Kosovo Roma Oral Histories Project

"This project was implemented between January and July of 2003 in several Kosovar Roma communities. It started long before that.

In November of 2001, we conducted a random interview in Gracanica to see what it would yield. We picked the mother of the middle-aged blacksmith next door, who we’d paid to weld iron bars over our windows. His mother, on sunny days, would slowly walk outside her small, well-kept home, to sit in the sun. She brought a small stool with her and placed it on the edge of the dirt road that ran up to the unused railroad tracks and the Serb homes beyond. On every sunny day I exchanged greetings with her on the way to or from work.

Adem Osmani interviewed her. She was almost 90 years old- she was sharp and lucid, she cracked jokes and occasionally she smoked a cigarette. She revealed to us a world none of us knew about; the woman spoke of growing up in Pristina’s Moravska Mahalla in the 1920s, when the Serbs were rare and the Turks were still the elite of the town. She spoke of the smells, the languages, the Turkish markets, the politics, and her best friend who she played with despite the fact that they shared no common language. She learned Turkish in order to better play dolls with her. She talked about Italian officers and the German occupation forces; she spoke of Roma traditions that we’d never seen or heard of- not even from the Roma we knew around Gracanica.

She was not the inspiration for this project; she was confirmation that it was worthwhile. (...)"

DWP Fields:
Memory Work
Storytelling

DWP Actors:
Communication for Social Development

Dates:
2003 — 2003

External Link