Belina Krasniqi
The Albanian League of Prizren, Prizren
19 May 2022
I was walking in the streets of Prizren in the heat of
the afternoon, wondering how many minutes it would take to arrive at the
Albanian League of Prizren. Walking close to the “Lumbardhi of Prizren” trying
to walk near shadows of the trees, I remembered the history of the Albanian
League of Prizren. Established officially on June 10, 1878, in the “Bajrakli”
mosque which was the center of the Vilayet of Kosovo. With 47 representatives
of Albanian nobility of the Vilayet of Kosovo gathered to set up a platform in
response to the decisions taken in the Treaty of St. Stephen.
After a half an hour walk, I found myself at the doors of the “Lidhja e Prizrenit”. A beautiful entry with the name of the museum, well maintained garden and building, made me realize how important the history is to this city. Inside the museum I found so many elementary school students, eager to find more about the culture and history of our ancestors. At the entry there was a young employee explaining to us the history of the building during the last war in Kosovo. I found out that the building was completely destroyed on the 27th of March 1999. Also the statues of Ymer Prizreni(President of the Albanian League of Prizren) and Abdyl Frasheri(Activist of the Albanian League of Prizren and minister of External Affairs in the Provisional Government) were found in the periphery of Prizren after the end of the war.
Finding out about this part of our history made me
think about how much war destroys the culture and the history of a country and
how painful it was to the people to witness the destruction of their own
nationality and culture. But what made me proud of my country was that the
building was restored in June 2000, and now is open to the public as a museum.
Enterering the building I noticed small wooden
doors that made me remember a story my grandfather told me. He said, “We made
our doors small size purposely, not because our men were short, they were
pretty tall, but in order to show respect to the ones in the room and to bend
our heads when we entered the room our doors were small.”
When I entered the rooms there were exposed some
traditional clothes that Albanian women and men used to wear centuries ago, and
also a loom in the middle of the room. This made me nostalgic of the time where
my grandmother used to work with a loom to make carpets. The sound of the
wooden piece where the woolen yarns got tighter to form the shape of the
carpet, designed with red and black to form the Albanian eagle and many other
symbolic figures. The monotonous movement of the woolen yarns from one side to
the other side of the loom turned me back in time, like I was seeing ladies
working in the loom with those traditional clothes, the atmosphere around made
my imagination even wider, the room with wooden floors and short ceiling, the traditional
house with two floors build like many more during that century. These made the
Albanian League of Prizren the perfect place of representing our culture and
traditions to me and to many visitors who want to explore more about the Albanian
history.
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