Two Pillars

Mitrovica is a disputed city and you feel it before anyone tells you. There’s a bridge in the middle of town with peacekeeping forces on it, and it doesn’t carry cars — the two halves of the place simply don’t connect the way a town is supposed to connect. Political posters on walls. A strange vibe, is the only way I can put it.

And at the same time: people live here. They shop, they take kids to school, they sit outside with a coffee. Both of those things are true on the same street at the same time, and that’s the part I couldn’t stop looking at.

The monument is up on the hill above it all. You come up a dust path through thin pines with the town noise dropping away behind you, and then two tapered concrete legs are standing in the dry grass, carrying something heavy above your head.

It’s a mine cart. Once you see it you can’t unsee it — a blunt drum of concrete lifted on two splayed pylons, tipped very slightly, as if it’s being pushed uphill and has just crested. Two legs, one load. This is a mining town, and the men it was built for came out of the same shafts under this hill speaking two different languages.

They took lead and zinc out of here for most of a century, and across the valley you can see what that costs a landscape: a raw red terrace cut into the green, sitting directly above a row of apartment blocks.

I stood there and thought about Donbas. Another mining region, another place where the coal outlasted the agreement about who it belonged to. The rhyme was immediate and I didn’t enjoy it.

Up close it’s board-marked and thoroughly written on — names, dates, initials within arm’s reach, the ordinary graffiti of somewhere teenagers walk up to at night. Above head height the concrete is clean and streaked rust-coloured, and it just goes on being what it is.

What you can see from up here

That’s the other reason to make the climb: it gives you the whole city at once. The town laid out flat under the haze, roofs and blocks and traffic and the river through the middle, and from up there it looks completely normal, which is the strangest part of the day.

Then you drive back down into it and the details start arriving. Concrete barriers across a junction. A white vehicle with KFOR on the door, parked where it can see the road. Nobody is shouting, nothing is happening, the town is doing its shopping — it’s just that the arrangements for nothing happening are visible from every street.

Check the news before you go. This isn’t a place where the situation is a fixed fact you can read about once.

I’ve stood under a lot of Yugoslav monuments built to say something the country then failed to be, and usually the gap is historical — safely over. This one you can check against the view. Climb the hill, read the sentence in concrete. Come down, look at the bridge.

Two pillars, one cart. It’s the heaviest thing I’ve photographed in the Balkans, and it’s only two shapes.