<snip>
>In the western half, the Drim does not form a relatively narrow fertile
>valley ("polje") but drains a wider relatively flat plateau from Pec south
>to Prizren.
>*This is Metohija*. In this plateau there is a railway junction at a sort
>of T, with the short line being that between Pec and Pristina and the long
>line ending at Prizren in the south. The small town at the junction is also
>called Metohija.
>
>The River Drim historically has been no gateway from anyplace to anyplace,
>and Metohija is sleepier than the Kosovo Polje & Pristina. When (a kid with
>hair to my shoulders) I was hiking in the hills around Metohija in the
>early seventies it was easy to imagine it was still the times before
>everything solid began to melt into air. Lots of Albanian men wearing the
>fez. Almost no cars. Plowing with horses or oxen. It was June and little
>kids would come running to *give* you a metal bowl - which of course you
>had to return - of strawberries (it happened three, four times).
>
>That NATO is bombing there disgusts and angers me.
Generally this post was puzzling since the Albanian children who gave long haired John Mage free strawberries 25 years ago are alleged to be the victim of NATO bombs now, although it is more likely that their homes have been bombed by Serb nationalists.
The very detailed geographical account did not explain the political significance of the name Metohija. It is clear that all formal spokespersons for the Serbs or Yugoslav governments carefully use the longer term Kosovo and Metohija. Nor is there any explanation on the Yugoslav website.
The following explanation from Kosovo: A Short History by Noel Malcolm 1998
Macmillan and Papermac, is more informative.
"Running from north to south through the middle of Kosovo is a lesser range of hills which divides the whole territory into roughly equal halves: streams running off the eastern side of these hills will flow into the Ibar and the Danube, while the western side sends its waters to the White Drin and the Adriatic. The two halves of Kosovo have their own traditional names, which for various reasons, political and geographical, have been sources of both friction and confusion.
The western half of Kosovo is known to Serbs as the Metohija. This is derived from metochia, a Byzantine Greek word for monastic estates, and reflects the fact that many Orthodox monasteries were granted rich endowments here (farmland, orchards and famously fine vineyeards) by medieval Serb rulers.
Kosovo Albanians, on the other hand, resent the use of this name, since it seems to imply that the identity of the territory itself is bound up with Serbian Orthodox land ownership. Their own name for this part of Kosovo is Rrafsh i Dukagjinit, the 'Dukagjin plateau' - Dukagjin being a medieval Albanians ruling family which also gave its name to a broad swathe of territory in northern Albania.
Where Kosovo's eastern half is concerned, confusion arises because this sub-division of Kosovo is itself known simply as 'Kosovo'. (Historically, the confusion happened the other way around: it is this area which gave its name to the entire territory, rather in the way that Holland, one of the component territories of the Netherlands, has become a commonly used name for the whole country too.) Thus the offical name for the administrative unit of Kosovo during most of the Titoist period was 'Kosovo and Metohija', sometimes compressed into a made-up single word, 'Kosmet'.
Quite how and why Kosovo became the name of this component territory is a little unclear; it was never used as a territorial name under the medieval Serbian kings, and first appears in accounts of the great battle of 1389, which took place on Kosovo Polje, the 'Kosovo field (or plain)'. 'Kos' means 'blackbird' in Serbian (the -ovo is an adjectival ending): hence the Germans know the battle-site as the 'Amselfeld', and Latin chronicles call it 'campus merulae'. (Kosovo is not an uncommon place-name in the Balkans: there are various villages or districts called Kosovo, unconnected with this one, in Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Albania.)"
----
Despite the book's lack of sympathy with the Serb nationalist position, it does not itself use the term that the Albanians prefer, Kosova. The author is also author of "Bosnia, A Short History", and the Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes.
Out of the reviews on the back cover the following from Michael Foot in the Observer is particularly interesting:
"A book to stop a massacre! ... It is as if some new Edward Gibbon had appeared to instruct us in these matters and to restore a sense of human decency amid the crimes and horrors of our century. Noel Malcolm's book is short enough to be read by Foreign Secretaries but explicit enough to stop a repetion of the surrender to force which still leaves its evil consequences in his beloved Bosnia."
Chris Burford
London