Back from Kosovo and Prague

Hello subscribers (and welcome new ones)!

It’s been a while since my previous Newsletter, in which I reported about my latest blog post on Albania. Since then I’ve been on two more, very short, trips. First to Kosovo over the May Day weekend, then to Prague this past weekend just gone.

I know it seems a bit odd flying to Albania and back only to fly almost the same route a few days later (Kosovo neighbours Albania to the north-east). But work commitments back in Vienna on the intervening days required this, unfortunately. Not good for my carbon footprint, I admit. But at least my trip to Prague was by train, and so will be my next short trip, in early June; a return visit to Budapest, again just for a long weekend.

Kosovo was very interesting and revealing. Apart from exploring the capital Prishtina, I had a guided tour arranged that was entitled “Western Kosovo Political Tour” (by the operator bnadventure.com), which took us to Gazemistan, Mitrovica, Prekaz (the young nation’s principal memorial site) as well as a number of other memorial sites related to the 1998-99 Kosovo war. I will make a separate blog post about that in due course when I find my feet again.

The featured photo above was taken in Prishtina and shows the “Heroinat” monument (You will have guessed it: that word means ‘heroine’ in Albanian … though on the bilingual plaque next to the monument it’s spelled out as ‘heroin’ in the English part.) The monument is dedicated to Kosovar women involved in the war, in particular to the “nearly 20,000” victims of rape, which was used by the Serbs as a weapon of war (hardly for the first time, and as we are seeing yet again, neither for the last … in fact it seems to be practically a constant in wars almost anywhere). The hotel in the background, by the way, is the former “Grand Hotel Prishtina”, which these days has lost any grandness it may once have had and now stands basically abandoned and unmaintained except for a few shops and cafes at street level.
  

My trip to Prague was for a conference, namely under the “Progressive Connexions” framework. I had submitted my presentation proposal when this was still planned as a dedicated dark-tourism conference but as they struggled to get the numbers of participants up enough (apparently too many people were still too afraid of travelling due to the pandemic), they first merged it with a parallel conference about street art and renamed the event “Dark Streets”, then with yet more themes, from “Queerness” to “Witchcraft” plus plenty of sex and violence (mostly cinematographic) thrown in for good measure, and the umbrella name for the whole mixed-bag event evolved into “Visiting the Shadows”. But the theme of dark tourism still found a home under that heading I thought, although it had become a minority strand (with only a couple of other presentations dedicated specifically to it).

The interdisciplinary approach generally fostered by Progressive Connexions was thus taken to yet-unheard-of levels at this event. Obviously that resulted in a good number of the topics of the other presentations not being particularly my cup of tea, but in the end I was positively surprised how many topics did still turn out rather interesting and eye-opening. It was also a good, friendly and non-confrontational atmosphere (unlike some of the linguistics conferences I used to attend in my previous academic life). It also gave me an opportunity to promote my current book Atlas of Dark Destinations a bit – and indeed a few participants said they would order a copy. Nice bonus.

It was just great to have a proper in-person event such as this again. For Progressive Connexions this was the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, during which everything was either cancelled or done remotely. So it was a breakthrough of sorts. OK, three contributions were delivered remotely via Zoom after all, but out of a total of 30 over two days, that’s a small enough proportion. For me it was actually the first time back at an academic conference in almost ten years, namely since I attended the founding conference of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research in Preston, Lancashire, in 2012. I may not let that much time pass before I do something like this again.

I might also make a separate blog post about the conference, and of course in particular about my own contribution “Off the Beaten Track – Islands of Dark Tourism”. But please bear with me. First I have to digest all the new and multifaceted input gathered over the past few weeks. Of course I’ll then also have to update my main website’s Albania chapters, plus add new ones, and then give Kosovo its well-deserved entries too. So I won’t get bored any time soon. And then there is the development of that other line of activity that I had already vaguely hinted at. I’ll give more details further down the road should this indeed take off.
  

But so much for this time.

Best wishes,

Peter