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Last month, in July 2026, Serbian artist Milan Vasić was invited to give a concert in Prizren, a town in occupied Kosovo whose historical significance stretches back to the Serbian middle ages. Prizren was the capital of the Serbian kingdom before it was overrun by the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The occasion for the festivity was the local Orthodox monastery of the Holy Archangels patron saint’s day. The monastery is situated in the environs of Prizren.
The monastery is the burial place of its founder, the Serbian medieval emperor Stefan Dušan, and is thus also a major historical site, apart from its religious and artistic importance as a prime example of the Morava style of ecclesiastical architecture.
What could possibly be wrong with a concert on a religious feast day? As it turned out, a great deal, at least in the estimation of the Kosovo secessionist authorities that were set up by NATO after the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and which operate under its auspices, with the unequivocal support of the democratic collective West. Upon arrival at the monastery, where about 3000 Orthodox Serbs had gathered for the religious ceremony and the concert that was to follow, the singer Vasić was surrounded by the Kosovo secessionist police and his vehicle was thoroughly searched. Vasić was then peremptorily handed a paper wherein the rules of conduct for his concert were strictly laid out. He was sternly warned that the word “Metohija” was forbidden and that on pain of criminal liability he was not to utter it in any of his songs. Vasić decided that, under the circumstances, with Kosovo police armoured cars and snipers positioned around the monastery, discretion was the better part of valour. So he put on his Serbian national costume and for that particular occasion deleted the offensive word “Metohija” from his singing repertoire.
One could reasonably ask what is it about the word “Metohija” (for a cultural and ethnographic overview see here) an expression largely obscure to virtually everyone outside the Balkans, that provoked a commotion of such magnitude, which was wholly disproportionate to the nature of the religious and cultural event that was taking place.
From the standpoint of the Kosovo secessionist authorities and their NATO and the collective West sponsors, there is plenty. There is a convoluted rationale to their bizarre reaction at the prospect of public use of a word that, whenever uttered, leaves their fraudulent Kosovo “nation building” project in tatters.
They know perfectly well that the real name of the territory they seized in 1999 and have controlled illegally ever since, whose “independence” they proclaimed in 2008 in contempt of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, is Kosovo and Metohija. Never mind that Kosovo, the same as Ukraine, is as “independent” as Manchukuo was under Japanese occupation. But Kosovo and Metohija is the way the territory has been known without dispute for centuries, Metohija in fact being the larger portion of it. And that precisely, from their angle, is the problem. Within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, a metochion (Greek: μετόχιον) signifies a dependent ecclesiastical property, a church or monastic dependency, usually a votive foundation.
Kosovo and Metohija is replete not just with Serbian toponyms and Orthodox churches and graveyards, belonging to its ethnically cleansed Serbian population and attesting clearly to the identity of the historical inhabitants, but also with lands which Serbian kings had deeded over to monasteries and church institutions for their sustainment. The institutional beneficiaries of those gifts eventually became so numerous that extensive swaths of land where they were located, in what is today NATO occupied Kosovo, became known simply as “Metohija.” That signified their character as church lands and bestowed upon the ancient Serbian territory its compound name by which it had been known for centuries, until quite recently, when for the occupiers’ political convenience the universally accepted designation was forcibly truncated.
The word “Metohija” consequently is to them is a bête noire. Its incontrovertible historical and cultural significance settles the issue and collapses the invented “Kosovar” identity like a house of cards.
That is why Metohija has to be edited out of Kosovo, just as Taras Bulba must be edited out of Maidan Ukraine. They both give the game away.
The intimidating demand put to the Serbian artist in Prizren to self-censor his lyrics has a much deeper significance than at first glance might appear. The necessity of imposing such a humiliating restriction on public discourse gives the lie to the official “freedom and democracy” narrative justifying the savage 1999 NATO bombing and the subsequent illegal occupation of the spiritual and historical heartland of Serbia. It also gives credence to Maria Zakharova’s recent comment that the position of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija is “catastrophic” and that the ethnic oppression taking place there is being conducted with the tacit approval of NATO and the European Union.
But there is more than that, and the broader context is something that every Russian in Ukraine would understand and could readily confirm.
In both the occupied province of Serbia and in Ukraine the collective West is pursuing its demented “nation building” projects. In both instances, ethnicities are being fabricated ex nihilo, with the expectation of course that they would obediently serve the geopolitical interests of their masters and creators. An ethnicity, no matter how improvised and virtual, to appear credible needs a history, a language, a cultural heritage, and other attributes that genuine nations have. The simulacrums of these elements are invented on a case by case basis, Ukraine being an outstanding example. A genuine nation that has emerged spontaneously, it is fitting to recall, does not need “nation builders” to bring it into existence.
There is a bevy of bought and paid for “scholars” in Western universities (gekaufte Gelehrte, if we may paraphrase Udo Ulfkotte) who are on hand for one purpose only, and that is to furnish a pseudo academic rationale for any narrative that the collective West elites deems useful at any particular time. They wield their phony credentials to disparage and if possible supress factual evidence to the contrary.
Kosovo is another glaring example, besides Ukraine, of how this imposture works. Its normative, establishment “history” (Kosovo: A Short History – An Essential Chronicle of the Balkans, Ethnic Tensions, and Political Independence) was authored by Noel Malcom, a British journalist masquerading as an Oxford scholar. Presciently, Malcolm’s confabulated history was published to rave reviews in 1999, as NATO was bombarding Yugoslavia, with military occupation of the Serbian province to follow soon thereafter.
But serious scholars, such as the late Teodora Toleva in her ground-breaking doctoral dissertation “The Influence of Austria-Hungary on the Formation of Albanian Nation,” have begged to differ. Based on a thorough study of diplomatic archives in Vienna, she argued that modern Albanian national identity (in exactly the same fashion as the Ukrainian later) was systematically engineered and constructed in the nineteenth century through Austro-Hungarian diplomatic and geopolitical interventions. Dr. Toleva’s key finding, which will resonate with all who know anything about the genesis and development of the anti-Russia project known as Ukraine, was that Vienna viewed the creation of an Albanian national consciousness and an independent state as a vital imperial strategy to block the expanding influence of Serbia and Italy in the Balkans, and to secure Austria-Hungary’s own strategic positioning.
Today, a similar improvisation, the NATO puppet “state” of Kosovo, without the forbidden reference to Metohija, fulfils an identical anti-Serbia mission.
