The Turkish Baths in Prizren are one of the few surviving in Kosovo. There used to be many, but they were destroyed through the years of violence and war.

I didn’t take many pictures here, so nearly all of them are seen in this post. However, they do have their own flickr set as usual.

A couple of weekends ago I went down to Prizren.  One of the stops was the League or Prizren Museum which actually consist of a museum, an ethnological museum, a library, a mosque, and a very nice courtyard.  The complex is located near the river in Prizren and is well worth the visit. The League of Prizren has played an important role in Kosovo’s past from the 1800s when the Ottoman Empire had control over Kosovo, through World War I and II, through to the present.

Their library is impressive, but in need of help to properly care for and store the very old books within. The U.S. Ambassador’s fund allowed them to restore it to it’s current condition.

As always, more pictures in the flickr set.

On Saturday I visited a Filigree “factory” in Prizren, Kosovo.  The “factory” was actually a school room being used by a collection of former factory workers.  Their factory is one of the recent state-owned assets that have been privatized.  The person who bought it, locked the doors and shut down the factory.  The remaining workers went from having hundreds of kilos of silver to work with to only 3 kilos.  They lost all their tools, all their projects, and their jobs.  Now they work from a school room with what tools they can buy.  They work basically for free, putting the vast majority of the money they make on the items sold back into buying more silver.  More pictures of them and their work below.

More pictures of their work are available in my Flickr Set.