WHERE THE STREETS HAVE NO NAME

It's often the little things that tell you a lot about a place - and in Kosovo, one of the things that reveals a lot about the country is its roadways.

Much of our filming has taken place in the capital city of Prishtina, a dusty, bustling city of over 300,000 people spread out over several miles of hills and valleys.  The biggest challenge in filming there has been getting around.  Interestingly enough, street names are almost never designated by any sort of sign, and most people do not use them.  Even the people who work at the city's many hotels or restaurants have no idea of their street number or name!  Rather, people will refer to a nearby landmark, such as "the place around the corner from the cinema" or "across the street from the municipality building".  Part of the reason for this confusion may be that street names in Prishtina have typically been highly politicized, changing according to who was in power.  The latest change in 2001, for instance, saw over 500 communist-inspired or Yugoslav street names written in Serb-Croat renamed.  Out went Rruga (street) Marshal Tito, and in came Rr Nene Tereza (named after Mother Theresa, an ethnic Albanian).  Kosovo Film Street became Rr Tony Blair.  Rr Belgrade is now called Rr Tirana.  But even with the new Albanian-friendly names, we've found that to get around our best bet has been to memorize landmarks rather than street names.  It seems that even taxi drivers use this technique to orient themselves toward their destinations.

The larger roads which connect cities and villages are also remarkably un-named, and it is not uncommon to come to a major crossroads or traffic circle that is completely free of any indication as to which of the many avenues to take to continue one's journey.  When I mentioned this to an Albanian friend, he explained that that lack of signs is a hold-over from the last days of communism; because the authorities did not want people moving from place to place to organize a resistance, they stopped the production of maps and decided that they would only maintain the road that tourists were likely to use on their way to Macedonia.  Although that is certainly a good explanation for how things came to be in such a state, one does wonder why such a crucial part of the country's infrastructure is not in better shape after the more than 33 billion Euros that the international community has spent to aid the country over the last ten years.

All this is not to say that the roads are completely sign-free, however!  When one passes through a city, the name of the city is always noted in both Albanian and Serbian, and you can often tell the mood of the city by the fact that one of the names (usually the Serbian version) has been spray-painted or meticulously scraped out so that it is no longer readable.

And then there are the mysterious signs like the one in the photo.  We have seen this curious sign many times and yet nobody that we have asked about it seems to know what it means.  A radical attempt to get jaded drivers to pay more attention to what's on the roadway?  An industrious use of leftover signs donated from Iceland?  A post-modern art project?  We suspect that none of these guesses from our Kosovar friends are accurate - please let us know if you have any insight into this matter!