These rebellious love letters were exchanged between two guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army, Xhevë Krasniqi Lladrovci and Fehmi Lladrovci.

Written between 1985 and 1990, when Fehmi was a political prisoner in Stara Gradiška, a notorious prison in former Yugoslavia, the two had been engaged for little more than a month when he was sentenced to ten years in prison for participating in illegal pro-Albanian rights movements. Both were thirty.

Fehmi proposed to Xheva that they remain friends so that she would not have to wait so long to marry him, but she promised to wait for him. She had already graduated in Albanian language and literature and was then studying law.

These costumes on the wall are what Xheva wore when she became “a bride”. Wearing not white, but red, symbolizing resistance. And resistance was her watchword until she was killed in combat by Serb forces on September 22, 1998, fighting alongside Fehmi. Exhibited on the wall is her chest webbing she wore when she was killed, which contained her ammunition and grenades.

During their prison years, a special correspondence began, that wrote of a love not yet fully consummated in freedom. Xheva’s letters were so witty, lyrical, motivating, and romantic that many other Albanian political prisoners read them and recited them to each other, finding inspiration therein. They recount how Xheva’s letters lifted their spirits and strengthened them morally, feeding their imagination and hopes of a beautiful life in a free Kosovo after getting out of prison.

Fehmi and Xheva knew that when they wrote, they were writing not only to each other, but to a community of friends and family members. And at Reporting House, for the first time, this correspondence is now on public display, for the new generation as well as the old.

While waiting for Fehmi, Xheva taught his mother how to read and write so that she too could write to her son in prison, while also pushing for the rights of girls in Drenas to continue their secondary education.

When Fehmi got out of prison, Xheva and he served as members of the Albanian Guard in Croatia, fighting for its liberation in 1992. From 1993-1997 the couple lived in Germany, where Xheva’s female friends described her arduous regime of cycling and walking with weights, preparing for the inevitable coming war. In 1997 it came, and she walked into Kosovo from Albania and enlisted in the KLA.

Xheva’s letters have been preserved dutifully and carefully by her family, including her brother Selim Krasniqi, a fellow KLA fighter. The letters you see are copies, as museum exhibition could harm the originals.

In the cold, damp harshness of the prison, with inmates crowded twenty-five to a room, Xheva’s idiosyncratic wit, intellect and bravery inspired others.  Among them was Adem Demaçi, the so-called Mandela of Kosovo, who spent 15 years there.

“Yours until the grave,” Xheva wrote forty years ago. And so it came to pass. A decade after writing those words, while fighting the Serbs in the Drenica valley in 1998, Fehmi took a bullet. He asked Xheva to pull back. She refused. Even after he died, she stayed beside him, fighting to a heroic, bitter end.

Written by Christian Jennings

Originally published on Chasing the Donkey, a travel blog covering the Balkans.

When I first arrived in Kosovo for the first time nearly twenty-seven years ago, in June 1999, I was as a British journalist during the war. NATO’s fighter aircraft were criss-crossing the sky, tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees were pouring home from exile in Macedonia and Albania, and the towns and streets were jammed full of peacekeeping troops from thirty countries.

I never dreamt that all these years later I would be returning to discover that there is now a fantastic new museum that tells the dramatic and gripping story of those days.

Now, on Mother Theresa Avenue in the centre of Prishtina, just next to the big statue of Albanian fighter Skenderbeg on his horse, you can find Reporting House. It is an imposing, modern structure, curiously enough set inside an old Yugoslav department store. It has already attracted 30,000 visitors in the first two years since it opened, and the interior of the imposing old building is now stripped back to structural, quasi-industrial basics amply suited to its new contents.

Outside is a striking installation made from scarred timbers taken from houses burned in the war, while inside there are numerous fascinating artefacts that give the viewer a gripping visual explanation of what happened in Kosovo.

The “Exodus ’99” museum, a project produced by Reporting House that documents the experience of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians forcibly expelled during the 1999 war, has opened at the Pristina Train Station.

The opening ceremony was attended by state officials, diplomats, scholars, civil society activists, artists and numerous citizens.

Located in the space from where the trains transporting refugees to North Macedonia departed in the spring of 1999, the museum brings to the forefront one of the most dramatic chapters in Kosovo’s recent history. Between March and June 1999, hundreds of thousands of Albanians were expelled from their homes along the Pristina–Han i Elezit railway line, in one of the largest forced displacements in Europe since World War II.

The exhibition includes 48 personal accounts of people who experienced the exodus, collected and told 27 years after the war. The stories are organized into four main themes: expulsion, life in refugee camps, staying with host families, and returning to Kosovo. In addition to the stories of refugees, the museum also presents testimonies of those who remained in Kosovo, hid during the war, or joined the armed resistance.

“Exodus ’99” aims to preserve the memory of the refugee experience and create a space for reflection for generations that did not experience the war. Through personal testimonies, the museum shifts the focus from statistics to the individual experiences of people who lost their homes, were separated from their families, and were forced to seek refuge outside of Kosovo.

The museum was produced by Jeta Xharra and curated by Gazmend Ejupi. It was founded by Reporting House, BIRN Kosova, and Prishtina Biennale.

“Exodus ’99” is located in the Prishtina Train Station and is open to visitors from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 to 18:00.

Reporting House has been accepted as a member of the Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO).

In a public announcement welcoming its new member, NEMO wrote that Reporting House marks 25 years since the end of the war in Kosovo and offers both local and international visitors an in-depth look at what it describes as the last European war of the 20th century.

NEMO notes that the exhibition, presented by BIRN Kosovo and Prishtina Biennale, brings together journalism, photography and media artefacts from the 1990s alongside contemporary artworks reflecting on the long-term impact of the war.

According to the network, visitors are guided through Kosovo’s recent history, from peaceful resistance and the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army, through the 1998–99 war and NATO’s bombing campaign, to Kosovo’s eventual declaration of independence.

“Founded by journalist Jeta Xharra and curated by artist Gazmend Ejupi, Reporting House highlights the essential role of the media in shaping historical memory and invites continued collaboration as the exhibition continues to evolve,” NEMO wrote in its announcement published on Saturday, April 25, 2026.

“Our motivation for joining NEMO is to share our unique model of combining journalism and contemporary art with other European institutions,” Xharra was quoted as saying. “We became a country with the support of many European states that have themselves experienced war, and we want to learn from European museums about how to tell our history to future generations. We are the youngest country in Europe, and perhaps the youngest museum to join the network, so we have much to gain from the exchange of knowledge within NEMO.”

NEMO, the Network of European Museum Organisations, is an international organisation bringing together museums and museum organisations from across Europe.

Opened 25 years after the end of the war in Kosovo, Reporting House offers a detailed account of the conflict that brought the 20th century in Europe to a close.

The exhibition opened on June 10, 2024, ahead of Kosovo Liberation Day.

Reporting House takes visitors through the mounting tensions and conflict of the 1990s, from which the guerrilla movement of the Kosovo Liberation Army emerged, through the 1998–99 war and the 11-week NATO air campaign, followed by Kosovo’s liberation and, eventually, its declaration of independence in 2008.

Located on the first floor of the former Gërmia department store, Kosovo’s first major department store, built in 1973, Reporting House has developed into a space not only for documentation, but also for discussion and research among local and international journalists, researchers and students.

A wide range of public figures from Kosovo, Albania and abroad have visited Reporting House, some returning more than once and bringing family members, friends and others interested in Kosovo’s modern history.

Originally conceived as a three-month exhibition, Reporting House has since developed into one of Kosovo’s most prominent platforms for exploring collective memory, journalism and contemporary art, according to artist and curator Gazmend Ejupi, who has been closely involved in its development.

Ejupi says the project’s impact has exceeded its initial expectations and that it has acquired a significant public role.

He expects its relevance to deepen further during 2026, as Reporting House becomes connected with the BLLACA 99 – Exodus project, a combination intended to open new spaces for reflection on Kosovo’s recent past.

Ejupi also emphasises that one of the project’s central pillars remains the relationship between journalistic material, documentary archives and contemporary art.

It is this combination, he says, that makes Reporting House distinctive: journalism is presented not only as historical documentation, but transformed into a visual, emotional and critical experience for the public.

“The fact that we are now part of a broader European museum context demonstrates that Reporting House has succeeded in creating a distinctive model for presenting history, memory and testimony through the combination of journalism, archives and contemporary art,” Ejupi told KALLXO.com.

Today, Wednesday, June 18, 2025, Reporting House will unveil a special installation made from 500 original mineral crystals brought from the Trepça Mine, marking the first anniversary of Reporting House.

Titled 100, the installation also commemorates 100 years since the beginning of Trepça’s modern industrial era.

Reporting House announced that the minerals featured in 100, curated by Gazmend Ejupi, come from the Stantërg Mine, the oldest mine within the vast Trepça complex, located a few kilometres from Mitrovica and around 45 kilometres north of Prishtina.

The minerals were extracted from a depth of 750 metres by miners who continue to work in extremely difficult conditions, facing temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius, high humidity, dirt and dust, often without adequate protective equipment.

“And yet, the lead and zinc ores contained in these rocks, extracted under primitive and arduous conditions, ultimately find their way into our pockets through modern technologies such as the mobile phones we use every day. Trepça’s lead and zinc are also used in car batteries. These raw, luminous and striking crystals are more than a geological wonder. They are a calendar of history, silent witnesses to labour, their ancient geological timeline now intertwined with the recent decades of our resistance and liberation,” the announcement states.

According to Reporting House, the Stantërg Mine, one of the oldest within the Trepça industrial complex, was developed by a British mining company in the 1920s, several years after Kosovo came under Serbian rule. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany took control of Trepça and retained it until 1944, when the Yugoslav Partisans came to power. A new era of mining followed, focused on extracting large quantities of ore with minimal investment.

During what became known as Trepça’s golden age, from 1960 to 1981, employment expanded significantly, eventually reaching 22,885 workers in 1988, compared with around 8,000 at the beginning of the period. As Slobodan Milošević moved to abolish Kosovo’s autonomy within Yugoslavia, Trepça became one of the centres of resistance.

“In 1989, 1,200 miners staged an eight-day hunger strike underground, seeking to defend the constitutional position established by the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution. Although the strike assumed historic proportions, it failed to halt the suppression of Kosovo’s autonomy and became a warning of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia that was to follow,” the announcement states.

Mining at Trepça has a much longer history, with evidence of activity dating back to the Roman period. The name Trepça itself appears in a papal document dating from 1303.

“Lead, zinc, silver and gold ores were extracted at Stantërg. The Ottomans took control of the mine in 1455. Following the destruction caused during the War of the Holy League, mining activity ceased toward the end of the seventeenth century,” Reporting House states.

Trepça’s modern industrial revival began with assessments of its lead and zinc deposits during the 1920s, an initiative associated with Yugoslav Prime Minister Nikola Pašić and his son Rade. After exploratory work was completed in 1925, a 50-year concession agreement was reached with Selection Trust, a British mining finance company.

In 1927, Selection Trust established a London-based subsidiary called Trepça Mines Limited. Production began in 1930, and the company operated the mine until the Second World War.

Reporting House opened on June 10, 2024, in Prishtina’s former Gërmia department store.

Through its exhibitions and programmes, Reporting House documents and presents the extensive work of local and international journalists who reported on the war in Kosovo.