Podujeva, the rural north of the Pristina region

Some 27 km north of Pristina as the crow flies sits Podujeva, a town of 20,330 people at the head of the region’s biggest municipality, with 77 settlements and a clearly shrinking population. In 2011 the municipality counted 88,499 residents; in 2024, 70,975. It won’t make anyone’s list of essentials, but it has three or four things I wouldn’t ignore if I were driving that way.

A big, agricultural municipality

Podujeva (Podujevë in Albanian, Podujevo in Serbian) covers about 663 km² according to the OSCE’s 2018 municipal profile, which makes it the largest in the Pristina region. The same profile describes an economy built on trade, food processing, farming, brickworks and metal parts, with around 4,600 registered businesses. The Ministry of Culture, in one of its records, writes the town’s name as Podujeva with Besiana in brackets, its other name.

After the town itself, the most populous settlements are Gllamnik, Obrançë and Dumnicë e Poshtme. At the other end of the scale, five villages (Bllatë, Përpellac, Reçicë, Surdull and Tërnavicë) had nobody living in them at the 2024 census.

Vindenis, the Rome under the fields

Podujeva’s real treasure isn’t visible at a glance. In the Gllamnik area, close to the Llap river, lies the Vindenis site, which the Ministry of Culture places in the Roman period (1st to 4th century) and late antiquity (4th to 6th). It was one of the main stations on the road from Lissus, today’s Lezhë in Albania, to Naissus, modern Niš, and it appears in Ptolemy and on the Peutinger Map. It linked Ulpiana with Ad Fines on the way to Naissus.

The digs of 1980 to 1986 opened just 534 m², 2% of the total, and still turned up a great deal. Out came the Orpheus mosaic, which the Ministry calls unique in the Balkans and which is now kept at the National Museum in Belgrade. So did a white marble sarcophagus 2.15 metres long, its gabled lid carved with fish-scale decoration, weighing over three tonnes with the lid, plus imperial coins, glass and pottery. Later a German and Kosovan team surveyed the ground with a magnetometer and found a structure 150 by 150 metres with walls around five metres thick, which points to a Roman military camp. The whole site would cover about 20 hectares.

I’m giving you just what the official record says. No source I’ve read describes what’s visible on the ground or whether there are panels or paths, so I’d see it as a stop for people who already enjoy this kind of place.

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Mills and houses on the heritage list

Two mills in the heritage database strike me as among the municipality’s most charming entries. The one at Metehi belongs to the village; oral tradition takes it back to the 18th century and, according to its record, it still grinds grain. It has two sets of millstones, and in 2014 an emergency programme cleared the inside and re-roofed it with traditional tiles. The Demë Ahmeti mill at Reçicë is tiny, 5.30 by 5.80 metres, from the late 19th century, and after the 2014 works its mechanism was repaired. The odd thing is that Reçicë was recorded with zero inhabitants in the 2024 census.

The list is rounded off by an early 20th-century timber-framed house with mud-brick walls at Llaushë e Ulët, and the Neolithic site of Gumnishtë at Surkish, a few kilometres south of town, known from finds turned up by ploughing.

Lake Batllava and the springs

Lake Batllava is a 3.27 km² reservoir, according to the statistics agency, beside the village of Batllavë. The regional water company KRU Prishtina says it started supplying the capital’s drinking water in the late 1970s and that the untreated water is made drinkable at the company’s plant at Albanik (Shajkovc). Since 1988 the Environmental Protection Agency has also protected two springs in the municipality as natural monuments, a mineral spring at Sallabajë and another at Shajkovc, along with several notable trees dotted around the villages.

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Fitting it into a trip

I’d stay in Pristina and head north one morning, with the lake as the main stop and Podujeva for lunch. The OSCE profile counts 40 mosques in the municipality, but none of them appears in the Ministry’s heritage database, so I’ve no data to point you to one in particular.

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