The ‘reterritorialisation’ of a myth: How has the Kosovo myth been inscribed among Serbs and Kosovo Albanians since 2008?

The Kosovo myth has long been central to Serbian nationalism and collective memory. Research has examined its reinterpretation of history and political instrumentalisation since the 1980s. Key to these narratives are the notions of mythical, cyclical time – where history is perceived as repeating – and national unanimity, both frequently mobilised by nationalist ideologies.

A major reactivation of the myth occurred during the 1990s conflict, especially the 1999 NATO bombing. Serbian public narratives of that period emphasised Serb victimhood, a theme deeply rooted in the myth’s structure. Since around 2017, the government of Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party has promoted commemoration of the 1999 Battle of Košare. Official discourse reduces these events to heroism and suffering while avoiding questions of responsibility. Despite numerous new street names and monuments, recent commemorative practices remain under-researched. Bottom-up forms of remembrance – graffiti, murals, and stickers – also require systematic study, particularly in relation to other contemporary expressions of the Kosovo myth.

The project addresses this gap through an interdisciplinary approach integrating analytical tools for interpreting emplaced commemoration within semiotic landscape studies and a discourse-analytical framework. Although these frameworks have only been recently applied to the analysis of Southeastern European phenomena, work combining this perspective with research on (re-)naming and memory politics is still rare.

Through fieldwork and collaborative analysis, the project will examine how the Kosovo myth is represented and recontextualised within the semiotic landscapes of Serbia and Kosovo. It will identify whether references to the myth have intensified since Kosovo’s independence and the displacement of the Serb population, and determine their locations and forms – monuments, street names, murals, and graffiti. The analysis will explore how meanings are produced and what political, media, and civic discourses sustain them. By linking semiotic practices to wider frameworks of national and regional memory, particularly the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia, the project will show how public space functions as a site of ideological negotiation and identity reconstruction.

Building on research conducted at the Institute of Slavic and Hungarian Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the project’s strength lies in its transdisciplinary, sociolinguistically informed approach to Balkan Area Studies. Collaboration among scholars of cultural linguistics, semiotic landscapes, and discourse analysis will foster international cooperation and lead to joint publications and a draft for a future project on the evolution of memory politics and semiotics in Southeastern Europe.