Mitrovica is a town divided by a river and a turbulent history. On the south side of the bridge you are in Kosovo where the main population are Kosovo Albanians. On the north side you are still technically in Kosovo although the local population of Serbs will tell you differently. Then as you walk around the KFOR patrols and barriers to cross the bridge back into the south you are then treated as being in Kosovo again.
We stayed with a friend who had moved to Kosovo 2 months earlier to work in a local business college. It was fascinating hearing about both the two months in Kosovo, but also about her previous time spent in Kurdistan, Iraq.
Everything there had to be done twice, once for each side of the bridge. Two communities, two languages, two currencies, two Sim cards. She had to run all of her classes twice. When she had a class on the other side of the river she had to take a taxi to the bridge, get out and walk over the bridge to find a taxi on the other side.
There were many cars around without numberplates as you couldn’t drive on the south side of the bridge with Serbian numberplates or on the north with Kosovian numberplates so people would just remove them.
In the middle of North Mitrovica is an old lead smelter, part of the Trebca mining complex that used to employ 20,000 workers and accounted for 70 percent of all Yugoslavia’s mineral wealth. The lead smelter was shut down due to environmental pollution.
While in Mitrovica we climbed up to a historic fortress on a hill, ate delicious trout from a restaurant with its own trout pond and ate incredible cake.
