Vushtrri, the town that kept its bridge and lost its river

If I had to persuade someone that northern Kosovo deserves a day, I’d start with Vushtrri. It has something genuinely unusual, a nine-arched medieval bridge with no river beneath it, and five minutes’ walk away a fortress that doubled as a summer cinema in the 1950s. Everything has a Ministry of Culture record, and everything is on foot.

A mid-sized town on the road north

Vushtrri (Vučitrn in Serbian) counted 28,150 residents in 2024 and its municipality 61,528, against 69,870 back in 2011. Those are Statistics Agency numbers, and the same source splits the municipality into 67 settlements, Stanoc i Epërm (2,282) and Maxhunaj (1,978) being the largest after the town. The OSCE’s 2018 profile gave an area of roughly 344 km² and described farming, small trade and woodworking as the local economy.

OpenStreetMap puts it some 24 km from Pristina and 10 from Mitrovica in a straight line. The Ministry of Culture places the village of Pestovë beside the main Pristina to Mitrovica road, about 4 km short of town, where a rescue dig in 2005 uncovered part of the foundations of a Roman country villa. If you’re driving up from Pristina in a hire car, that’s the road, on the right-hand side like the rest of the Continent.

The old bridge, the reason to come

West of town, on the old road to Mitrovica, stands Vushtrri’s stone bridge, Ura e Vjetër e Gurit to the Ministry of Culture. The record gives a 14th-century date, nine arches, a span of 135 by 6 metres and a cobbled deck. In the 20th century the River Sitnica moved away and left it high and dry, and the Ministry describes it bluntly as a bridge without a river. The authors it cites disagree on who built it, some naming the Vojinović family while an Ottoman archive from 1791 credits Mahmut Pasha. Since 2008 it has been a Special Zone by law, listed as the medieval Vojinović bridge.

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The fortress and the old core

In the centre, about 600 metres from the bridge, is Vushtrri fortress, a square two-storey tower topped by a defensive platform, with a curtain wall to the west. Its sandstone and river-stone walls passed to the Ottomans in 1455, and it later served as a prison, an arms store and, from 1955 to 1958, a cinema and restaurant. It was restored in 2013 and 2014.

The rest lies around it. The Gazi Ali Bey hammam dates from the late 14th and early 15th centuries and went up in two phases, with a 17th-century entrance in porous volcanic stone and three older low domes; its floors were white marble. It has been out of use since the 1970s and was restored alongside the fortress. A hundred metres away, the Gazi Ali Bey mosque was rebuilt after 1999 without its original features, according to the Ministry itself.

Of the houses, two stand out for me. Shaban Aga’s, from the late 19th or early 20th century, is a traditional town house with a jettied timber-framed upper floor and an enclosed çardak gallery, still lived in by the family. Mahmut Pasha Gjinolli’s, by the River Tërstena, has a small rooftop dome where the clock used to be; after the Second World War it housed the municipal offices and, in the 1960s and 70s, a clinic. Both are seen from outside, since people live in them.

A link between Vushtrri and the capital

Here’s a detail I enjoy. According to the Ministry of Culture, the 1764 bell in Pristina’s clock tower was brought from Vushtrri on the orders of Jashar Pasha. See both and you have the story that ties them together.

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Around town and how to plan it

On the outskirts the Ministry protects two fortified hilltop sites it dates to the Iron Age, Duboc, on a hill in the Çiçavica range, and Stroc, known as Gradina, with walls up to 2 metres thick. The environment agency has also protected the Gjelbishtë thermo-mineral spring as a natural monument since 2016.

My plan would be simple. Morning in Vushtrri, bridge first and then fortress and hammam, and afternoon in Mitrovica. Sleep in Pristina. For the wider north, everything is set out in the Mitrovica region guide, with Skënderaj about 17 km to the west.

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