Sacred Journey to a Nation: The Construction of a Shrine in Postwar Kosovo

Sacred Journey to a Nation

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Abstract
Anna Di Lellio
Independent Scholar
and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers
School of Slavonic and East European Studies,

The site of an infamous Serb massacre of a militant Albanian extended
family in March 1998 has become the most prominent sacred shrine in
postwar Kosovo attracting thousands of Albanian visitors. Inspired by
Smith’s (2003) ‘territorialization of memory’ as a sacred source of national
identity and MacCannell’s [1999 [1976]] five-stage model of ‘sight
sacralization’, this article traces the site’s sacred memorial topography, its
construction process, its social and material reproductions, and adds a sixth
stage to the interpretation — the ‘political reproduction’.