Some additional material accompanying The First Bllok: the lives of a Kosovan neighbourhood is available here

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Extra material for chapter 8: 'The people who’d been raised up'

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Dukagjin: a vignette

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Dr Dukagjin Pupovci is a tall, authoritative man who was previously a Deputy Minister for Education. Born in the Bllok in the sixties, by the age of 21 he was teaching at the Bllok’s local high school, Sami Frashëri. One month after starting there, he was invited to teach at the University of Prishtina. He did his Master’s in Zagreb, and received his doctorate from the University of Prishtina and then became the deputy Dean of the Science Faculty there. Later, he founded a successful education NGO which runs a private school modelling modern approaches to teaching and learning. I’d told him about writing this book, and he brings photographs to our coffee meeting. This is man who expects others to do their homework – and is used to doing his own. He still peppers his conversation with ‘apo jo?’ – the professorial ‘is that not so?’ I find myself responding, ‘Yes, yes,’ like a keen student hoping for a good grade.

 

The autobiography he sketches for me is as much a story of geography as of history. ‘I studied mathematics because I had two neighbours who were mathematicians: one on the floor below me, and one of the same floor as me.’

 

Dukagjin’s father worked at the university – and went on to be the head of Kosovo’s Academy of Sciences – which is the reason the family had such unusual neighbours. It is this social as well as apartment-block geography that features large in Dukagjin’s biography – when I ask how his life would have been different if he hadn’t lived in the Bllok, he reflects on how ‘You were in a circle of intellectuals – you had the advantage of knowledge, and the habits that go with it.’

 

And it wasn’t just about what you got from your family, he says. ‘When I visited my cousins on my father’s side in Peja, their conversation was “let’s go into someone’s garden and get a couple of plums” – a whole different mentality. And I had family in town on my mother’s side in Prizren, but they’d still be talking about going out to milk the cows.’ I can imagine the young Dukagjin – not as tall as he sits towering over our café table today, but perhaps still taller than his country cousins, perhaps even then stooping a little as he bent to talk to them. And as he played in the streets outside our buildings, no, it wouldn’t be with plum-scrumpers and milkmaids. The other children would come from homes with pianos; homes with books and aspirations.

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Përparim: a vignette

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Mayor Përparim Rama grew up in a Prishtina apartment in the 1980s development of Ulpiana, seen as luxurious for the time As a young teenager in the 1990s, Përparim and his family saw that despite the seductive lifestyle opportunities of Ulpiana, there were dangers ahead for young Albanian men in Kosovo, especially the risk of being recruited to the Yugoslav Army, where Albanians were being sent to fight Yugoslavia’s wars and were considered the most expendable troops to be put in harm’s way. Përparim left for London, arriving as an unaccompanied minor who was taken into care.

 

The odds are not great for looked-after children in Britain but Përparim’s story is a welcome reminder of the resilience demonstrated by many young people in tough situations, and of what can be achieved through the compassion of British institutions and the individuals who staff them, at their best. His story shows that ‘incomers’ are not always seen as a threat, and it shows the potential that is unleashed when they are supported. With Përparim’s work and successful qualification as an architect, he made millions and met a smart and beautiful woman who was also ethnically Albanian, though her family was from the Albanian community in Montenegro and she had grown up in the US. They married and had sweet cosmopolitan children who were brought up in Notting Hill. The twist in this story is what Përparim did at the age of 45 – when he decided to return to Prishtina to stand for election as mayor. This, too, he did successfully.

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Extra material between chapters 13 and 14

 

Memories and truth

 

Let’s imagine something that had happened in the years between the Bllok’s construction in 1948 and the point in time of an interview with me nearly eighty years later. I would ask someone, or more than one person, who witnessed or took part in this event to tell me about it. I would take accurate notes and would then write up the incident in my manuscript. I would share what I had written before it was published, and confirm with the person that I had accurately captured what they told me. Then it would be printed and other people could read about what had taken place.

 

Yes, of course things could get lost in translation; I would need to look out for potential bias, and behaviours that would strain the neutrality I was aiming for, but the process was uncomplicated. The memory was a photograph in an album; I would invite the owner of the album to retrieve it and pass it to me so I could scan and copy it, check with them that I had a fair copy, and curate a new album of these copied images for others to enjoy.

 

This was how I had imagined this book being born, but I began to realise that I had had a naively straightforward view of how the process could work. I was shocked by the scepticism demonstrated by my interviewees about the validity of their own memories – as if they were holding a photograph in their hands but doubting what they saw there. ‘I need to check,’ says one woman; ‘I could verify that,’ she repeats whenever she’s told me a story from her life in the Bllok. Whenever I ask Lavdim for a memory, he shows me a Facebook post.

 

When I meet Agron, the nephew of teacher, linguist and Bllok resident, Zekeria Rexha, I ask him for details about his uncle. But it turns out that Agron never met his uncle, so he gets out his phone and goes onto Wikipedia to answer my questions; when I talk to Shpresa, I ask about the posters I see on the wall in the photograph she shares with me from the early nineties. I query whether they were from a Yugoslav magazine; whether they were in Albanian, and her instinct is to Google it, as if we’ve subcontracted our memories to some servers in California. Dr Agim does the same thing when I ask him for memories of the neighbourhood river before it was put underground. It’s not only the rush and plash of water that is under cover now.

 

Even a BBC journalist responds like this when I contact her to ask for details of an interview she did with one of the families in the Bllok immediately after the war. The son of the family has told me proudly that they appeared in TV footage with the journalist, but I can’t find it online, which is why I go back to the source and find her on LinkedIn and ask for help in locating the footage. She kindly replies but says she doesn’t remember this story, adding ‘I assume you’ve asked AI to help?’

 

Arbër wants a meta-conversation about the memories he’s sharing with me. He urges me to watch a documentary, ‘The Mind Explained’ about how a memory changes as you repeat it. I do so after our conversation, and realise the error of my idea of people retrieving their memories like photographs that can be passed to me with the same composition and colouring for me to paste into a new album. Memories change every time they’re handled. A thumbprint here, a bit torn off there; or sometimes some figure inserted. Rather than imagining them as photographs, I realise that retrieving them is more like handling one of Kujtim’s doughy flatbreads before it’s gone in the oven. Each time you pick it up, it shifts and distorts. As I continue my interviews, I imagine the fragile memories being handed to me as floppy as if made of soft putty. I try to handle them even more gently.

 

Arbër goes on to talk about fake memories, and hesitates – ‘I don’t want to give you stuff as if it’s factual – I was seven or eight years old.’ When one young man tells me about specific graffiti on the wall of one of the Blok buildings and how he remembers it being created, he describes it in some detail before telling me I should go to see it for myself and check ‘because of the Mandela effect.’ He studied psychology and the subject expert in him comes out as he explains how ‘`Widespread false memories’ work, like people being convinced that Mandela died in prison. The power of such false memories is truly significant, and frightening. However, I find it even more frightening if we take as a lesson from it that we can’t tell anyone anything about the images etched into our recollections of childhood without any confidence unless they have been to the sites and run their fingers over the stones we’re describing?

 

But then I talk to a Bllok resident about his memories of the day that Kosovo declared independence in 2008. He remembers ‘the yellow NEWBORN sign with Rita Ora singing on top of it.’ It’s a strong image – the three-metre-high metal letters spelling out NEWBORN were positioned in central Prishtina just hours before the declaration of independence, and became a focus for celebrations on that giddy day. I remembered it too – or I thought I did.

 

But Rita Ora?

 

I double-checked (by which I mean, I looked up in our shared memory store on Google). The footage with her singing on top of the sign was part of the 2012 video for her song ‘Shine Ya Light’. As far as the media reported in 2012, when she visited and drew a crowd at the NEWBORN monument, the footage was filmed then and wouldn’t have existed in 2008 on the day that independence was declared and that my interviewee is ‘remembering’.

 

And while no-one probably minds the idea of Rita having been with us and dancing on that memorable (?) day, there are inevitably other memories that are more contested. When Olivera sees a Facebook post where I’ve written about interviewing the daughter of an Albanian man who was politically active in the years of Yugoslavia, she writes to me to complain. I tell her that I just wrote what his daughter had told me in the interview I was sharing. ‘A lie told many times becomes the truth,’ she writes gnomically. She says that she had been going to send me more memories but she sees that there’s no point now ‘Because you’ve made your choice’. She doesn’t say, but I presume she means a choice between the viewpoints of the different ethnic communities in Kosovo; that she sees me not representing the viewpoint of her – Serbian – community. I reply to her that I’m not making a choice: I’m just telling the stories of the people who’ve lived in the Bllok – which will include her story. I know as well as any storyteller that this is disingenuous because there are always choices in the stories you share, and how you share them, but I am being honest about my intention. She is unappeased and as a parting shot, she writes ‘What I know, that's what I say and write, not what someone told me. That's my truth.’

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Extra material for chapter 10: 'Working from home'

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Abdurrahman Shala

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Genc remembers that in the 1960s, his uncle Abdurrahman Shala would come to the children’s theatre dressed up as Father Winter (a jolly old man with a white beard wearing a red suit. He might remind you of someone, but don’t tell the Yugoslav authorities because this figure is strictly secular). ‘Father’ Abdurrahman ‘Winter’ would rev up to the theatre on his famous German motorbike – a sure giveaway of his true identity since there was only one Zundapp bike in the whole of Prishtina (Shala’s son says his father got the bike ‘off the Germans when they left’ after the Second World War).

 

It was also Abdurrahman Shala who directed an Albanian-language children’s play at the Kosovo Theatre. He had been the first director of any Albanian language play at the theatre, though he also directed plays in Serbian and Turkish. It was also he who made Shakespeare speak Albanian for the first time at the Kosovo Theatre.

 

In a career spanning over 40 years, Shala notched up plenty of ‘firsts’. In 1950, he directed a play called Zhelanët and took it to a competition in the People’s Theatre in Belgrade where it won first place. Shala went on to co-write the script for Uka of the Accursed Mountains, as the first Albanian screenwriter of the first Albanian-language feature film in Kosovo (you will not be surprised to hear that his film starred, in a word, the Bllok – including both Melihate Ajeti and Shani Pallaska). At the time, this was the most watched film in Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav film most shown around the world.

 

The next year, in 1969, he was part of an even bigger enterprise, acting in The Battle of Neretva, a film featuring Orson Welles and Yul Brynner. Its poster was designed by Picasso, and with those kinds of production values, it was the most expensive film ever made in Yugoslavia. The cost was raised by extravagances such as four specially-constructed villages, built to be destroyed on film, and a battalion of the Yugoslav Army of 10,000 soldiers. It garnered the highest box office attendance in Yugoslavia, with around 4.5 million viewers – at a time when the country’s total population was 20 million. At its premiere in Sarajevo, Tito himself was in attendance, and is rumoured to have been accompanied by Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif.

 

Director Fadil Hysaj describes Shala as ‘an Albanian Anthony Hopkins’ for the way that he inhabited the characters he played, so that he started to think like them. The comparison also flags up how prolific the Albanian was: in total, as well as his films, Shala worked on about sixty plays at the Kosovo Theatre, whether as actor or director, as well as about thirty radio plays.

 

He emphasised the neighbourhood context of his success in a 1979 interview with the weekly Serbian-language newspaper, Jedinstvo, reflecting on the prizes he’d won: ‘If an actor is rated and respected and greeted in the street by children and adults, those are bigger prizes’. He went on to reference the title character he played in the film Era dhe Lisi which had just come out, ‘For me it is really sweet – something I wouldn’t trade, and my greatest reward – when I meet the innocent gaze of children in the street and they say, “Look, it’s Uncle Lis”’.

 

In 1993, he acted in Para Shiut (‘Before the Rain’). The film was to win the Lion D’Or in Venice, and went on to be nominated for the 1995 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It was shown in dozens of countries, and the New York Times put Para Shiut on their list of the 1000 best films ever. Sadly, Shala did not live long enough even to see his film’s premiere, dying in March 1994. His death before the film’s post-production was complete meant that in one case, a line that had been planned for him to voice as additional dialogue had to be added only in the subtitles, like a ghostly tickertape from beyond the grave.

 

The memories he left behind can still be played on YouTube, and in those who’d known him they ranged from the ostentatious public persona on that Zundapp, to the private flamboyance of a man who collected rose petals to put in the bath the first time his first granddaughter was bathed at home.

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