Zeke Çeku sat in the brightest room of hotel, enjoying the slits of sunlight that played across his face from the window. He sipped an espresso slowly, keeping it warm in his hands —one of the few espressos the hotel’s cafe would sell that day.
He looked across to the hotel’s lobby, its dreariness reflected on his wrinkled face. The musty relic of Kosovo’s socialist era is a reminder to him of the neglect the hotel has endured for the past decade. Within the lobby are peeling, rust-colored walls; the faux leather chairs are worn at the center. The exterior of the hotel is stained brown like a tea stain on paper, and its lights flash “The Gr-nd Ho-e” throughout the night. The condition of the hotel tells a story that Çeku finds hard to hear.
As manager for 11 years, he remembers when the Grand Hotel Pristina used to be grand.
“It was all in the name,” he said, gazing out the window. “That’s really what the hotel was — Grand.”
Established in 1978, toward the end of socialism in Yugoslavia, the Grand Hotel boasted 350 rooms, four restaurants, a disco and even a bowling alley. Pristina residents, clad in evening gowns and tuxedos, would swarm the red carpet for weddings, graduation parties, and other family gatherings, to elegantly commemorate cultural rights of passage. Internationals from across the globe would convene in the lavish meeting halls to discuss politics. The 13-floor hotel was the heart of Pristina, Çeku said.
Today the Grand Hotel stands as a neglected monument of vicious warfare, unsuccessful privatization, and subsequent city expansion. Since its privatization in 2006, the Grand Hotel has been entwined in a legal battle over ownership, and now exists in a kind of limbo under the administration of the Privatization Agency of Kosovo. Today, the surviving evidence of the hotel’s former grandeur are the heavy golden room keys behind the front desk, symbols of what the hotel had been, and may be again.
Çeku recalled the days when all those keys would be off the shelves. When he was first hired as general manager of the hotel 30 years ago, fresh out of the University of Rijeka in Croatia with a degree in tourism and hospitality, he knew he would be putting his major field of study to good use.
“At the beginning, when I came in 1984, there were many economic and investment troubles that the hotel was facing. I came there to solve the problems,” he said. “In three years, we became one of the five best hotels in former Yugoslavia. Using my degree, I was able to hire 338 employees. We were open 24 hours a day, and we became one of the strongest companies in the area. We truly were an institution.”
Waiter Xhemshit Shala has served at the hotel’s café in stretches over 19 years, many of those years working alongside Çeku. The two men swapped memories and inside jokes in mumbled Albanian as they recalled the Grand Hotel’s glory days, smiling with each recollection.
“Every night the restaurants would be full,” Shala said, pointing out one in particular, the Restaurant Panorama, in which a 360-degree view of the sweeping city landscape brought hundreds to the 13th floor each night. “I would work 130-hour weeks because of how busy we were.”
“Sometimes I didn’t even know if we would have enough food to feed all the guests,” Çeku said with a laugh. “One night we had to find a tractor coming from Albania, and bought some drinks and food stuff, and we were able to feed all the guests. In fact, the guests had an opportunity to pick from three dishes! That was a great achievement.”
The 13th floor, once home to one of the best restaurants in the region, according to Çeku, is home to the 13 Rooftop Bar. It opened July 3 after a brief stint of renovations. The nightclub is one of the 20 businesses that pay rent to the Grand Hotel to use its property, providing 20 thousand euro of its monthly income, according to manager of the Grand Rrahim Fazliu. The funky murals coloring the walls and trendy drink menu scribed in neon paint on the black bar roof are attempts to attract the younger, hipper crowd of Kosovo back to the hotel. The bar’s electric atmosphere is in stark contrast to what exists beneath it — the 12th floor, no longer used, littered with crumbled concrete, a tangled mess of free-hanging wires, doors hanging off frames, its walls marred with graffiti.
Çeku struggles to capture the words to describe why several floors are in such disarray, warded off from guests by locked doors, but still accessible by elevator.
In 1989, President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic rescinded Kosovo’s autonomy, and rid all ethnic Albanian employees at state institutions of their jobs. All ethnic Albanian workers at the Grand Hotel faced this fate, including Çeku and Shala. What followed, Çeku said, was a decade of darkness for the hotel, a “decade of surviving.”
“Leaving the hotel was one of the worst days of my life,” he said, his eyes clouding. “It was heartbreaking knowing I was the legal general manager, but because we were licensed by the Serbian regime, I couldn’t do my job.”
Serb militants such as the notorious paramilitary commander Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan, were free to occupy hotel. Arkan claimed the fourth floor for his own, and initiated an era of terror within the hotel, directing the torture, rape and murder of hostages behind the cement walls, according to Çeku, and the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
Çeku said evidence of the massacres was splattered across the walls of the entire hotel, and discovered deep within the basement; women’s underwear, devices used for torture, fire pits, and uniforms were found when KFOR troops organized forensic analyses of the building after the war. Çeku said he could only guess whom the Serb militants targeted with their brutal behavior.
“When Arkan first took over, he taped a note to the front entrance doors of the hotel,” Çeku said, placing a napkin on the wall behind him. “I remember to this day exactly what the note said: ‘No entrance for Albanians, Croats, and dogs.’ I can imagine these are the people he went after.”
In June 1999, only two weeks after NATO concluded its 78-day air strike, Çeku reclaimed the hotel with NATO assistance. A miserable assemblage of pillaged restaurants and damaged rooms remained to greet him. Because the hotel did not inherit any money from the government once the Serbs departed, Çeku and his fellow employees dug through their pockets to feed and accommodate the hundreds guests, including international politicians and journalists, who flooded the Grand Hotel the weeks following the war.
While Çeku said it was unlikely that the hotel would be restored to its former glory, he used his extensive knowledge in tourism to train his employees and stabilize the hotel into a lesser version of the powerhouse it used to be.
“Our strength was in our employers, who really knew the business and tourism side of things,” Çeku said. “What we needed at the time were people who knew who to cater to and accommodate people. So we hired young, well-educated people who were well-versed in tourism and hospitality. And once again, we became one of the strongest companies in Kosovo.”
Çeku enjoyed his general manager position for seven years, until, in 2006 the Privatization Agency of Kosovo (PAK) began to privatize state-owned businesses, like hotels, through the tendering process. According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the tendering is a process in which government and financial institutions — in this case, the Kosovo Trust Agency — invite bids for large projects that must be submitted within a deadline. In the case of the six Kosovo hotels privatized in 2006, the new owners agreed to reach prescribed employment and investment levels determined by the PAK.
Çeku said he and an Albanian investment company put in a bid during the tendering process, but were defeated by a much wealthier investor — Zelqif Berisha, President of Silcapor construction company.
Bitter and heartbroken, Çeku felt his beloved hotel was stolen from under him. He grimaced when he recalled the situation.
“We were suffocated. I think I lost 10 years off my life during this time,” he said.
According to the PAK, the Grand Hotel was sold from the Kosovo Trust Agency to Berisha and his company Unio Commerce — a subset of Silcapor — for 8 million euros. He agreed to hire 570 employees and invest 20 million euros in the business within a year.
In 2009, PAK audited and evaluated the financial status of the Grand Hotel, and found that the owner had only achieved 8 percent of the required investment and 80 percent of the employment commitment. The agency determined that Berisha’s group was not living up to the agreement.
“Because it did not fulfill the requirements in the contract, the PAK decided in 2012 to revoke the shares in the Grand Hotel and to return it under PAK administration,” said Arta Gosalci, Public Relations Officer for the privatization agency.
Berisha is challenging the legality of PAK’s decision, asserting that he had met the stipulations of the contract and that the agreement was modified after August 2006.
“I was also in the process of renovating the hotel. We had signed a €6 million contact with the American hotel company Sheraton, a five-star hotel chain,” Berisha added during a translated interview. “We were renovating the whole hotel when 31 million euro of my money was blocked.”
The Privatization Agency will block distributed funds to a business if it determines that the stipulations in the contract are not being met.
According to the Special Room of the Supreme Court of Kosovo, in 2013, the court rejected Berisha’s claim as “ungrounded.” It ruled he had not reached the requirements provided in the contract, and denied his claim that the contract had been modified. Berisha appealed the court’s decision, but a date has not been set for the appeals hearing. Until then, the hotel is under PAK’s administration. Plans are to issue a new call for ownership bids once the court case is settled.
About half of the hotel’s southwest tower is renovated, its glossy, maroon exterior in contrast against the worn concrete beside it. Çeku said those renovated floors characterize the failed privatization and mismanagement the hotel endured for seven years.
“I knew it wasn’t going to work…” Çeku said, referring to Berisha’s administration. “When he got the bid, I was thinking, ‘he will see the day when he loses everything.’ I pity him.”
Berisha denied botching the deal, and directed all grievances to the court and the Privatization Agency.
Since the PAK put the Grand Hotel under its direct administration, conditions have, “stabilized considerably,” according to Gosalci.
Current general manager Fazliu said the hotel employs 100 people full time, and accommodated about 85 guests on a typical day in July. With 280 beds, this means it was operating at 30 percent of capacity. In the past, when 500 beds were available, Fazliu said the hotel usually had 80 percent of its room filled.
The future of the hotel is uncertain, Fazliu said, but the right direction is clear.
“I think that the hotel needs to be renovated and to look like it did before 2006 because in a manner, the citizens are used to that ‘Grand,’” he said. “If not, then it would be good if it was totally destroyed and start to be built all over again into another hotel or any other object that would have more than 40 floors.”
Fazliu added that the location is prime because Pristina needs more tall buildings with “advanced architecture.”
Receptionist and security guard at the Grand Hotel, Leo Bajqinovci, would like to see the hundreds of guests he greets each year be treated to a five-star experience, complete with a swimming pool and a spa. The only luxury hotel in the area is the Swiss Diamond, originally the Hotel Iliria — an historic enterprise similar to the Grand Hotel that was built in the 1950s. The hotel was also privatized in 2006, and sold to Behgjet Pacolli, Deputy Prime Minister of Kosovo and president of Mabetex construction company.
As Çeku enjoyed his espresso in the hotel where he once invested his hopes and dreams, he is haunted by the past, and wonders what could have been. While the hotel remains in an indeterminate state, its future ownership unclear, Çeku hopes that one day a heroic investor with a good heart, will come along and save this grand damsel in distress.
“Until then, I will be waiting by the phone for a call to come back,” Çeku said with a grin. “I would come back in an instant.”
(Victoria Slater is a reporting intern at KosovaLive this summer in collaboration with Miami University in the United States.)
