detail from: KRK Art dizajn

Kirjakula and Metohija

Homage to Prota’s Quarter

Zvonko Mijatović

English translation
by Pavlina Mijatović Popić

And then there was Prota’s quarter. Unrecognizable now, even its spirit seems to have fled with us. I know, it was only a street a step away from the town center, and yes, it needed some restoration. But its old, oriental character should have been preserved. Instead, glass-fronted modern buildings now stand there, competing to dazzle, or perhaps to eclipse, the memory of the old mahala. With every demolished house, it felt as though a fragment of the city’s soul had faded away.

And we are not without blame. We sold our inheritance for next to nothing. Buyers would send photographs of our ruined homes, and already then any reverence for what we saw began to dissolve. Later, wishing our traces to be erased forever, they razed even our cemeteries, tore down our shrines, left some in neglect and uncertainty, and renamed others as their own cultural heritage.

“Beneath what you see lie our foundations,” they say groundlessly, as if history could be rewritten by knocking down stones. Each fallen stone erases a part of the story, but writes no new one; it leaves only emptiness, a mute vacuum without identity. Like in Ćopić’s Silent Gunpowder, a silence threatening to explode, yet powerless to speak the truth. Perhaps one day we will gather the strength to speak of all that burdens and troubles us.

I fell asleep quickly that evening, exhausted from the long day. We had set out at dusk; the sun was already sinking. On the bus steps I paused briefly and looked westward.

“Almost the same sky.”

Shades of gray were once again swallowing the red, dissolving it over the rugged heights of the Prokletije and Rugova mountains. What the cosmos has once ordained remains unchanged. All variations of change seem to me mere illusions within our fleeting perceptions.

There was no torus-shaped cloud. Or perhaps I failed to notice it, hurried by the conductor impatiently gesturing that it was time to depart. And yet I hope it is still there, hovering somewhere high above, silently arching its wings over the patriarchal shrines, guarding them in our stead.

I am leaving Kosovo.

As I stepped into the bus, carrying the image of the sunset with me, I remembered how we once watched that very scene from our neighbor’s terrace. Perhaps even then, as Leibniz might have said, our perceptions of the same event were merely different aspects of one and the same truth. The same light, the same horizon, and yet each of us seemed to see something different, refracted through our own thoughts, memories, and expectations.

It once seemed to me that our perceptual prisms, from one side and the other, were positioned so that the refracted rays still converged in a shared focus. As if the light, despite passing through different angles of experience, traveled through the same optical medium, like a chalcedony crystal¹, and somewhere deeper, beyond us, gathered into a single point.

I thought again of grandmother Kirjakula. I have noticed that whenever I find myself in doubt, I return to her and to her careful, far-reaching counsel.

At the very end of Prota’s quarter, where my sister and I spent our childhood until the second grade, there lived an Albanian family. A modest house with a hidden courtyard that opened toward the river. I remember the large, somewhat unstable wooden gate with its heavy iron latch, on which Rustem, that was the man’s name, would place a sizeable padlock before leaving. Limping slightly, staff in hand, he would lead his water buffalo toward the Karagač meadows for grazing.

We rarely saw the rest of the family, his wife and a son much younger than we were.

I do not know how it began or who started it, but I remember that as he walked away, we would shout after him: “Rustem crooked, cannot live straight!” Some of us would even throw small pebbles once he had moved a little farther down the road.

It was part of our game of Cowboys and Indians. The limping man and the strange animal ambling beside him became the “Indians.” We, naturally, were the cowboys, gripping wooden sticks shaped vaguely like pistols.

The man never provoked us, not by gesture, word, or glance. He followed the same ritual each day: lead the buffalo out, close the gate, lock the latch, and without looking back, set off, murmuring something softly to the animal.

One afternoon, after one of our childish “battles,” grandmother was waiting for me at the gate.

“En to pan,” she said quietly, words that have stayed with me, and seeing that I did not understand, she added even more gently, “We are all the same, my son.”

Then, for the first and only time, I heard her raise her voice in anger.

“This must never happen again! You must not touch the neighbor!”

I was ashamed, flushed, unable to meet her gaze. Even now, remembering it, I feel the sting of discomfort and guilt.

Ἓν τὸ πᾶ, “The One is All, and All is One.”
Later I learned it was attributed to Heraclitus, sometimes called a philosophical paradox, even a myth. Harmony in discord. Order in chaos. Unity within multiplicity. Unity does not exclude difference, nor does plurality exclude connection.

And it was then that I first understood unity is not born from sameness, but from the understanding of difference.

That is the key.

The deepest clarity often arrives not through grand revelations but through quiet recognitions that momentarily stop us in our tracks. Later Jung would write that for such truth to exist, there must be a primordial pattern, a common link within different chains of causality.

Sometimes I wonder: is there such a link in the causal chains of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija?

It is difficult to find an unbreakable bond. One might ask whether Kosovo itself could be that common link. And yet even the name of our homeland is not singular. Metohija must never be forgotten, if only as a reminder of the centuries-old Dečani monastic estates, for which there is a well-documented record.

We would say that. They might claim that “Metohija was seized by Serbian rulers”, and for that, too, historical records of one kind or another exist.

Perhaps that very layering is a sign that the link between our collective unconscious, an archetype, as Jung would say, does indeed exist. Not as proof, but as a question that obliges us all.

“Perhaps because of this layering, they will accuse me of ‘me von,’” I thought, smiling faintly.²

“Do not play with words, logos is no joke,” I hear my grandmother’s voice.

“If you have truly understood something, it is time for metanoia. Not for sarcasm.”

Notes

¹ As in the law of refraction: when rays of light enter an optical medium (for instance, a restless ocean, or better yet, a small wondrous lake that changes color depending on the angle of vision) from different directions, they may, under precisely adjusted conditions, bend in such a way that they converge in a common focus.

² A play on words: in Albanian më vonë means “later.”

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