My (virtual) neighbour P. Plener draws our attention to a new blog on/from Belgrade - belgrade 2.0.  While his posting links us to interesting you-tubed video clips on 1930s Belgrade, also that weblog's "mission statement" deserves attention:  Most foreign guides will treat Belgrade like Hitchhikers guide treats Earth, only with a few pages, at best. This one is created to fill the gap, to help those that plan to come, and to help others decide whether to come at all. It is supposed to be honest in a way that you can read about the bad things as well as the good ones, the places to avoid as well as the places not to be missed.

There's been a lot about tourism in the Balkan-related media in recent months, and among the articles I failed to point out here in time, too busy with offline duties, are items with titles such as Tourists flock to Southeast Europe for holidays, At a Kosovo ski resort, a fragile comity endures, Albanian Tourism between Statistics and Reality, or Summer in the Balkans rich in cultural events. Also, Novi Sad's legendary EXIT has received the award for "Best European Festival" (here), and ESI's Verena Kraus has published a guidebook on Kosovo, though it is not, as claimed, "the very first travel guidebook ever written on Kosovo alone" (I have one here, in German; not so great) - "Kosovo has many more secrets to share than is commonly believed."

The Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin seems to emerge as an interesting spot on the map. This (academic) year they're organizing a seminar series on Ottoman Urban Studies, and at least two of the lectures should be hightlighted on this weblog: Balkan Cities 1878-1912: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalisms (March 31) by the popular Dr. Bojan Aleksov, now of London; and Cosmopolitanism and the Urban Governance of a Balkan Town – Sofia in the Late 18th - Early 19th Centuries (February 25) by the Ottomanist Gergana Georgieva, specialized on urban history. The complete list of seminars can be seen, inter alia, here.

...and has absolutely nothing better to, may consider joining my presentation at the Kokkalis Balkans workshop. The cryptic title of my talk is Intercultural Pasts as a Problem in the Construction of National Programs of Cultural Heritage in Modern Southeast Europe. The date is 8 February 2008, the time 3:15PM.

The 16th-century Hadum Mosque in Djakovica/Gjakova (Kosovo), more concretely its (early 19th-century?) wall paintings (pic), will be restored by the Swedish NGO Cultural Heritage Without Borders (CHWB); this time financed by UNESCO. It is, in fact, the first UNESCO-funded project in Kosovo following the international Donors’ Conference held in Paris in 2005. It's nice to see that now also wall paintings, not only architecture, become subject to expert restorations. [In Bosnia, some of these are now lost; not through the war, but through Saudi-funded restorations, during which the flamboyantly painted original interiors came to be whitewashed (cf. article by Michael Sells).] Another 2008 project of CHWB will be 15th-century hamam of Prishtina. At least a part of the funds for the project will not come from international donors, but by the municipality, which has secured 250.000 Euros for that purpose (read announcement).