Viti, the rural Catholic south of the Gjilan region

Viti strikes me as eastern Kosovo’s best surprise. There’s no single headline monument. What this rural, hilly municipality has instead is a cluster of Catholic churches with a story to tell, an Orthodox ruin with a Special Protective Zone, protected traditional houses and a Catholic shrine.

The municipality

Viti (in Serbian, Vitina) is in south-eastern Kosovo, in what OpenStreetMap treats as the Gjilan region. The municipality had 35,566 people in 2024, well down on the 46,987 of 2011, in 39 settlements. The town itself bucked the trend, growing from 4,924 to 5,780, followed by Pozharan, Smirë, Sllatinë e Epërme, Kabash and Drobesh. By mother tongue the census counts 35,392 Albanian and 123 Serbian speakers.

The picture at the top, sourced from Commons, catches the town by the river, with a stone footbridge, a weeping willow and red-roofed houses backed by green hills.

Catholic heritage

Nine of the Ministry of Culture’s DTK entries fall in Viti, and two are Catholic churches whose stories justify the stop. St Anthony of Padua’s at Binçë was begun in 1968 and opened to worshippers in 1972. It’s an octagonal building with a matching octagonal bell tower set on higher ground, and Monsignor Mark Sopi is buried inside. What makes it special are the murals of 1989 to 1991 by Demir Behluli and Zeqirja Rexhepi, the same artists who restored the paintings in Gjilan’s Atik Mosque. Every saint, Christ included, wears Albanian folk dress from different regions.

The other is St George’s at Stubëll e Epërme, which its record calls the first Albanian school in Kosovo. The DTK says a college of St Luke worked there from 1584, the date 1846 is carved in the apse, regular lessons in Albanian began in 1868 under the teacher Dom Mikel, and Austria-Hungary made it official in 1905. Further east, the village of Letnica has the church the diocese calls a shrine.

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The Binač ruins and the rest

At Buzovik, about 4 km south-east of town on OpenStreetMap, lie the ruins of Binač Monastery, which the DTK records as St Michael’s, from the 14th century. Law 03/L-039 gives it a 100 m Special Protective Zone. The other sites are domestic and rural, such as Haxhi Ahmeti’s 19th-century house and guest room at Remnik, built by the owner himself, the carpenter Nezir Deliu, and two mosques at Gërmovë and Sllatinë e Epërme.

Beside the banja at Kllokot, about 6 km north, the DTK records the 2nd-century Roman site of Vërban, where a bust was found that the record considers Dardanian work. I bring tower houses and traditional homes together in kullas in Kosovo.

Getting around

Opening times, admission and visiting rules aren’t published for any of these places, and buses between the villages didn’t show up in any official source I checked. By car, OpenStreetMap puts Viti about 19 km from Gjilan in a straight line, and Gjilan is where I’d stay. Night driving on rural roads is something the FCDO advises against, given surfaces it calls fair to poor. It also reminds visitors that the GHIC isn’t valid in Kosovo.

So you do not lose the morning at the ticket office, browse tickets and tours in Gjilan on GetYourGuide.

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