Janjevo, an old village between Pristina and Lipjan

Janjevo has a name that comes up in almost any chat about the area around Pristina and that, once you look for official sources, shrinks to a few lines. I’ll tell you what they say, without padding out what they don’t, and why I still think it’s worth a stop.

A shrinking village

Janjevo (Janjevë in Albanian) is a settlement in Lipjan municipality, about 12 km from Pristina, to the south-east, in a straight line on OpenStreetMap. In 2024 the statistics agency counted 1,407 residents in 2024, against 2,137 in 2011, a fall of a third in thirteen years. The OSCE’s 2018 municipal profile notes that it has a police sub-station and a family health centre.

Four communities in one village

What sets Janjevo apart is its people. In a March 2024 note, the OSCE Mission in Kosovo presents it as an old locality where Kosovo Croats, Albanians, Turks and Roma live side by side. Its 2011 report on Kosovo’s Croats had already mentioned Janjevo as the other place, besides the Letnica area, where that small community lives.

I have no finer official data than that. The census doesn’t publish communities village by village, and the Croat figure in that report was a 2010 estimate from local representatives, so I won’t repeat it as if it were current. The same OSCE profile counts two Catholic churches in Lipjan municipality, both in use, without saying where they stand, so I can’t point you to one with an official source behind me.

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Veletin, the hill of the mines

A kilometre and a half north-west of the village, on Veletin hill, the Ministry of Culture protects the remains of a fort. Its record says the summit reaches 970 metres, that it overlooks the ancient mines to the east and the plain of Ulpiana, about five kilometres away, to the west, and that 1980s excavations showed it was used from the earliest days of ore mining and metal smelting, then through prehistory, Roman times, late antiquity and the Middle Ages. A curious detail is that it belongs to Shashkoc, a settlement that forms an island of Pristina municipality inside its neighbour’s territory.

In its record for Novo Brdo, the same ministry recalls that Strabo, the Greek geographer, had already mentioned in the 1st century BC a settlement on the Veletin of Janjevo, alongside those of Ulpiana and Artana.

How I’d see it

Janjevo has no opening hours or tickets, because there’s no listed monument inside the village. I’d slot it between two weightier visits, Gračanica monastery roughly 5 km off in a straight line and Gadime Cave about 11 km away, and give it an unhurried stroll. People live here, so being discreet with the camera is part of the plan. I include it among the prettiest villages in Kosovo for that mix of communities, not for its monuments.

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