Europe's Flyover States: Exploring Post-War Yugoslavia

On a mild, Balkan morning, the beginning of a day too warm for a Kosovar winter, I sat in a bare cafe picking at a lump of baklava. The TV in the corner played the Australian Open and I felt strangely at home despite my immersion in the mysterious Albanian tongue. Brief, broken-English banter was swapped with the shop attendant as the 'hapur/mbyllur' window sign clattered gently on the glass in the faint breeze. I drained my coffee with a mouthful of stale smoke, the kind that lingers in almost every establishment of former Yugoslavian states. My travels through the Balkans, where 'no smoking' signs are all but strictly observed, had led me to become a 'chain secondhand-smoker'.
Prizren had been welcoming. Had it not been for a chance encounter in a bar with the owner of the only hostel (I was the only guest that night) my bed might have been the grassy patch beside the babbling Bistrica.
Freedom. The bus to Tirana was in six hours and a fresh breeze coaxed me outside. I stood deliberating my next move on the fan-cobbled square, the Shadervan, when I caught a glimpse of Prizren's gem. The Kalaja is an old fort sprawled across a tabletop hill, dwarfing the city's vanilla-white mosques. I was suddenly struck by a sense of adventure and curiosity. Weaving towards the fortress, cautiously scaling steep, crumbling passages, I entered the charred remains of a Serb neighbourhood that had been torched in an act of vengeance a decade earlier. A gaunt worker tied sticks onto a donkey and I realised I stood out on the outskirts of town. The buildings ended and a rocky path led uphill to imposing stone walls. I tailed an old man, trudging along with his arms crossed behind him donning a qeleshe, a traditional Shqip hat. A few boys yelled at me from the walls; in my limited Albanian I shouted "Unë nuk di me fol shqip!" and they disappeared into the ruins laughing.
The unregulated site felt satisfyingly genuine. I had chanced upon a once-dangerous structure, majestic, ancient and haunting. It felt befitting to reflect upon the centuries of war, conquer and defeat; conflict which had lasted eras and the smell of unresolved tension still in the air today. The view from the top of the fortress walls was arresting. Prizren was an old, neat city, steeples and minarets jutting out here-and-there amid the sprawl of clay-red roofs. Beyond the city were fertile green meadows, grey silhouettes of unreachable mountain peaks and the next chapter of my journey: the road to Albania.