Archive · War Reports
Argyris Dinopoulos was in Kosovo from the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis — among the first foreign journalists to meet Ibrahim Rugova, the Kosovo Albanian leader. His party was then still housed in a small building beside Pristina's national stadium. He returned twice to make documentaries, in 2006 for Antenna (ANT1) and in 2007 for ERT, as the region's final status was being decided; it was, by his own account, his last journalistic assignment in the Balkans. The two documentaries and his photographs from Kosovo are collected here.
The documentary records Kosovo as it moves toward independence — a society tested by war and mass displacement, full of contradictions. For Dinopoulos it was the "last act" of the break-up of Yugoslavia — a course that, by his reading, had its roots in Kosovo itself as far back as 1989.
The documentary connects his 1999 Belgrade archive with his post-war returns to Kosovo and closes the circle of his Balkan reporting.
A longer documentary on Kosovo in the years after the 1999 war, focusing on the destruction of Orthodox churches and monasteries in the post-war period. Kosovo, Dinopoulos notes, was "the beginning and the end" of the Yugoslav tragedy.
2 photographs · Click a photograph to enlarge.
