Brod and the Dragash Mountains

South of Prizren lies the municipality of Dragash. This is home to one of Kosovo’s lesser known minorities, the Gorani. The Gorani (meaning ‘mountaineers‘) are believed to have come to the region in the middle ages from Bulgaria. They are Muslim and speak a language similar to a mixture of Macedonian and Serbian. They number in the tens of thousands and live in a few dozen remote villages high in the Sharr mountains. Many of these are almost completely inaccessible, especially in the winter months, but it is possible to visit the larger village of Brod at 1200m without too much difficulty.

To get to Brod from Prizren we first take a bus into the hills which drops us at a road junction near Turbe. From here we’re ushered onto a smaller minibus carrying workers returning to the villages from the larger towns. The minibus winds its way to the capital of the region, also called Dragash. This is a pleasant enough mountain town, dominated by a KFOR base occupied by Turkish NATO troops. Already the air feels thinner and colder. We go into a local café which is heated by a metal stove in the middle of the floor and occupied by swarthy men playing cards. There’s a handful of tiny cafes selling nothing but burek, a kind of pastry with cheese which is popular across Kosovo but particularly here – in the one we visit the menu simply reads: ‘Burek, 50c, Yoghurt, 30c’. From here we hitch a lift the last few kilometres to Brod. We’re held up as the road is currently being surfaced – this is the first of several signs we see that Brod is banking its future on more tourists making the trip here.

The chief draw of the village is the feeling that life here has remained unchanged for generations (even the war had little impact on the area). It’s located at the foot of a mountain valley, a sprawling cluster of buildings based around a labyrinth of cobbled, winding streets. We didn’t expect to see much traffic, but even so are surprised at just how quiet the place is – not a horse and cart in sight when we arrived. It’s mid-morning and he place is virtually deserted apart from a few old men sitting in the town’s couple of cafes – difficult to believe the population of the village numbers in the thousands, although that includes many scattered farms. Sharr sheepdogs – a tall, shaggy breed unique to this area – laze in the sun. The buildings are a hotch-potch of older stone structures repaired and extended with brick, wooden walls, tin sheets hammered into roofs. On many buildings blocks of dung have been used as a kind of plaster, which is supposed to act as an effective insultaion against the cold winter nights. A river runs through the village and, for some reason, is lined in many places with the rusting hulks of cars, which have been built into the riverbanks.

We’d expected to be able to find a local family to stay with, but the few villagers who come out to greet us instead point us in the direction of a new hotel – built a further couple of kilometres up the valley. They call ahead and someone offers to give us a lift – while we wait we watch an engineer shimmy up one of the town’s few telegraph poles using metal hooks on his shoes.

The hotel turns out to be impressive in scale, comfortable, and completely incongruous with its surroundings, resembling a Swiss ski chalet. That’s pretty much the effect the owners are going for – they’ve earmarked the surrounding valley slopes for ski runs, and have started constructing another, equally large hotel alongside this one. In a few years time they hope the area is transformed into a winter sports centre.

From here we walk into the mountains through fields dotted with wild raspberries to a remote shepherds shelter. Under Milosevic, construction was started on a new road to link Prizren with Macedonia over the mountain passes. This project was cancelled through lack of money, but today the track makes a useful trail to follow. It appears as though construction stopped very quickly – enormous concrete pipes lie by the wayside and there’s even an abandoned digger sitting on the prow of the hill.

The path takes us through spectacular mountain scenery and back to the village, where there’s a little more activity than earlier – people chopping wood, one man making bricks from piles of dung. Groups of children follow us through the village wanting their photos taken. We chat to a couple of people who say the economy is very bad and they’re struggling to make any kind of living – much of their income comes from family members working in Germany or Switzerland. The village is pinning its hopes on tourism, but we’re disappointed to hear the hotel doesn’t seem to be using much in the way of local produce from the town.

As we walk back to the hotel we pass a large herd of cows driven through the centre by several generations of a family – the next day as we leave the village we see one of these being slaughtered in the street. A group of people are crowding round to help skinning the carcass. There’s a real sense of community and tradition here but it’s difficult to know whether this will survive should the anticipated tourist industry ever happen.