Three Elegies For Kosovo

Three Elegies For Kosovo

Summary

28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field; an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since.

28 June 1989, the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launches his campaign for a fresh massacre of the Albanians, the majority population of Kosovo.

In three short narratives Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century.

Reviews

  • The main goal of these three fables ... is to transmit a message about freedom, in the sense that to write truthfully is to set something free. In this book Kadare has set Kosovo, the battle, the myth, free from the chains of untruth
    London Review of Books

About the author

Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare is Albania's best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. He was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, the Jerusalem Prize in 2015, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2019 and the Neustadt Prize in 2020.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more