The coffeehouse in the beginning of a collapsing federation
by Roni Idrizaj
Cafés have never been just cafés in Kosovo, and the year 1991 shows how they transformed into something entirely different from simply spending time with your community. They turned into stages where power and fear were showing up in real time. By reading the reports of Gazeta Bujku, you feel that these small rooms filled with the sounds of boilingmilk and cigarette smoke were among the first public spaces that recorded the tremors of a collapsing Yugoslavia and the ever-tightening grip of Milošević’s rule. What had once been social territory, where people sat for hours over a Turkish coffee, where political jokes were whispered, where young people tested the boundaries of growing up, suddenly became terrain of surveillance and danger.
By late autumn of that year, the presence of police in cafés was no longer an exception but the rule. Reports from Gjilan described officers storming into every coffeehouse with fury, singling out young Albanians whose IDs they checked; some were pulled immediately toward military vans, and others, the younger ones, were told to stay home and wait. The raids were systematic, often carried out during evening hours when the cafés were full, turning the ritual of drinking coffee into a calculated risk. The authorities understood something instinctively: cafés were the centers of Albanian social life, and to control them meant to control the people who gathered inside them.
The cafés of Mitrovica, once full of noise and people, emptied almost overnight. A Bujku journalist wrote that the absencefelt frightening, as if the city’s pulse had weakened. Young men stopped entering the teahouses, not because they nolonger wanted company, but because the men in uniform inside were hunting them. Many left the city entirely, dispersing into villages, other towns, abroad, anywhere they could escape the hand that reached toward them over coffee tables.
In more rural areas, the violence was even more blatant. In Deçan, cafés and teahouses were all closed as armored vehicles stood in the center and police checked houses along the main road. In Gjakova, night turned into a theater of intimidation. Police fired guns into the air, then entered cafés and private coffeehouses to check documents and beat the customers. The routine of “going out for coffee,” which is an expression synonymous with normal life, became almost a guarantee of confrontation.
Even outside Kosovo, in the region, the café was a place where the federation’s instability appeared. The shootings in Bugojno, in Bosnia, where a policeman “accidentally” wounded two guests while bragging about his revolver, captured how unstable and absurd the region had become. A moment meant to impress or display authority turned instantly into violence. The café was again the stage, the place where the private ego of a man with a gun collided with the public expectation of safety.
But cafés were not only places where fear descended; they were also places where identity and culture were attacked. In Prishtina, the transformation of beloved cafés into establishments with
Serbian brands. For example “Arabeska” reborn as Srpski Kraljevski Klub (“Serbian Royal Club”), was part of the broader effort to displace and overwrite Albanian presence. It was not just a change of décor. It was a symbolic eviction: Albanians pushed out of institutions, out of the streets, and now, implicitly, out of the places where theygathered, laughed, debated, flirted, organized. Cyrillic signs multiplied across the city, recording its surfaces, but it was in the café where this change felt intimate, almost insulting.
Yet even in this climate, cafés continued to preserve their meaning as communal spaces. In Switzerland, Albanians in the diaspora voted for Kosovo’s independence in cafés. They became gathering points for celebrations, voting,resistance, places where people returned day after day just to embrace, to share news from home, to feel the collective heartbeat that in Kosovo was being forced down. The cafés of the diaspora were keeping alive the social energy that thecafés of Kosovo were not allowed to sustain.
And perhaps that is precisely why repression inside Kosovo targeted these spaces so obsessively. The coffeehouse was more than a drink; it was an idea. A room where information circulated, where solidarity took shape, where citizens stillbehaved like citizens. At a time when the state wanted Albanians atomized, frightened, and invisible, cafés threatened to keep them connected.
By the end of 1991, the newspaper reports read like a map of closed doors and empty chairs. The cafés that once hosted hours-long conversations now remained half-dark, visited only by police patrols or by those brave enough ordesperate enough to risk a cup of coffee. But even in their emptiness, they bore witness to a social world that refused tovanish. The authorities could close the doors, beat the customers, rename the buildings, and fill the rooms with fear butwhat remained was the memory of what these places had meant, and the promise that one day they would return to their original purpose: to be places of gathering, not dispersal; of comfort, not intimidation; of conversation, not silence.
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Research sources: Gazette Bujku (January to December 1991) https://books.flossk.org/gazetat/