Prison of Ideals Prishtina
Down torture lane
It used to be a place of horror. From 1945 until the end of the war in Kosovo, hundreds of Kosovo Albanians would experience torture and deprivation from freedom for their dissident thought, activism for rights and liberty. Located in the center of Prishtina, an almost inconspicuous door leads into a once infamous political interrogation center and prison. The cold, damp, coiled corridors; the claustrophobic cells with barred, tiny, grimy windows; the obvious lack of facilities that every human being deserves (although renovations made when the building became a museum improved on what used to really be here); the chest-tightening three-story labyrinth - all these hold within them countless stories of systemic abuse against one group.
There is an endlessly looping scroll of the names of people who walked through those doors and never came out the same. Stories of escape attempts using a small metallic file smuggled through a mayonnaise tube; a man giving up his chance to escape to allow his friend to flee into freedom from window to rooftop through barbed wire; a fig tree in the once-walking area with a quote about freedom.
The former Prishtina prison has been transformed into a museum. It memorializes the history of persecution and oppression and represents all prisons that tried to break the political prisoners. The building is located next to the main police station in Prishtina.
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