Part 1: 1189-1989

The Serbian province — and UN protectorate — informally known as 'Kosovo' is a fertile, mountain-ringed area of 10.887 km². It subdivides into the valleys of Kosovo proper and Metohija (Greek for 'monastic land'): indeed, its full name, as Serbs often like to point out, is 'Kosovo and Metohija'. Here, 'Kosovo' will refer to the entire area unless otherwise noted.

The ancient history of the region is fairly obscure. Suffice it to say that, conquered by Alexander the Great 300 years B.C.E., it became part of the Roman province of Dardania in the 4th century A.D. and thus belonged to the Byzantine empire when the Serbs arrived in the Balkans about two centuries later. Fast forward to...

1189 In this year, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa passed through on his way to the Third Crusade. Stefan Nemanjić, ruler of the small Serbian principality of Rascia, met with him and signed a trade agreement. Barbarossa drowned underway to Jerusalem, but Nemanjić used the mayhem of the time to carve out a kingdom. One of his sons was crowned; another founded the Serbian Orthodox Church and secured it autocephalous status. As proven today by some 1,300 monasteries and churches, Kosovo was the cultural, political, and economic heartland of this advanced medieval state.

The Kingdom of Serbia flourished between the demise of the Byzantines, from whom it emerged, and the rise of the Ottomans, to whom it fell prey. This Golden Age spanned less than two centuries, culminating with Tzar Stefan Dušan the Powerful, who doubled his empire until it stretched from the Danube to the Peloponnes and encompassed present-day Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, northern Greece, and Bulgaria. When Dušan died en route to seizing Constantinople in 1355, it dissolved into squabbling fiefdoms.

By then, the Ottoman Sultanate had embarked on a formidable campaign of conquest. In 1371 it vanquished a Christian army in modern Bulgaria, wiping out the chief contenders for the Serbian throne. Militarily, this spat was far more important than the one to follow in 1389; the same can be said of the final Serbian loss on the Danube in 1459. In terms of mythic significance, however, it is the other way around: "In all of European history," notes Tim Judah in The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, "it is impossible to find any comparison with the effect of Kosovo on the Serbian national psyche." (30). By way of attempts, the Battle of Kosovo has been likened to Hastings, Bastogne, the Siege of Leningrad, and the Fall of Troy — combined.

1389 On St. Vitus Day, June 28, 1389, at a desolate plain near Priština, a scrambled Christian alliance of Serbs and Bosnians faced its foe. Its commander was a minor Serb nobleman, a certain Prince Lazar; his Ottoman counterpart being the Sultan, Murad I. Neither man survived the day. And though the Turks gained the most in relative terms, the battle itself was apparently a tie which mostly pleased the blackbirds feasting on the tens of thousands of slain. This gave the region its name: Kosovo Polje means 'the Field of Blackbirds'.

But legend has painted the draw as a Serbian disaster, and elevated the defeat, in turn, to a moral triumph. As was Ottoman practice, the Sultan had offered Prince Lazar a choice between vassalage and war. Après la lutte — likely in order to boost morale as well as the interests of Lazar's heir — the Serbian Church cast the decision to fight as an affirmation of moral purity over worldly gain. According to this hagiography, God made Lazar choose between victory and temporal power, or death and an eternal Kingdom of Heaven. "And the emperor chose the empire of heaven above the empire of the earth," one poem, "The Downfall of the Serbian Empire," declares.

Lovingly embellished over the centuries, this story evolved into a veritable Passion. For example, a 16th century interpolation involves a Last Supper, as well as a Judas figure represented by Vuk Branković, one of Lazar's favorite knights, who supposedly withdrew at a critical stage in the battle. Taken to extremes, the myth suggests that St. Lazar's "martyrdom" absolved the Serbs of the sins by which their state had perished, making them in effect a "new Israel." So, in the fullness of time, they shall be restored even their earthly kingdom.

In the present, however, Serbia was duly conquered by 1459 and would remain so for centuries. Killing or expelling most of the nobility, the Ottomans imposed shari'a laws reducing Christians to second-class citizenry. This included a poll tax (jizya), legal discrimination, and worst of all, devshirme: the dreaded "blood tribute" of perhaps a thousand male children per annum, to be converted to Islam and enrolled in the imperial apparatus. While these were better terms than those offered Muslims by Christian rulers of the age — notably in Spain upon the Reconquista — that obviously did little to console the Serbs. The most hardcore fled to the mountains of Montenegro, the only semi-independent Balkan state. There the monks would carry forth the martyr cult of Kosovo Polje, while by the flickering bonfires, village bards sang of Prince Lazar.

In the meantime, another ethnic group was moving down from the highlands. The people now known as Albanians began settling in the lowlands. These were fiercely clannish pastoralists of disputed ancestry, who are thought (though all such questions are controversial) to have been a minority in the Serbian Kingdom. Having neither a Church of their own nor the memory of statehood, the proto-Albanians proved more susceptible than Serbs to conversion and its rewards. An estimated two-thirds took up Islam. And from their ranks sprang the new feudal lords of Kosovo; a mainstay of Serb resentment ever since.

1689 The demographic shift came to a head after the failed second siege of Vienna. When the Turks repelled an Austrian invasion in 1689, Serb peasants, who had risen to support it, fled the harsh retaliations. In 1690 the Archbishop of Peć, whose monastery the Ottomans had destroyed, led 30,000-40,000 families across the Danube to the Austrian Military Frontier, the area now called Vojvodina.

This "Great Migration" — another paradoxically celebrated event, which in the Serbian national consciousness evokes the Exodus — moved the center of Serb culture to the Belgrade region, where it has since remained. This rendered Kosovo underpopulated, causing a Turk-sponsored influx of Muslims from present-day Albania. Along with not necessarily voluntary mass conversions among remaining Serbs, many of whom came in time to adopt Albanian customs and even language, this produced an ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo that has also endured to this day. Such, at any rate, is the simple version of a complex tale. Fast forward two centuries...

1889 By now the tide of power was turning on the Balkans. With the declining Ottoman Sultanate on the verge of bankruptcy, Serbia had resurfaced as a principality after a revolutionary war (1804-14) and under the auspices of the Turks' most vehement enemy, Russia. At the 1878 Berlin Conference it had won recognition as a sovereign state, as did Montenegro. The Serbian Kingdom was back on the map; and its gaze became fixed on its historical heartland.

A 19th century representation of the epic poem "The Maiden of Kossovo."

In Belgrade a nascent bourgeoise had discovered the epic cycles of Kosovo Polje, which had drifted north from Montenegro and were published in national-romantic fashion. (They attracted international admiration: Alexander Pushkin and Jacob Grimm cherished the poems, and Goethe, who taught himself Serbo-Croatian in order to read them, compared them to The Illiad.) As with nation-building in general, a literate high culture was constructed from folk traditions in a manner glorifying a distant past. What is unique here is the status assigned the fictionalized events of a non-decisive battle half a millennium back. In a rousing opening address to the nation-wide, months-long celebration of the 500th anniversary of this slaughter, Serbia's minister of foreign affairs intoned:

On St. Vitus' day, June 28 1889, 30,000 pilgrims paid homage to St. Lazar's bones in Hungary.

In due course, the national myth was pressed into service for a Greater Serbia. Set in motion by ambitious politicians and sustained by a wave of yearning for the Golden Age, an irredentist project gained momentum: the "historic mission" of "liberating Old Serbia." Thus, in the chaotic First Balkan War of 1912, Serbian troops advanced on Kosovo, whose defense the retreating Turks had left to the Albanian aristocracy. After centuries of tense but seldom violent co-habitation, Serbs and Albanians clashed for the first time in large-scale battle. Here is how one typical young enlistee responded to his southward deployment:

That year the Serbian army, trailed by thousands of peasant settlers and wreaking much havoc, conquered Kosovo proper in the face of stiff Albanian resistance. The next year the international community recognized the area as Serbian, with Montenegro getting sovereignty over Metohija.

Famously, however, on June 28 1914 another young Serb nationalist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip was outraged that Bosnia remained a Habsburg province, and especially, that the prince had picked St. Vitus Day to oversee military manoeuvres on the Serbian border. He was also inspired by a mythical incident in the Battle of Kosovo, wherein a Serb nobleman, Miloš Obilić, infiltrated the enemy in the guise of a deserter and plunged a poisoned dagger into the Sultan. In any case, his wrath lit the fuse of World War I; an unprecedented carnage which would cost Serbia an incredible sixty percent of its fighting-age male population.

In Kosovo proper, a fierce guerrilla war ensued between Serbs and Albanians, before Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian invaders crushed the Serbian army there and forced what is — characteristically — known as the "Great Serbian retreat" across Kosovo and over the Albanian mountains to a refuge on the island of Korfu. Constantly harried by insurgents, this hapless winter march claimed as many as 100,000 Serbian lives. (It is remembered in Serbia as the nation's "Albanian Golgotha.") However, by 1918, as the Dual Monarchy lost out to the French, the Serbian army inflicted a terrible revenge replete with massacres and ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile Serbia received accolades in the West. In June 1918, for example, the United States recognized St. Vitus Day as a day of special commemoration.

The retreat of the Serbian army in 1915.

The colonization continued after Serbia joined the pan-Slavic monarchy later to be named Yugoslavia. Throughout the interwar period, the Belgrade government deported Albanians from Kosovo proper and resettled half the arable land, spawning a big Serb majority by the late 1920s. (More on this project and its ideology can be found in an official memorandum from 1937 called The expulsion of the Albanians.) But during World War II the tide turned again, with most of Kosovo incorporated into an Italian-controlled "Greater Albania." Nearly 100,000 Serbs were expelled, and up to 10,000 killed, by Albanian militias allied to the fascists.

It was hoped that the country's post-war reincarnation as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) under the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito would end this inter-ethnic bloodfeud. And after a final uprooting of the Albanian resistance, killing up to 48,000 in six months, it did for a while. The province of Kosovo enjoyed decades of relative tranquility wherein nationalism of every kind was suppressed with extreme prejudice by the equal-opportunity dictator and his secret police.

During this respite, a demographic bomb went off. Rural Albanians, plagued by poverty and low education levels, had the highest birth rate in Europe, making the Kosovar Albanian population virtually explode. By 1961, Albanians accounted for 67%, Serbs for 27%, and others for 6%. This new situation on the ground, combined with frustration at the underdevelopment that propelled it, led Kosovo Albanians to riot for independence in the 1968 student revolts.

The pragmatic Tito responded by revamping the consitution in 1974, granting Kosovo (as well as the Vojvoidina province with its big Hungarian minority) effective self-government. Besides vast financial transfers from the center, Kosovo gained a seat on the federal presidency; a legislature; a supreme court; a university; a central bank; a police force; and a quota system ensuring Albanian dominance of all these institutions. But much as this displeased the Serbs, it also thwarted a growing Albanian demand for full Republic status, which carried the theoretical right to secede. A year after Tito's death in 1980 — at which point 77% of the population were ethnic Albanians — near-revolutionary riots flared up anew. This time they were quelled with tanks.

Meanwhile there were now persistent claims of harassment and discrimination of non-Albanians. The complaints had considerable merit, as the thousands of Serbs fleeing Kosovo every year would readily confirm. It is equally true, however, that they were wildly exaggerated by Serb nationalists. In 1986, Serbian Orthodox bishops spoke of genocide in progress, as did 216 prominent Serbian intellectuals who decried "the physical, political, legal and cultural genocide" against the Serbs.

Then, a much-reported turning point occurred. In April 1987, the deputy president of the Serbian communist party, Slobodan Milošević, arrived at Kosovo Polje — by now a suburb of Priština — to mediate the simmering conflict. As he met with local Serbs, a crowd of nationalist Serbs outside the building began pelting stones at the (predominantly Albanian) police, who struck back with batons. As Milošević ventured outside to see what was happening, an elderly man approached him begging for help against "separatist police beating women and children." The former retreated to a second-floor balcony and declared, while gesturing toward the Field of Blackbirds: "Noone shall be allowed to beat you again!" The crowd responded with chants of "Slobo, Slobo."

This incident, which rebel leaders have proudly confessed to instigating — possibly in collusion with Milošević, who had met with some of them four days beforehand — was televised in all four corners of Serbia. It served as a firebrand for nationalist emotion. Transformed overnight from grey apparatchik to national hero, Milošević proceeded to wrest control of the communist party from Ivan Stambolić, his friend and benefactor for a quarter century. Stambolić, who in 2000 was assassinated on the eve of the Presidential election by eight Serbian secret police officers loyal to Milošević, has said he had seen that day at Kosovo Polje as the end of Yugoslavia.

While that may be an overstatement, certainly two basic taboos of that federation had been flaunted: on mass rallies and ethnic identity politics, respectively. Milošević, supported by hard-liners from Kosovo, followed up with more than sixty so-called "meetings of truth" on the the Kosovo question across the length and width of Serbia. These mass rallies he deftly used to overthrow the provincial leaderships of Kosovo and Vojvoidina. At a November 1988 meeting in Belgrade, under the parole of "Brotherhood and Unity," he thundered to a million listeners:

In grand demagogic style, he envisioned a new:

To be continued.