--Saturday, 01 July 00--
I try to sleep late on Saturdays. Sort of a defiance of having to work a 6 day week. I try but I fail. I was at work before 8.

The work here is overwhelming -- especially when I was gone. It seems as if everything needs to be done. Yet much has been achieved. FreeBalance was chosen as the accounting system and the company decided to really commit themselves to the effort. FB sent Grice Mulligan, their chief marketeer and former chief technician, to Prishtina for a month. Staff recoded 1000 transactions, and the system was brought up 28 days later. The CFA issued a financial report based on the inputted data. If you know how difficult this is, it is a very impressive achievement.

My typing was interrupted just now by the ringing of the door bell. Almost no one knows where I live and, Smile, the one person who does know, went to his village today (It was characteristic of Smile that he could insist that I come to visit him and then go to his village.), so who could it be?

I went to the door and said loudly, Hello?. There was a mumble of conversation from the other side that I could not make out. I said, Hello?, again and another mumble. I decided to open the door because in Kosovo, foreigners in general, and Americans in particular, have exceptionally high status. In Turkmenistan Americans are liked, here we are revered as national saviors.

When I opened the door there was an older woman, an older man and a young man about 20-25. He spoke a little English and, between that and some mime, asked if he could go out on my patio and crawl around the barrier to the adjacent apartment's patio. The whole event was now too interesting to say no, so I said yes and he took off his sneakers and did so. The gray haired woman took off her shoes and went out to see how he was doing and another woman arrived with a strange key that she gave to me with an air that suggested that the key would solve whatever the problem was. I brought the key to the gray haired lady who was following the progress of the young man and she accepted it knowingly and exited my apartment. The young man, seeming pleased, came back from the other side of the patio and put his sneakers on. They all went down the stairs to an apartment on the floor below.

How little we understand of what goes on around us.


--Sunday, 02 July 00--
Woke up with the sore throat that always portends my colds.

Out the door by 8:30 on my way to Sultan Murad's tomb. On Smile's suggestion I took a van on the highway beside the bus station to Vushtrri/Mitrovitsa and got off at Mazgit (pronounced maz-geet) and walked up the street on the left. Sultan Murad I was the Ottoman leader whose army defeated the Serbs and their allies in 1389 despite the fact that he was killed by some sort of trick involving a Serb crossing the lines saying that he wanted to fight for the Sultan and, when he was shown to the Sultan, falling on him with a knife. The Sultan was buried where he fell. And now I was to see his tomb.

The tomb of Sultan Murad I

The mausoleum is a small, pleasant domed structure made of stone -- rather like a mosque without a minaret. It is in the center of a tree-filled garden surrounded by a stone wall. I walked past the open iron gate and saw a woman caretaker. She showed me into the one-room mausoleum. In the center was a casket-like structure higher at one end that the other and covered in green felt cloth; carpets tiled the floor. A French inscription on the wall recorded the history of the place. I could make out enough of the French to realize that in the centuries since 1389 this mausoleum had fallen upon hard times repeatedly.

The garden around the Mausoleum of Sultan Murad

I remember the slighting description of Sultan Murad's tomb in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" and resolved to reread it when I got home.

After visiting the Sultan's mausoleum, I set out to find the tower that the Norwegian solder had told me about. I walked north along the road to Mitrovitsa until I saw a car wash (probably the single most common business in Kosovo) with a customer sitting in the shade. The customer spoke English, knew where the tower was and offered me a ride to it, and a Coke. We had a pleasant conversation while we waited for his car to be cleaned. He had been a refugee in Germany for ten years. He had only been able to get menial (and probably illegal) jobs but he supported his parents and the families of his brothers back in Kosovo. When the war was over he decided he wanted to come back even though he had not been home for a decade.

The tower at the Field of Blackbirds. It was from the base of this tower that Milosovich made his famous speech in 1989, the 600th anniversary of the battle.

He drove me south to the big, square tower which is off the road about 200 meters. The tower is of stone set in the middle of a large concrete base which seems to have been added later and to have circular concrete thingies that seem to have been added after the original base construction. I learned later that this was the platform from which Slobodan Milosovich had made his famous speech on the 600th anniversary of the Serb defeat there before one million Serbs. It made his career -- about the consequences of which we know too much.

The Norwegian troops stationed there give a visitor an English translation of the Serbian plaque at the top. Entering the tower I noticed that someone had attempted to blow up the staircase, if not the whole tower, but had succeeded only in destroying the first few steps. This is perhaps not surprising as the tower is a potent symbol of Serbian domination of the area.

The Field of the Blackbirds. The dark green in the center is the garden of Sultan Murad's Mausoleum.

The view from the top shows the gently rolling character of the "Field of the Blackbirds". No particular spot seemed to offer any strategic advantage over any other so in 1389 the armies slugged it out and the larger army won. And in the 19th century it was decided that history had been made there in 1389 despite the fact that the Turks withdrew and did not complete the conquest of Serbian territory for 75 years.

I saw a small domed structure not far away and asked the Norwegians what it was but they said that it was not in the territory they guarded so they didn't know. I wondered if it was the mausoleum of Gazi Mestan, a standard bearer to Murad I who was also buried where he fell. If so, the battle seems to have extended over a distance of several kilometers.

I hitchhiked back to Prishtina and got a lift from a good-looking 30 year old driving a shiny new model air conditioned Audi. I lunched on pepperoni pizza at Edi's. The pepperoni is good but I think they put too much cheese on their pizza.

Joe