Kosovo Serbs
Based on Wikipedia: Kosovo Serbs
The Serbian Jerusalem
In the nineteenth century, Serbian nationalists began calling Kosovo something striking: "the Serbian Jerusalem." The phrase captured everything—the sacred weight of the territory, its role as a cradle of civilization, and the almost religious fervor with which Serbs viewed their historical connection to this small patch of the Balkans.
Today, Kosovo Serbs number somewhere between ninety-five thousand and one hundred thousand people, making up roughly five to six percent of Kosovo's population. They are the second-largest ethnic group in the territory, vastly outnumbered by ethnic Albanians. But numbers tell only a fraction of the story. The relationship between Serbs and Kosovo runs through centuries of empire, war, religious devotion, ethnic cleansing, and contested memory.
To understand the Kosovo Serbs, you have to understand how a territory can become more than geography—how it can transform into an idea that people will fight and die for, generation after generation.
Medieval Glory and the Nemanjić Dynasty
The story begins with the Slavic migrations of the sixth and seventh centuries, when peoples historians call the Sclaveni raided and settled throughout the western Balkans. Byzantine chronicles mention the White Serbs arriving during the reign of Emperor Heraclius, who ruled from 610 to 641, though modern scholars debate the specifics of these early migrations.
For centuries, Kosovo changed hands repeatedly. The Bulgarians controlled it during various periods in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Byzantines reasserted their authority under Emperor John Tzimiskes in the 970s and then again under Basil the Second in 1018. Local Orthodox churches in places like Lipljan and Prizren answered to the Archbishopric of Ohrid.
The decisive transformation came in 1166, when a Serbian prince named Stefan Nemanja—founder of the Nemanjić dynasty—asserted independence after rebelling against Byzantine Emperor Manuel the First Comnenus. The family drama was brutal: Nemanja defeated his own brother Tihomir at Pantino near Pauni and drowned him in the Sitnica River. Though initially forced to submit and return some conquests, Nemanja later allied with Hungary after Manuel's death in 1180 and finally broke Byzantine control over Kosovo.
His son, also named Stefan, completed the conquest. By 1208, he had taken Prizren and Lipljan, pushing Serbia's border south to the Šar Mountains. In 1217, Stefan received a royal crown—which is why Serbian historians know him as Stefan "the First-Crowned."
Two years later, in 1219, the Serbian Orthodox Church gained autocephaly—the right to govern itself independently rather than answering to Constantinople. The church established dioceses across Kosovo, at Hvosno, Prizren, and Lipljan. By the century's end, the center of Serbian religious life had moved to Peć, in western Kosovo.
Prizren became Serbia's capital during the fourteenth century, a thriving trade center where King Stefan Dušan founded the Monastery of the Holy Archangels between 1342 and 1352. Grand monasteries accumulated vast landholdings across Kosovo and the neighboring region of Metohija. In 1345 and 1346, Stefan Dušan elevated the Serbian Kingdom into an Empire, and the Archbishopric at Peć became a Patriarchate—though formal recognition from Constantinople wouldn't come until 1375.
Modern Serbian historiography treats this era as the political, religious, and cultural apex of medieval Serbia. Kosovo wasn't peripheral territory; it was the heart.
The Battle That Became a Myth
Stefan Dušan died in 1355, and his empire immediately began fracturing. His successor, Stefan Uroš the Fifth, presided over feudal disintegration as various lords carved out their own domains. Parts of Kosovo fell to different nobles—Vukašin Mrnjavčević controlled some areas, Vojislav Vojinović expanded into others, and eventually Prince Lazar emerged as a major power.
Then came June 28, 1389.
The Ottoman Empire, which had been steadily advancing into the Balkans, invaded Prince Lazar's realm. The two armies met at Kosovo Polje—the Field of Blackbirds—near Pristina, at a site called Gazimestan. Lazar commanded somewhere between twelve thousand and thirty thousand men. The Ottoman Sultan Murad the First brought twenty-seven thousand to forty thousand.
Both leaders died. Lazar fell in battle. Murad was assassinated—Serbian tradition credits a knight named Miloš Obilić, who supposedly feigned surrender and stabbed the sultan. The battle's actual outcome remains historically ambiguous; the new Sultan Bayezid the First had to retreat to consolidate power rather than press his advantage.
The battle didn't immediately end Serbian independence. Vuk Branković emerged as a local lord in Kosovo, sometimes an Ottoman vassal, sometimes not, between 1392 and 1395. Another major battle occurred in 1448, when Hungarian forces under regent John Hunyadi clashed with the Ottomans at Kosovo—the Hungarians lost after two days of fighting, but the engagement essentially halted Ottoman expansion northward for a time.
Final Ottoman conquest came in 1455, when the southern regions of the Serbian Despotate were invaded and Kosovo was incorporated into the Ottoman administrative system.
But here's the crucial point: the Battle of Kosovo became something far larger than its actual historical significance might warrant. It transformed into the central myth of Serbian national identity—a story of heroic sacrifice, Christian resistance against Muslim invasion, and a lost golden age waiting to be restored. The battle's anniversary, June 28th, remains one of the most important dates in Serbian culture. The Field of Blackbirds became sacred ground.
Under the Crescent Moon
Ottoman rule lasted more than four centuries and fundamentally transformed Kosovo's demographics and religious landscape.
The Ottomans brought Islam, particularly to urban areas. Many Orthodox churches and holy sites were destroyed or converted into mosques. The grand Monastery of the Holy Archangels near Prizren—the one Stefan Dušan had founded—was torn down at the end of the sixteenth century, its stones repurposed to build the Sinan Pasha Mosque. The mosque's namesake was an Albanized Muslim, a pointed symbol of the religious transformation underway.
The Serbian Patriarchate of Peć was officially abolished in 1532. Yet paradoxically, it was an Islamized Serb who helped restore it. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a grand vizier who had been born Serbian in Bosnia and converted to Islam, used his influence to reestablish the Patriarchate in 1557. Special privileges followed, helping Orthodox Serbs and other Christians survive under Ottoman rule.
The Great Turkish War of 1683 to 1698 temporarily changed Kosovo's status when Austrian forces occupied the territory. But when the Ottomans retook it, Serbian Patriarch Arsenije the Third led a massive exodus—thirty-seven thousand families fleeing Kosovo to escape Ottoman reprisals. This migration devastated the Serbian population and created patterns of displacement that would repeat for centuries.
In 1766, the Ottomans abolished the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć for good.
During the First Serbian Uprising in the early nineteenth century, Serbs from northern Kosovo prepared to join the rebellion, but Ottoman forces arrived and suppressed their efforts before they could participate. Violence drove more Serbs to migrate northward to central Serbia, joining rebels led by the legendary Karađorđe. Interestingly, the Kelmendi were the only Albanian tribe to fully support the Serbian rebels—a reminder that ethnic boundaries weren't always absolute.
The Demographic Reversal
By the late nineteenth century, something profound had shifted: Albanians had become the dominant population in Kosovo.
How did this happen? The answer involves centuries of migration, conversion, and violence in both directions. Serbian ethnographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed a concept called Arnauti or Arnautaši—their term for Kosovo Albanians, whom they perceived as "Albanianized Serbs." The theory held that Serbs had converted to Islam and gradually adopted Albanian identity and language.
Modern anthropologists criticize this framework as a tool of nation-building rather than accurate history—an attempt to claim that the Albanian majority was somehow "really" Serbian. But the underlying demographic reality was undeniable: in a territory Serbs considered their Jerusalem, they had become a minority.
Violence accelerated this transformation. After Serbia annexed southern territories following the Serbian-Ottoman War, tens of thousands of Albanians were resettled, mostly in eastern Kosovo. Attacks against Serbs followed. In 1901, Albanian groups carried out massacres against Serbs in northern Kosovo and Pristina. The Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijić claimed that Albanians forced an estimated one hundred fifty thousand Serbs out of Kosovo between 1876 and 1912.
Albanians were accused of conducting a campaign of terror against the remaining Serbian population. Serbs were accused of conducting ethnic cleansing during their military campaigns. Both narratives contain truth; both oversimplify a horrifically complicated history of intercommunal violence.
Wars and Reannexation
The rising Kingdom of Serbia had never abandoned its claims to Kosovo. As Ottoman power crumbled at the turn of the twentieth century, Serbian planners prepared for restoration.
Some historians suggest that Austro-Hungarian agents deliberately stirred conflicts between Serbs and Albanians to advance their own interests—a reminder that great power meddling has always complicated Balkan politics.
During the First Balkan War of 1912, Serbia and Montenegro fought alongside Greece and Bulgaria as part of the Balkan League, driving Ottoman forces out of Europe. The allies acquired virtually all Albanian-inhabited territories, hoping for international recognition of their new borders.
But Albanians across the region resisted, fighting for their own proposed independent state. The resulting conflict between Balkan League armies and Albanian forces ended with the Treaty of London, which created an independent Principality of Albania close to its present borders. The bulk of the Kosovo vilayet—the Ottoman administrative division—went to Serbia, while the Metohija region was awarded to Montenegro.
Kosovo was back under Serbian control for the first time in over four centuries.
The triumph was short-lived. During World War One, in the terrible winter of 1915 and 1916, the Serbian army withdrew through Kosovo while fleeing the Central Powers. Thousands died of starvation and exposure during this retreat, one of the war's most harrowing episodes. But in 1918, Serbian forces pushed back, and Kosovo was reunified when Montenegro joined the Kingdom of Serbia.
Kingdom of Yugoslavia: Colonization and Failure
The monarchy transformed into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. Kosovo's territory was split among three administrative divisions: the Zeta Banovina, the Banate of Morava, and the Banate of Vardar.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the Yugoslav government pursued deliberate colonization, settling between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Serbian families—roughly sixty thousand people—in Kosovo to strengthen the Slavic presence. Meanwhile, many Albanian families were forcibly displaced or pressured to emigrate to Turkey under a 1938 convention.
The policy aimed at demographic engineering. It largely failed. Albanian resistance proved stubborn, conditions were poor, and then World War Two interrupted everything.
Occupation and Atrocity
When the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, they carved up the country. Kosovo was divided among three occupiers: Fascist Italy got the largest portion and annexed it to the Albanian Kingdom (a Greater Albania under Axis control), Nazi Germany took northern sections, and Bulgaria occupied the southeastern parts.
What followed was systematic persecution of the Serbian population. Serbs faced expulsion, internment, forced labor, torture, destruction of property, confiscation of land and livestock, and the destruction of monasteries, churches, and cultural monuments. Violence peaked in waves—April 1941, June 1942, September 1943—with continuous pressure between the surges.
The main perpetrators were Albanian collaborationist forces: the Vullnetari (volunteers), the Balli Kombëtar nationalist movement, and most notoriously the SS Skanderbeg Division. This Waffen-SS unit, recruited from Albanian volunteers, became better known for murdering, raping, and looting in Serbian areas than for actual combat operations.
The irony of the expulsions became apparent quickly: Serbs had been running most of Kosovo's businesses, mills, tanneries, and public utilities, and had been responsible for most useful agricultural production. Removing them created economic chaos.
Serbian estimates put the number of expelled at around one hundred thousand—forty thousand from the Italian zone, thirty thousand from the German zone, twenty-five thousand from the Bulgarian zone. Approximately ten thousand Serbs and Montenegrins were killed in Kosovo during the entire war period.
Socialist Yugoslavia: Autonomy and Tension
After the war, the communist Partisans under Josip Broz Tito unified Yugoslavia as a socialist federation. In 1946, Kosovo became an Autonomous Province within Serbia—the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo—with limited self-government designed to provide institutional protection for the Albanian ethnic majority while keeping the territory within Serbia.
Constitutional changes in 1963 reorganized the country as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Serbia became the Socialist Republic of Serbia. Kosovo's status was adjusted and equalized, though the full details of these changes reveal the delicate balancing act Yugoslav authorities attempted between Albanian and Serbian interests.
The socialist period represented an uneasy compromise. Albanians gained significant cultural and political rights. Serbs retained their historical claims and religious sites. Both communities remembered their grievances. The arrangement held together under Tito's authoritarian management—but what would happen when that management ended?
The Unraveling
The 1990s provided the catastrophic answer. As Yugoslavia disintegrated, Kosovo became one of the bloodiest flashpoints. The Kosovo War and Kosovo's subsequent declaration of independence in 2008—partially recognized by the international community, rejected by Serbia and its allies—created a new reality.
Following the Kosovo War, over half of the Kosovo Serb population was expelled, primarily fleeing to Serbia proper. The demographic transformation that had been underway for centuries reached a brutal acceleration. Today's ninety-five thousand to one hundred thousand Kosovo Serbs represent a remnant population, concentrated in enclaves, particularly in northern Kosovo near the Serbian border.
They remain a recognized ethnic minority in Kosovo's legal framework. They maintain their Orthodox churches and monasteries—including the medieval foundations that represent the religious heart of Serbian civilization. They live in a territory their nation considers sacred, under a government their nation doesn't recognize.
The Weight of History
The story of the Kosovo Serbs resists simple moralization. Every chapter contains both victims and perpetrators, often the same people at different moments. Serbs expelled Albanians; Albanians expelled Serbs. Both communities suffered under Ottoman rule and under each other's nationalist movements. Both have genuine historical claims and genuine historical crimes.
What makes Kosovo distinctive is the extraordinary symbolic weight both communities place on the territory. For Serbs, it's the site of their greatest medieval achievements, their holiest religious sites, and their most formative national myth. The Battle of Kosovo isn't just history—it's identity. The monasteries of Peć and Gračanica aren't just architecture—they're proof of presence, evidence that this land was once the center of Serbian civilization.
For Albanians, Kosovo represents something equally fundamental: their demographic majority, their independence movement, their escape from Serbian rule. The same territory, carrying incompatible meanings.
The Kosovo Serbs who remain today live at the intersection of these competing narratives. They're heirs to medieval kings and patriarchs, descendants of people who survived Ottoman rule and Axis occupation, survivors of the most recent round of ethnic violence. They're also a small minority in a territory that may never be fully at peace—people whose very existence poses questions about history, identity, and belonging that have no comfortable answers.
The Serbian Jerusalem remains contested holy ground.