Three young Kosovar boys gamboled on the newly crafted playground, burning off steam. Their chuckles drifted across the forested hills before them, blending with the rhythmic squeak of the metal swing set.
In the half-acre garden across a patch of sunbathed grass, two elderly men stretched their legs from a long walk down the hill. They leaned against the wooden fence beneath the shade of the terrace, smiling with the exhilaration that comes along with exercise. Their bones were old, but this park made them feel stronger.
“We love it here,” said Podujevo native Fatos Gërguri. He bent down to smell a red rose in full bloom. “I enjoy walks around this park every morning. It keeps me healthy.”
At the top of the hill, a teenage couple lounged in the long grass, pointing out cloud shapes beneath the shadow of the St. Andreas Church, which was destroyed during the Kosovo war. The only other sound was the breeze, rustling sapling branches as it carried the scent of roses and grass through the afternoon air.
The afternoon is the most peaceful time of day at the Manchester Peace Park, a 22-acre ecological site off R-129 in the heart of Podujevo. Thousands of residents flock the quiet stretch of forested land in the eastern municipality, mainly during the morning and night, to walk its steep, shady hill for exercise, to relish its tranquil atmosphere, and pay respect to those who were lost during the war.
“There is never a time when the Peace Park is empty,” said park volunteer Rrezarta Mulolli. “Everyone will come here everyday to walk, to enjoy the fresh air, to exercise. It is the best place in Podujevo. Everyone thinks so.”
Park caretaker Armend Bajgora said the park serves a vital role in the community of Podujevo: providing a place of health and wellbeing, accessible to all residents, regardless of age.
“This park makes the entire community healthy,” he said.
This summer will mark the fifth anniversary of the Peace’s Park’s opening. Bajgora said the concept took root in 2004, sprouting from a prominent wartime legacy that Podujevo community will never forget.
According to Podujevo Red Cross director Ahmet Ahmeti, in March 1999, a notorious Serbian paramilitary organization called the Scorpions herded 19 ethnic Albanian women and children into a walled garden after their men fled to the mountains, thinking their wives and children would be safe. The Scorpion army pressed the women against the wall and shot them with machine-guns. Only five children survived the massacre, all cousins in the Bogujevci family.
“They witnessed their entire family be slaughtered before their eyes,” Ahmeti said.
He paused before he continued, shaking his head and eyeing the floor as recounted the details. One of the cousins, 13-year-old Saranda Bogujevci, also was shot, he recalled.
“People heard her screams and finally came to help,” Ahmeti said.
Ahmeti added that a heavy British military presence existed in Podujevo during the war. This allowed Saranda and her four cousins to be evacuated to a hospital in Manchester, England to recuperate from their trauma.
During this time, an organization called the Manchester Aid to Kosovo (MAK) was founded “in response to the moving news reports of Kosovar victims of ethnic cleansing,” according to Bajgora, who also serves as a MAK representative.
MAK used humanitarian aid, donations and fund-raising efforts through British universities to provide relief and rebuilding efforts throughout Kosovo. One of its most prized projects was the Peace Park.
MAK representative Pam Dawes said the idea for the park was conceived by request of the five Bogujevci cousins who had recovered beneath the tranquil shade of UK’s safe and well-tended gardens.
“It was those children that asked us to make the Manchester Peace Park in their own town,” Dawes said. “They’d been stimulated by the beautiful parks and gardens that they’d seen here, which don’t exist in Kosovo, and they felt that had helped in their recovery, so they wanted us to do the same thing for the people over there.”
Podujevo is a sleepy city that nurtures a close-knit community of 77 rural villages. The population of 88,000 congregates the shop-lined streets, walking-hand-in-hand between the tractors and old-fashioned cars. They pop in and say hello to one another on the way to work. Everyone is greeted with a smile and a warm hug. They rally around their community hero: Bill Clinton. His face, tailored suit, and accompanying wave grace the walls of the municipality office, symbolic of what happened 15 years ago.
Podujevo wasn’t always this happy. According to village coordinator Latif Mehmeti, the municipality was pillaged during the Kosovo war. More than 600 people died, and 40 are still missing. Only 12 ethnic Serbs call the city home today. Every private business in the city and every third house in the villages was destroyed, amounting to €376 million in damages.
However, Mehmeti said significant good did come after the war.
“Prior to the war, Podujevo only had three paved roads and the villages barely had any water draining systems,” he explained. “But we received €65 million euro budget to rebuild the infrastructure after the war, and now every village has at least one main road, and 70 percent of the villages having drinking water from organized systems.”
Bajgora said the Peace Park would further serve as a symbol of this rebirth and hope for the future, reminding the residents how they were able to successfully rebuild their city from the violence they endured. So MAK set to work on the construction of the park, fundraising between €120,000 and €150,000 worth of donations, and collaborating to secure land with the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the municipality, which now controls 50 percent of the park. They expected to receive only a few acres. They were given 22.
“The area of land was war-torn and looted though,” Bajgora said. “The ground was not good enough for a garden. We had to replace the soil and brought in 50 to 100 tracts of top soil in.”
Bajgora said hundreds of school children planted messages of hope beneath 1,000 flower bulbs in the park’s fresh soil, while workmen constructed walking paths through the adjacent forest.
Podujevo native Shqiproje Shala, 21, was one of the children who planted bulbs in the park as part of a second grade project.
“We all came together as a community to make the Peace Park,” she said, smiling with the recollection. “Podujevo is like that. We are one big family here.”
In 2008, hundreds more residents, MAK, and 12 volunteers planted 2,000 trees and shrubs in the half-acre garden area of the park.
Red cross director Ahmeti said several of the plants were favorites of the lost families, others were the same species of those grown in the peace gardens in England, and many were imported from Italy, Greece, and the Netherlands, costing as much as €2,000 each.
Today the garden area of the Peace Park is mainly gated off from visitors, with the exception of the stone walkway that cuts through the center beneath a terrace. Bajgora said this is because the rows of delicate rose bushes and adolescent saplings are still young and need to be protected.
“In a few years the garden will be fully open, but for now it still new, and we don’t want people to come in a steal the flowers,” he said. “We need to let it grow.”
Thievery has been a trend within the Peace Park since its official opening in 2009, according to Bajgora. While petty theft involved women stealing flower bulbs from the garden to plant in their own, last spring, a massive bronze statue called “The Thinking Man” designed by Kosovar artist Agron Blakçori was taken from the center of the park. The thief remains unidentified, but the statue is being recast in a foundry in the United Kingdom and will be reinstalled later this summer.
“I know people in Podujevo love to use this park, but I just wish people cared more about it and would take care of it,” Bajgora said, referring to the theft and to littering, which is regular occurrence in the park.
Podujevo resident Gërguri agreed that the community should care for the park, given it is such an integral part of the Podujevo community.
Bajgora, along with two full-time gardeners and 20 volunteers, is responsible for the upkeep of the park, tending to and watering the plants, mowing the grass, and picking up piles of litter that accumulate within the depths of the forested areas. Since its conception two years ago, the development of the park is in its third phase, which is to be completed in October 2015.
According to Bajgora, the focus of this phase is to acquire investments from the Ministry of Sport, Youth and Culture to enhance the park as an area for exercise and physical activity, “enabling it to become a center of excellence which can improve the health and quality of life of all who use it.”
Bajgora and the volunteers have crafted a new swing set for the entertainment of children, and plans are in the works for the construction of a sport area that will serve as the only sport field in the municipality for public use. The field will include a long jump, ping-pong tables, chess tables, a tennis court, and additional children play areas. In addition, a sitting terrace will be erected beside the garden area that will provide public seating suitable for the entire community, including the disabled and the elderly.
Shala said the park is a prime spot for the elderly to gather, and not only for its trim, tree-lined trail that offers an accessible spot for exercise.
“The air is good for their lungs,” she said. “The air is so much sweeter and fresher here than other places like Pristina.”
Bajgora said the park also contributes to the wellbeing of other segments of the community. Peace Park volunteers donate flowers to the patients at a psychiatric hospital, just a few minutes down the road.
Mulolli, 21, has volunteered at the Peace Park for two years. She said she was drawn to the position because it allowed her to teach English to hundreds of Podujevo school children.
“I just really wanted to meet English-speaking people,” she said. “And the park is such a special place in this community, I wanted to get involved.”
Since 2003, MAK has hosted a two-week-long summer school session for 200 Podujevo children ages 6 to 14. Twenty volunteers from the region and the United Kingdom teach English in the morning and then set the children loose to explore the Peace Park in the afternoon. While the afternoon portion is dedicated to games, art, and sport, the children gain understanding about a crucial aspect of Podujevo’s history while burning off steam on the shiny new playground, Mulolli explained.
“The children absolutely love the park and the summer school,” she added, grinning. “They keep coming back every year until they are too old.”
This year’s summer school will began. August 4. Each year’s launching ceremony brings back several of the Bogujevici cousins, who live in Manchester.
With St. Andreas church cresting the top of the hill, Mulolli said the Manchester Peace Park and its location will always serve to remind the residents of the tragedies their small city endured during the war. The Serbian Orthodox church was looted and burned by ethnic Albanian Kosovars in 1999.
But to Mulolli, this park is set apart from the others in Kosovo, especially the one that was recently erected by ethnic Serbs on the bridge between the north and south regions of Mitrovica. She said the Podujevo park has sustained as a place of lasting peace.
“It is the most amazing place in Kosovo,” she said with enthusiasm. “Everybody comes there to find peace of mind, to find themselves. It is like my soul is there.”
(Victoria Slater was a reporting intern at KosovaLive this summer in collaboration with Miami University in the United States.)
