Three Elegies for Kosovo
Ismail Kadare
In three short narratives, Kadare evokes a defining moment in European history
28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field; an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since.
28 June 1989, the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launches his campaign for a fresh massacre of the Albanians, the majority population of Kosovo.
In three short narratives Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century.
‘An utterly captivating yarn: strange, vivid, ominous, macabre and wise’ New York Times
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About Ismail Kadare
Reviews for Three Elegies for Kosovo
London Review of Books
The bridge is a foreboding, an omen, a threat. It is a bridge over which Asia will invade Europe and the future will invade the past. Kadare, an Albanian, has used the materials at hand to become one of Europe's great writers
Los Angeles Times
An utterly captivating yarn: strange, vivid, ominous, macabre and wise
New York Times