Kosovo: a short history

Antiquity: Dardania and Rome

People settled here very early: the settlement of Runik is dated to around 6185 BC. In antiquity the region was part of the land of the Dardanians, a people of the central Balkans whose name lives on today in many places. After the Roman conquest, Kosovo probably became part of the province of Moesia Superior around AD 87. After 284, under Emperor Diocletian, a separate province called Dardania was created, with its capital at Naissus, today's Niš.

The Middle Ages: Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia

In the early Middle Ages the region changed hands several times. In the ninth century it came under the Bulgarian Empire, in 1018 Emperor Basil II brought it back under Byzantine rule, and in 1019 Prizren was first mentioned in writing. Between 1185 and 1195 Stefan Nemanja took the area along the White Drin, and in the following centuries Kosovo became a core region of the medieval Serbian kingdom and, from 1346, of the Serbian Empire.

From this period come four Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries that UNESCO lists as the World Heritage property Medieval Monuments in Kosovo: Visoki Dečani, the Patriarchate of Peć, Our Lady of Ljeviš in Prizren and Gračanica. Dečani was inscribed in 2004, the other three were added in 2006, and in the same year the property was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

On 28 June 1389 the Battle of Kosovo was fought near today's Prishtina. A Christian coalition under Prince Lazar, mostly Serbs but also Bosnians, Albanians and others, faced the Ottoman army of Sultan Murad I, who was reportedly killed in the battle. Contemporaries were divided over who had won. The battle later became a central reference point of Serbian national memory.

Five centuries under the Ottomans

In 1455 the Ottomans took the fortress of Novo Brdo, and by 1459 the last Serbian state had disappeared. Kosovo remained part of the Ottoman Empire for more than four and a half centuries. The population changed in that time as well: during the fighting of 1689 and 1690, when parts of the population supported Austria against the Ottomans, Patriarch Arsenije III led between 30,000 and 40,000 refugees, most of them Serbs, to Hungary.

In 1877 the Ottomans created the Vilayet of Kosovo, the first time the name was used for the whole territory. On 10 June 1878, three days before the Congress of Berlin, Albanian representatives founded the League of Prizren in the town of the same name. In the following decades there were repeated Albanian uprisings against Ottoman rule, among them in 1910.

The Yugoslav century

In the First Balkan War of 1912 most of Kosovo came to the Kingdom of Serbia, and from 1918 it was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia. After the Second World War it became an autonomous region within Serbia in 1945. Its rights were gradually extended, and the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 gave Kosovo extensive self-government.

In 1981 Albanian students in Prishtina protested for the status of a republic within Yugoslavia. In 1989, under Slobodan Milošević, Kosovo's autonomy was largely revoked, and in 1990 thousands of Albanian employees lost their jobs. Kosovo Albanians built up parallel institutions; in 1992 Ibrahim Rugova was elected president of a self-declared Republic of Kosovo in elections that Serbia did not recognise.

War and UN administration

On 28 February 1998 the armed conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began. On 24 March 1999 NATO started an air campaign against Yugoslavia. On 9 June 1999 the Kumanovo Agreement provided for the withdrawal of Yugoslav and Serbian forces. According to figures of the Humanitarian Law Center, around 13,500 people of all ethnic groups were killed or went missing; hundreds of thousands were displaced.

On 10 June 1999 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1244 with 14 votes and one abstention. It placed Kosovo under an interim international civil administration, UNMIK, and authorised an international security presence, KFOR, while reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later convicted several Serbian and Yugoslav officials and one Albanian commander for crimes committed in Kosovo.

Independence and the present

On 17 February 2008 Kosovo's representatives declared independence, and the constitution of the Republic of Kosovo entered into force on 15 June 2008. Serbia does not recognise the independence and continues to regard Kosovo as its Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. At Serbia's initiative, the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion; on 22 July 2010 the court found by 10 votes to 4 that the declaration did not violate general international law.

At least 110 UN member states recognise Kosovo. In the Brussels Agreement of 19 April 2013, facilitated by the European Union, Belgrade and Prishtina agreed on steps to normalise relations. Kosovo is a member of the IMF and the World Bank and applied for EU membership in December 2022. According to the 2024 census it has 1,585,566 inhabitants; Albanian and Serbian are official languages, the capital is Prishtina and the currency is the euro.

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1. Wikipedia: History of Kosovo
2. Wikipedia: Kosovo
3. Wikipedia: Kosovo War
4. Wikipedia: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244
5. Wikipedia: ICJ advisory opinion on Kosovo's declaration of independence
6. Wikipedia: Medieval Monuments in Kosovo