Multiethnizität in Alltag und Konflikt. Schein und Realität von Identitätskonstruktionen in der Balkanstadt Prizren

Multiethnizität in Alltag und Konflikt is based on Johannes Gold’s PhD thesis, defended at the University of Jena in 2018. In his book, he focuses on the relationships of the different ethnic and religious communities living in the Kosovar city of Prizren. An old Ottoman regional capital, Prizren has remained one of the most ethnically diverse cities of Kosovo. The composition of its population is in many ways a remnant of the multiethnic and multireligious Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. Today, while many members of the traditional urban middle class continue to speak Turkish, the city has an Albanian majority population, with Serbian, Bosnian and Roma minorities living there, too.

The book is structured like many PhDs with an introduction, a theoretical framework, a description of the research design, and the results of the research. The empirical part of the book starts with an overview of the historical development of the city and its demographic structure. Although this gives the reader a detailed introduction into the history of this city and its vicinity, Gold’s narrative does not question contemporary ethnic self-attributions. He writes about these ethnic identifications as though they have existed for centuries. Other than, for example, Oliver Jens Schmitt, whose work focuses on the historicity of ethnic identities, Gold does not address their development in the nationalization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He thereby implies a continuity of the attributes of what is ‘Serbian’, ‘Albanian’, ‘Bosnian’ and ‘Turkish’ throughout history. Although he does mention interethnic marriages and the fact that, as a result, around 9% of the population have ethnically diverse parents, this does not lead him to deconstruct ethnic categorization, let alone trace its historical development.

As religion rather than language or ethnicity shaped collective identities in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, historical changes in the relevance of collective identities—from religious to ethnic—would have been an important factor in Gold’s analysis. In fact, Prizren is an excellent example of the fluidity of ethnic self-attributions, where the boundaries between being ‘Albanian’ and ‘Turkish’ are anything but solid. Through time, many families effectively oscillated between these two ethnicities, depending on whether it was preferable to be ‘Albanian’ or ‘Turkish’ at a given historical moment. Also, the self-identification as ‘Bosniak’ is a relatively recent phenomenon. During socialist Yugoslavia, most of the Slavic-speaking Muslims were identified as ‘ethnic Muslims’—Muslimani with a capital M, instead of muslimani, which referred to the religion. Other terms used for Muslims in the villages southeast of Prizren were torbeši, and in those south of Prizren, gorani. Their southern Slavic dialect varied between Serbian and Macedonian/Bulgarian, and in fact their Bosniak identification was only invented during the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. To cut a long story short: Gold records intercommunal relationships in different realms of life in a detailed manner, but he misses out on deconstructing the ethnic self-perceptions as such, and takes the various ethnic categories as given. This results in an overestimation of ethnicity and the neglect of the role of religion as a collective identity marker. Furthermore, in this way the author does not shed light on any grey zones of collective identity construction in this Southeast European city marked by a strong Ottoman legacy.

The author introduces the innovative method of ‘city walks’, through which he gathered his empirical data. He ventured on such city walks with local residents, such as historians belonging to different ethnic groups, with the aim of recording the city’s ethnic geographies. In this way, his ‘city walk’ with a Turkish student saw the latter proudly show remnants of Ottoman history, while distancing this imperial legacy from present-day Turkey. Gold concludes from this that the Turks of Prizren see themselves as people who due to their historical role in the city have reconstructed self-image as the preservers of Prizren’s traditional multiethnic fabric (157). His ‘city walk’ with an Albanian cultural activist also brought forth many references to Ottoman history, thereby demonstrating the closeness of Turkish and Albanian history in the city. Maybe unsurprisingly, the Albanian interviewee excluded much of Prizren’s Serbian history, while the Turkish interviewee included it in his narrative. Both the walk with a Bosniak and with a Rom revealed how these groups did not have a lot of urban locations to identify with. The walk with a Serb demonstrated a rather pragmatic handling of the city’s history (152). All in all, with these ethnicized ‘walks’, the author gives a first impression of the various narratives of the city and their overlapping urban geographies.

After analysing the historical narratives and the ways in which the different ethnic groups are present in Prizren’s public space, the author focuses on interethnic relations in everyday life, the economy, the city’s residential quarters, leisure, religion, and the family. In addition to the city walks, the author conducted interviews giving insights into friendships, marriage patterns, and economic interactions. He conducted these interviews with individuals and families as well as with representatives of twenty-three organizations in the city. Among these were members of the cultural associations of each of the ethnic groups, representatives of the trade associations and various sport clubs, many of which have a history going back to multiethnic, socialist Yugoslavia. In fact, the latter continue to be multiethnic organizations and tend to boast local, urban patriotism rather than any division along ethnic lines (241). The third group of associations from which Gold gathered his interviewees were multiethnic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) established after the end of the Kosovo war in 1999.

An interesting aspect of the everyday practices Gold describes are the interreligious visits by Christians and Muslims on important religious holidays. Such mutual visits by religious notables are a part of Prizren’s culture. For example, Muslims make pilgrimages to the Serbian-Orthodox Zočiste monastery where they donate votive offerings, and to St. Cosmas and Damian’s Monastery, about thirty kilometres north of Prizren. However, the author observes that the Serbs maintain many more interreligious practices than the Muslims. Thirty-five percent of the Serbs have visited a mosque since the end of the 1999 war, which is not matched by the Muslim groups in the town who practise less interreligious everyday exchanges. Also, Muslims visit Catholic churches much more often than Orthodox ones—most probably a result of the fact that most Catholics in the town are of Albanian ethnicity (257). In addition to the holidays of the different religious groups, Prizren observes a holiday called Karabash-Baba, celebrated by all religious groups each year on 5 May. Here, pagan, Muslim and Christian elements make up the celebration, and people of all denominations hold a picnic at the city’s oldest Ottoman cemetery. Once more, Gold points out that Prizren features an inclusive urban identity that goes beyond the more exclusive ethnic identities. However, he also shows that in times of conflict the ethnic categories have been used to mobilize one group against another.

Gold thus describes Prizren as an asymmetrically interethnic microcosm with various interreligious interactions. The city is dominated by the Albanian and Turkish ethnicities. Serbs play a social role that goes way beyond their small number. Other ethnic groups, such as the Roma, remain on the margins. Interreligious activities sometimes cross the ethnic boundaries; sometimes they stay within them.

Generally speaking, the book brings forth few unexpected insights. However, Gold does deliver a good amount of interesting empirical detail from his ‘city walks’ and interviews, which make the overall picture a colourful one. Even if he does not de-construct historical ethnicity, and largely leaves out the post-Yugoslav framework, he does embed his material in theoretical discussions on multiethnic cities and their identity constructions and challenges.