Customer Reviews

Art of Kosovo: The Sacred Land

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This beautiful and comprehensive coffee-table size book is a valuable and poignant record of Kosovo's rich Serbian Orthodox Christian religious heritage dating back almost a thousand years which is literally being blown to smithereens on a daily basis by the Albanian victors of Clinton's splendid little air war in Kosovo! These Byzantine style churches and monasteries, vivid frescoes and liturgical art survived the 5 century Ottoman occupation, 2 World Wars, and Tito's communism. Unfortunately, the photos in this book may soon be all that is left. That only makes this well produced volume even more valuable.

I was pleasantly surprised when I received my copy; I hadn't seen a copy before, nor had I seen any review, so I wasn't prepared for the well-done color photographs of the frescos. In particular, the frescos of gracanica, which i had never seen before, are incredible. These frescos are a truly hidden jewel in europe.

If anybody has wondered how El Greco could have done what he did, they should look at the frescos of gracanica.

What a great book in regards to showing what historic significance Kosovo & Metohija has to the Serbian nation. The illustrations are simply breathtaking and tempts one to go there and view the beauty in person (if it were not for the violence). The book will soon be a book on history as it seems that every day another church or monastery is blown away by the Albanian population while the West sanctifies their actions. Great book and its a shame that we can't go to Kosovo and Metohija and view it in person!

To the "reader from New York": Take care of the ignorance and racism you obvioiusly show in your review. This is a review about a book, not what you ignorantly think about a people. It's comments like these that led to the wave of violence that swept over the Kosovo countryside last week in another wave of ethnic cleansing. Only this time the aggressors were the Albanians and the Serbs were the victims. As a result of this attempt at stamping out all signs of Serbian society, even its medieval artistic symbols, the churches, were targeted. This is important to mention here because one of the churches photographed and described in this book is the Church of the Mother of God, Bogoroditse Ljeskva in Prizren, which dates back to the 14th century. It was tragically destroyed in a wave of violence. Sadly, this book shows what once was, and no longer is.

It is a wonderful book that described both the history and the art of the Serbian Orthodox Church, specifically focusing on the Patriarchate of Pec, St. John the Baptist in Gracanica, the monastery of Decani, and the Mother of God in Prizren. The artwork is superb and the architecture is a wonderful blend of Late Byzantine mixed with Medieval Serbian. Highly recommended if you are interested in the foundations of the modern Serbian state.