The Emin Gjiku Ethnological Museum, a Pristina home of 1800

Of everything you can see in Pristina, the Emin Gjiku complex brings me closest to the city as it was before the broad avenues. It’s a set of houses round two courtyards, shut in by high walls at the north-eastern edge of the historic centre, and it now holds the Ethnological Museum. The appeal here isn’t one particular object but the whole place.

A family home from the early 1800s

The Ministry of Culture dates the complex to the early 19th century and attributes it to the Gjinolli, one of the city’s well-known families. The name has a story. Emin Gjinolli was nicknamed “little man”, Eminçik in Turkish, which over time wore down to Emin Gjik.

There are two big courtyards. The entrance yard held a stable and a stone building; the inner one has the family house and the guest house, which the museum uses today. The courtyards are enclosed by tall walls of adobe and timber beams, 55 centimetres thick. The Ministry rates it among the finest early 19th-century town houses left in Pristina, and I’d agree.

The building that outlived the bazaar

There’s a detail I love. The single-storey stone house with a stone roof in the first courtyard was moved here in 1960 and is the only building left from the old bazaar, which was flattened that decade. It was once a blacksmith’s and now works as a contemporary art space called Stacion. If you want to know what happened to that bazaar, see Pristina’s old bazaar.

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From nature museum to ethnological museum

According to the Municipality’s leaflet, the complex was the Museum of Nature until 1990, and in September 2006 it opened as the Ethnological Museum, a branch of the Kosovo Museum, with a display on life in Kosovo in the 18th and 19th centuries. The same leaflet goes further back, saying that in the 19th century Emin Gjiku’s house became Pristina’s first museum, showing the family’s own belongings. The complex belongs to the Kosovo Museum, which according to the Ministry is responsible for opening up the buildings and collection to visitors.

The official sources don’t list the exhibits or publish opening hours and prices, so I’m not quoting any. Go in the morning instead of leaving it to the end of the day, and to ask at the door.

Bring euros in cash for any ticket. Kosovo uses the euro even without an agreement with the EU, according to the European Commission, so your pounds will need changing, and gov.uk suggests using cash machines inside banks rather than those on the street.

Why it’s worth your time

Because in a capital that pulled down most of its Ottoman quarter between the 1950s and 1970s, this is the only place where you can step inside a house of that era with its courtyards, even if the Ministry notes it has changed a good deal over nearly two centuries of different uses. I’d pair it with the Imperial Mosque and the Great Hammam, a few steps away, and save the afternoon for 20th-century Pristina. If you like museums in old buildings, the Prizren Archaeological Museum is also in an Ottoman ensemble, the 15th-century clock tower, with the Esma Hanëm fountain in its courtyard.

So you do not lose the morning at the ticket office, browse tickets and tours in Emin Gjiku Ethnological Museum on GetYourGuide.

If you are staying the night, see the best hotel deals in Pristina for your dates: the well-placed rooms go fast.