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On the traces of Migjen Kelmendi, rock icon and Kosovar intellectual

Kosovo’s identity remains highly contested in spite of its declaration of independence all the way back in 2008. While many still hold on to an ethnic conception of the state, people like the musician and intellectual Migjen Kelmendi want a new country with new values. This aim can be traced back to a cultural milieu that overcame the divisions of Yugoslavia.

I met the journalist and writer Migjen Kelmendi in the Charlie Brown café near Bill Clinton Boulevard in Pristina, Kosovo. Forty years have passed since he founded the band Gjurmët, but the thin smile of the first Kosovar Albanian rock icon is still there. In the 1960s, Yugoslavia welcomed rock-n-roll, organized festivals and promoted Yugoslav artists via the Yugoton label. An unprecedented rock scene emerged during the following decade: Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Sarajevo became vibrant centres where punk and new wave flourished. Often mobilized by the state apparatus, the youth used rock to voice new aspirations. 

February 28, 2025 - Erik Da Silva - Issue 1-2 2025MagazineStories and ideas

Kosovo, still a mere region of Serbia, demanded greater autonomy, which the constitutional reform of 1974 eventually granted. A few years earlier, in the wake of demonstrations in Pristina in 1968, the University of Pristina had been founded in 1970 and Kosovo’s future elites no longer needed to study in Belgrade. In 1974, Radio Television Pristina (RTP) was launched. The birth of a Kosovar sense of identity had not waited for this development, however, as in the case of Migjen Kelmendi’s father, he was “one of the bards, one of the icons of literature and journalism in Kosovo, he was one of the names of that generation that began to reinvent Kosovar Albanian, it was a very benign nationalism, they were rather romantic nationalists”. Kelmendi’s son studied law in Pristina, “to please my father”.  

Revolutionary loophole 

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