Novo Brdo, a tiny municipality with a medieval mining town

Novo Brdo is an odd one. The municipality barely has 4,493 residents and its namesake village just 117, yet in the Middle Ages this was a mining town of the first rank, with silver, gold, its own mint and merchants who’d come from Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik. What’s left of all that is the reason I come.

A small, rural municipality

Novo Brdo (Novobërdë in Albanian) sits at the eastern end of the Pristina region. The statistics agency counted 4,493 people here in 2024, down from 6,729 in 2011, spread over 26 settlements. The largest is Pasjak, with 1,440, and three villages, Bolec, Carevc and Mazgovë, had nobody at all. The OSCE’s 2018 figures give it about 204 km² and describes an economy of farming, rural tourism and small traders, with around 280 registered businesses. According to the same profile, the municipality has seven Serbian Orthodox churches and two mosques in use.

The silver town

The Ministry of Culture explains that Novo Brdo appears under this name in documents from the early decades of the 14th century, as Nuovo Monte, and that it was a silver and gold-mining centre known for its forges and its coin minting. By 1326 it was already a market frequented by the Ragusans and by the Saxon community, miners who’d arrived to work the seams. Law 03/L-039 now protects the medieval town as a Special Zone.

At its heart is Novo Brdo fortress, from the 13th and 14th centuries, on a hilltop between the Përlepnica and Krivareka rivers. It has its own page with everything in the official record.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Pristina before prices climb.

A cathedral, a mosque and a miners’ church

Just north-east of the fortress lie the ruins of Artana cathedral, the town’s largest church, 30.7 by 23.4 metres. Digs in 1956 and 1957 found an earlier 14th-century church beneath it, ringed by graves, and the Ministry says that in the 15th century the Ragusans raised the Romanesque cathedral on top. For a time it was the seat of a Catholic bishopric. After the Ottoman conquest of June 1455 it was turned into a mosque in 1466, gaining a minaret. Part of the walls was restored in 1954, and an estimated 900 graves lie within.

A kilometre to the south-east, in the village of Bostan, are the ruins of the Saxon church, St Mary’s, from the early 14th century. In the early 17th century Marin Bizzi, Archbishop of Bar, described it as a painted church that could hold 3,000 worshippers. Its walls now stand a metre high and the Ministry warns that they need urgent work.

How I’d see it

I’d leave Pristina in the morning with the whole day ahead, climb to the fortress, walk down to the cathedral and the Saxon church, then carry on to Gjilan or return to the capital. No official source publishes opening hours or access details for the ruins, so walking boots and water are firmly on my list. If castles are your thing, I cover the rest in castles and fortresses in Kosovo. On my 5 days in Kosovo route, Novo Brdo is the day-two stop, 41 km from Pristina.

If you would rather have a local show you round, book a guided tour in Pristina and choose by the reviews.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Pristina before prices climb.