As I knock back a few beers with Ukiq, he tells me how that same techno-loving cousin who lent him those CDs suggested that the family open a bar after the war. Following years of being banned from cultural spaces like cinemas and theaters, a place to drink and gather freely as ethnic Albanians was necessary and cherished—and, suddenly, filled with opportunity.
Twenty five years on, nightlife is now a driving force of Pristina. Along the narrow street of 2 Korriku that leads from the boulevard to Servis Fantazia, both electronic and mainstream pop blasts out of vibrating bars, punctuated by takeout stands slinging kebabs to line people’s stomachs. In the 1990s, that same energy could be found in the Kurrizi, a network of underground bars and clubs playing everything from techno to jazz to punk, which lay below the residential Dardania neighborhood of the city. It was dismantled by oppressive Serbian forces as the war took hold, but young Kosovars continued to look to clubbing as an avenue for escape—from grief, from trauma, from boredom—in the aftermath. It was a trend that swept much of the region following both the break up of Yugoslavia and the fall of the Soviet Union.
For Kosovo, the soundtrack to both its post-war struggle and collective euphoria was electronic music. An early watermark of this time was The Road of Peace Train, which saw a group of Kosovar and Serbian ravers hitch themselves to a freight train, assemble some turntables, and blast ‘90s electronica as they rode across the former Yugoslavia in 2002, from Pristina to Skopje, in a symbol of unity. A tight knit community of DJs, promoters, and musicians has since formed, starting club nights, opening underground venues, and throwing festivals that pound with the heavy beats of house and techno until sunrise: parties like Episode, one of the first DJ nights to be established after the war; the late Spray Club, often credited with cementing clubbing culture into the foundations of 2000s Pristina; and the recently founded Bliss, Bliss, Bliss collective. It’s a movement that, while well covered online, has morphed and evolved behind sealed borders: Largely unable to perform outside of the country due to visa restrictions, and with few international DJs flying in, the scene has been driven by Kosovars, for Kosovars.
“Parties [after the war] introduced us to a new way of receiving culture, listening to music, and being together,” Rina Meta, a Pristina-born creative who recently collaborated with Montez Press Radio on a series about Kosovo’s cultural landscape, told me over the phone. “This music scene was shaped in isolation. You never created music with an audience in mind, only your friends.”
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The Palace of Youth and Sports is a large, brutalist piece of architecture from the 1970s that looms over this city of 227,154 people like a monolith. It was formerly named Boro and Ramiz after Boro Vukmirović and Ramiz Sadiku, two World War II Yugoslav Partisans of Serbian and Albanian descent, commonly referred to as a gesture of “brotherhood and unity.” For years it functioned as a sports and community complex, hosting tournaments and other large events, even a 1989 miner’s strike against the ongoing destruction of Kosovo’s autonomy. After a fire in 2000, though, parts of it were thrown into disuse and left to ruin.
