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Peje buildings 10.
archaeoblog on human rights archaeology - community cultural heritage in Pejë/Peć (also known as Peja and Peq)
[t]he 17th-century Bula Zade Mosque in Peje (pictured here) was demolished to make room for a reinforced concrete structureand wrote its narrative from the text in Said Zulficar's article on mosques in the Balkans, in which he stated that,
The Saudi aid agency in question was also responsible for the demolition of the 17th-century Bula-Zade Mosque in Peje (Pec) and the construction of a reinforced concrete mosque historically inappropriate to the region.I had written that:
this would and should have been the seventeenth-century Bula Zade Mosque, but the Saudi Joint Relief Committee for the People of Kosovo and Chechnya were generous enough to bulldoze it and build a concrete one in its stead, purged of its multicultural architecture and the coexistence it symbolised.This is perhaps the most contested of the postings that I've made, as it doesn't concern "simple" errors made by me ("simple" not detracting from how serious some of them were) or questions over the definition of terms. [Actually, it was a very simple mistake, now resolved.]
The only reason they have been able to get away with this where they have is that they have made aid dependent upon acquiescence to this violence; locals and UNMIK are powerless to halt this campaign of destruction.
WHAT?!!! Are you kidding me?! Where did you get this information? I am from Peja, and I can tell you for sure that the mosque was never "bulldozed" as you say and there was no Saudi humanitarian group involved in its reconstruction. The mosque was burned down by Serbian forces as it was every other mosque in the town as well as 95 % of houses in the town(mine included). The mosque was actually reconstructed from the Italian Government - Misione Acrobaleno, and even the Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi visited it in one occasion to see how the works are proceeding.I have to admit that at this point,
I appreciate the work you have done here, but please get the facts straight before any post.
And btw, there is more risk of islamic extremism getting ground in Serbia than there is in Kosovo (i.e. for one thing, they both hate the West).
And, since you have been in Kosovo then you probably know how religious people are there.
The Bajrakli Mosque (15th century) was restored by the Italian humanitarian organisation INTERSOS in co-operation with the Italian National Institute for Restoration. The Italian mission Arcobaleno financially supported the project. The restoration of the Mosque was part of a wider programme aimed at improving reconciliation between local communities through the awareness and respect of cultural heritage. Alongside the restoration of the Mosque, INTERSOS was also simultaneously dedicated to the urgent restoration of some frescoes in the Patriarchate of Peja.
Across the street stands the Bathhouse Mosque, which was also burned. Today, though, it boasts a suburban-style glassed-in veranda, lemon yellow walls, and a sterile whitewashed prayer room. Nothing about its appearance hints that the mosque, too, was built 400 years ago by the Ottomans.That isn't the mosque in the photograph. So,
Nice photo, but wrong mosque. The one in your photo is not the Bula Zade Mosque (which was indeed messed up by the Saudis, as Peter Ford recounted in the Christian Science Monitor - where you can see a picture). Nor is the mosque in your photo made of concrete.
In fact, what your photo shows happens to be the oldest surviving mosque in the town of Pec/Peja, the Bajrakli Mosque ("Mosque with a Flag" [flown from its minaret on holidays]), a.k.a. Sultan Muhammed the Conqueror's Mosque, built in 1471 by the Ottoman sultan Muhammed II. Like other mosques in the town and its surrounding villages, the Bajrakli Xhamia was torched by Serb forces during the 1999 war and was burned out and badly damaged. You can see signs of the fire in these photos of
the exterior and the interior of the mosque. The second photo shows the marble columns holding up the women's balcony, damaged by the heat of the fire, being restored by experts from the Italian Academy of Fine Arts. Another photo shows the original 15th-century minbar (pulpit) of the mosque, carved entirely out of marble, its surface layer calcinated (turned into burnt limestone powder) by the intense heat of the fire. The Bajrakli Mosque is a rare success story in post-war Kosovo - it is one of only a bare handful of war-damaged cultural monuments to have been restored with Western assistance, under the direction of professional restorers from Europe.
The Saudis, with their destructive approach - insisting that mosques be rebuilt according to the donors' wishes, to be "bigger, better, and 'more Islamic'" - would not have made such an impact (in Kosovo or in Bosnia) if there had been any alternative sources of funding and technical assistance available after the war.
But the UN official, the EC bureaucrats and other "internationals" involved in postwar reconstruction assistance were only too happy, as one Western official was heard to say, "to let the Arabs take care of their own [co-religionists]." As far as that official and his colleagues were concerned, these 500-year-old mosques, built by local craftsmen on European soil, are not really part of Europe's cultural heritage. It seems these monuments belong to the "Orient" and the Turks just forgot to take with them when they were driven out in 1912.