• Architectural Heritage in Kosovo: A Post-War Report
• Traditional Houses in Western Kosovo: report
• Traditional Houses in Western Kosovo: assessment chart

Burned Books and Blasted Shrines: Cultural Heritage under Fire in Kosovo
A Commentary on the Preparation of the Exhibition

Andras Riedlmayer, Harvard University

In preparing my exhibition, I took my little packet of burned books (which I'd brought back from Kosovo inside a Zip-lock bag wrapped in paper towels and stuffed into the cut-off bottom half of a large empty plastic Coke bottle) up to the paper conservators at the Straus Center for Conservation, on the top floor of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum.

They helped me to unpack them and to arrange a sample for display. As we watched a conservator and an intern gently picking through the remains with tweezers, we all learned something new about the way books burn. They don't turn into wispy paper ash, like the crumpled newspapers one uses to start a fire in the grate. When scores of books packed into shelves or in piles are set ablaze, the pages fuse and carbonize, turning into clinkers in the intense heat due to the lack of oxygen.

We watched as the conservator picked out these small bits of charcoal -- the carbonized fragments of manuscripts and old books. They were hard and black, some had shiny surfaces that reflected the afternoon sunlight. Looking closely, one could distinguish: smooth, blackened fragments of leather bindings; loose fibers or carbonized pieces of woven cloth from the inside of the spines of books; chunks of charcoal in which one could still see the fused layers of pages; still smaller fragments of burned paper; black charcoal dust. One larger piece, softer and grayish in color, not completely turned to carbon, was still recognizable as a book: the remains of a spine, or perhaps the fore-edge of a volume, less than an inch wide and perhaps 2-3 inches long, with the curled edges of charred pages still visible on the narrow ends. It had come from the burned-out interior of a 15th-century mosque in Pec, torched by Serbian policemen on June 11, 1999, the day before the first NATO peacekeepers arrived.

It was an odd feeling to take the glass laboratory dishes with these burned remains of books down to the Fine Arts Library to put them in the display cases. Sad, almost reverential ... and also furious at those who have burned both books and human beings in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in too many other places in recent years.

In my office, I keep a copy of a poem, an elegy for the burned Sarajevo library by a Bosnian poet, which talks about the removal of tons of such clinkers from the ruins of Bosnia's burned out National Library. In Prishtina the National Library still stands, but an estimated half of all the books in public libraries in Kosovo -- nearly a million books -- were destroyed by the "ethnic cleansers" in 1998-99.

It brings home the vulnerability of the human knowledge that institutions such as universities and libraries are established to cultivate and preserve. We like to believe that we can be keepers of the records of civilization and we do our best to preserve them from fires and floods and other natural calamities. But what can one do to keep books and human beings safe from the barbarians?