the pedestrian main street, the so-called Korzo, then Marshall Tito Street, now Mother Theresa Street. The pool was removed in the late 1970s to make room for the Hotel Grand, and was never rebuilt, as originally planned, in the new Sports Complex Boro and Ramiz.

The Hotel Božur, built  in the mid 1950s,  was, with the Brotherhood and Unity Monument and Square, a key signifier of Pristina as a modern city. It was replaced by a much more monumental hotel, the Swiss Diamond, in 2006.

A commemorative postcard of the twentieth anniversary of the Liberation at the end of WWII could not miss the Brotherhood and Unity Monument and Square as well as the Hotel Bozhur and the Ramiz Sadiku construction company.