Peja

Peja grew up on the Lumbardhi, a tributary of the White Drin, where the river leaves the Accursed Mountains. In the Middle Ages the area passed between Byzantine, Bulgarian and Serbian rule. After the monastery of Žiča was burned in the 1290s, the seat of the Serbian archbishops moved to the safer monastery here, and in 1346, when the Serbian Patriarchate was proclaimed, Peć became the seat of the patriarchs. It remained the centre of the Serbian Orthodox Church until the Patriarchate was abolished in 1766.

Under the Ottomans Peja became a district capital, and the Bajrakli Mosque was built for Mehmed II in the 1460s and 1470s. The town's people were largely Muslim by the late 16th century: a tax register of 1582 lists 158 households, only 15 of them Christian. In 1835 local Albanians, supported by rebels from Shkodra, took the town from the Ottomans, and in 1899 the League of Peja, led by Haxhi Zeka, was founded here in the spirit of the League of Prizren to seek autonomy for the Albanians within the empire.

From the late 19th century the town was claimed by both Albanian and Serbian nationalists, and relations were often tense. Austria-Hungary took Peja in January 1916; in 1943 Italian forces burned the bazaar. The tensions came to a head in the Kosovo War of 1998–99, when the town suffered mass killings and more than 80 per cent of its 5,280 houses were heavily damaged or destroyed. More damage followed in the unrest of 2004. The bazaar has since been rebuilt in its Ottoman form.

Peja's identity is bound up with the mountains. Rugova, the high region entered from the north-west edge of the town, is known for its villages, pastures and access to peaks above 2,400 metres, and its traditional crafts and costumes fill the ethnographic museum in the bazaar. The town is a base for hiking and climbing, with via ferrata routes and a 700-metre zip line, the longest in the country, in the canyon.

The town also carries heavy symbolic weight for both communities. For Serbs the Patriarchate of Peć is one of the founding places of their church; for Albanians the League of Peja and its leader Haxhi Zeka, whose mill is one of the stops on the town's trail of cultural monuments, are part of the national story. One of the landmark early Kosovar films, Uka of the Accursed Mountains (1968), was shot in the town.

FC Besa Pejë is the main football club and KB Peja the basketball team, with handball, volleyball and judo clubs as well, and the town hosts music festivals including Peja Jazz. Haxhi Zeka University brings students to the town.

At the 2024 census Peja municipality, which includes the town and 95 villages, had about 82,700 people; at the 2011 census about 49,000 lived in the town itself. The population is about 91 per cent Albanian, with Bosniaks the largest minority at about 3.6 per cent.

The centre of daily life is the rebuilt bazaar, which serves as the town's main market, and the cafés and squares around it. People walk and jog in the Big Park in Karagaç in summer, and the Rugova valley begins at the edge of town. The local beer, Birra Peja, is brewed in the town and sold across Kosovo.

Infrastructure still lags behind. Peja's water comes from the White Drin and a spring known as Ujë i bardhë, but the sewage network does not reach parts of the town and most villages, and the Lumbardhi itself has been used to carry waste water. The town's 1930s railway station, a protected heritage building, is served by local trains to Pristina.

Peja eats the hearty food of western Kosovo. Grill houses serve qebapa, small skinless sausages of mixed lamb and beef, with onions, sour cream, ajvar and pitalka bread, and suxhuk, a dry, spicy fermented sausage. Bakeries sell burek filled with minced meat, white cheese or spinach, and pies (pite) and flija appear at home and in traditional restaurants.

Freshwater fish is part of the region's cooking: trout is common across Kosovo, often kept fresh in pools and fried to order, and tavë krapi, carp cooked in a pot, is made in the towns of the Dukagjini valley. Winter tables carry pickled vegetables and ajvar, made in early autumn, and baklava is the classic pastry.

Birra Peja, brewed in the town and named after it, is found all over Kosovo. Rakia, the regional fruit brandy, coffee and drinkable yoghurt (ayran) complete the table. Coffee, above all the macchiato, is sipped for hours in the town's cafés.