7Arte’s interview with Niman Uka (former manager of the Trepça Hotel

Photo 1: Trepça Hotel, immediately after the end of the war, when it served as an elementary school for the children of the Stantërg neighborhood.
Photo 2: Today, more than two decades later, Trepça Hotel stands in a dilapidated and abandoned state, forgotten and without any plans for restoration.

Below is part of 7Arte’s interview with Niman Uka (former manager of the Trepça Hotel), conducted as part of Memory of Trepça: Confessions of 100 Trepça Workers.

The hotel in Stan Tërg. Its construction and opening took place in 1936. The English were the ones who built it. The old miners remember this well. Even a man named Jonsoni mentions it. He visited Stan Tërg in the 1980s. He was born in 1910. There was also a girl who was born in 1938 in Zvečan. Her passport lists her birthplace as Zvečan, Yugoslavia. But they had come with a completely different mission. They built the hotel in Stan Tërg, and within the complex they built a swimming pool a few hundred meters above the hotel on the mountain. They also built a tennis court whose concrete is in better condition than much of what has been built recently on our land. They made stone steps for walking on the mountain and benches for sitting.

After the war, the hotel was left untouched for a time, but I say this with great regret: in a place that should have been preserved, destruction took over. One day when I went there, I saw that people had taken stones from the hotel for construction all across the Balkans. They had completely demolished it. Right there, when they called me uncle, I cried like a child. I truly cried.

If only we had acted right after the war, we could have painted and restored the offices in the Stan Tërg Hotel. Every delegation that came, because many delegations did come, should have been received there. Every guest entering the hotel would have seen what kind of people we are. Instead, Burhani and Azizi received guests in a small office near the post office. It was in terrible condition. Yet every investor or foreign collaborator who came was still welcomed there. Even the waiter could not wait to leave that place.