These rebellious love letters were exchanged between two guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army, Xhev\u00eb Krasniqi Lladrovci and Fehmi Lladrovci.<\/p>\n
Written between 1985 and 1990, when Fehmi was a political prisoner in Stara Gradi\u0161ka, 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
During their prison years, a special correspondence began, that wrote of a love not yet fully consummated in freedom. Xheva\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Xheva\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
In the cold, damp harshness of the prison, with inmates crowded twenty-five to a room, Xheva\u2019s idiosyncratic wit, intellect and bravery inspired others.\u00a0 Among them was Adem Dema\u00e7i, the so-called Mandela of Kosovo, who spent 15 years there.<\/p>\n
\u201cYours until the grave,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These rebellious love letters were exchanged between two guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army, Xhev\u00eb Krasniqi Lladrovci and Fehmi Lladrovci. Written between 1985 and 1990, when Fehmi was a political prisoner in Stara Gradi\u0161ka, a notorious prison in former Yugoslavia, the two had been engaged for little more than a month when he was sentenced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5770"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5774,"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5770\/revisions\/5774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reportinghouse.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}