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Above Left: Statue of Albanian war hero. Above Right: Sinan Pasha Mosque viewed from the central square. Right: Teens in Prizren's central square. |
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Left: Café juxtoposed in front of a mosque. Below: Trilingual sign in Albanian, Serbian, and Turkish in Prizren. UNMIK has required bilingual Albanian and Serbian signs, and sometimes trilingual signs to take into account local minority languages.
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Macho Men, Balkan Style (originally posted to The Agonist on May 31, 2007):
Both Serbian and Kosovar men are macho men in a metrosexual packages. There's just not that much work for the Queer Eye guys here. Young men already dress carefully in the most stylish duds and haircut they can afford. People in Pristina and Belgrade dress far better than in Washington (faint praise, I know). Male friends put their arms around each other in ways rarely seen outside the gay ghettos of the USA.
Balkan men nonetheless remain very traditional. Indeed, it the absolute taboo on homosexuality rather than comfort with it than makes such things possible. Shortly before my departure for the Balkans, a gay Kosovar received political asylum in the United States due to persecution in his homeland.
It’s a long way from the debate over civil unions and gay marriage in the U.S. And not unique in Eastern Europe—the BBC recently reported on how gay rights activists were beat up right outside the Kremlin.