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.
Argyris Dinopoulos was in Kosovo — first as SKAI 100.4 FM's correspondent and then as Antenna's — from the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis, and was among the first foreign journalists to meet Kosovo's historic leader Ibrahim Rugova, at a time when his party's offices were a small building beside the national stadium in Pristina.
Later he made two documentaries in Kosovo, for Antenna (in 2006) and for ERT (in 2007), concerned above all with the ordeal of the Orthodox Church — the monasteries in particular — and of the Serbian population itself after the NATO intervention of 1999, Kosovo's independence and the almost total predominance of the Albanian element.
The documentary records Kosovo as it moves toward independence — a society that entered the ordeal of civil war and ethnic cleansing, 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.
9 photographs · Click a photograph to enlarge.
