Actors from Kosovo and Serbia have been collaborating on a new version of ‘Women of Troy’, the Greek tragedy that views war though the lens of women – and has clear relevance to recent Balkan history.
Transcending time and space, it has since become an almost universal metaphor for the endless cycle of human violence – an echo that continues to resonate over the centuries.
“In some way it was like a catharsis because nobody threw anything at me,” Mitic told BIRN a few minutes after she and her Albanian and Serbian colleagues were applauded for their performance.
“It feels like what art always should be. Not war, killing or raping. Who knows how many artists from Gaza or Ukraine these days are migrants? We’re always thinking about these people,” she added.
The ‘Women of Troy’ play at Prishtina’s ‘Dodona’ theatre. Photo: BIRN
Mitic plays the Trojan queen Hecuba, while Kosovo Albanian actor Semira Latifi plays her daughter, Cassandra.
This version of Women of Troy is a compelling collaboration between the Pristina-based Artpolic-Art and Community Centre and the Belgrade-based DAH Theatre, exploring contemporary themes of war, displacement and the resilience of women when confronting violence and oppression.
This was not first time Mitic has appeared in front of an Albanian audience in Pristina, however.
“I was among the first [Serbian actors] to come here after [the Kosovo war ended in] 1999 for a festival about Faruk Begolli, a long time ago,” she recalls, referring to the famous Kosovo actor who had a decades-long career in Yugoslav cinematography.
Conceived over two years, the production aims to bridge historical and national divides, instead inviting audiences to engage with the universal experiences of suffering and survival in times of conflict.
Directed by the feminist artists Zana Hoxha of Pristina and Dijana Milosevic of Belgrade, the bilingual performance conveys the profound resilience of women impacted by war, emphasising both their vulnerability and strength in facing systemic oppression.
Zana Hoxha, as co-director, reflects that the project was “one of the most difficult I have done in my life.
“I was the only one who knew both languages [Albanian and Serbian]. Sometimes I was giving indications in three languages – Albanian, Serbian and English,” she told BIRN.
Photo: BIRN
“There was a lot of professionalism and commitment,” she added
The production, developed over almost two years, unites the talents of 15 theatre artists from Kosovo and Serbia whose artistic and activist sisterhood is rooted in years of meaningful exchanges and networking between them.
Shpetim Selmani, the actor who also wrote the contemporary text of the play, changed out of costume as soon as the play performed at Prishtina’s Dodona theatre ended on the evening of November 9. But sweat from the performance was still visible on his face.
“The idea was to tell the stories of suffering through women, to tell that Troy still exists – that there are still conflict zones around the world and each is similar to the ancient Greek tragedies,” Selmani told BIRN.
After Prishtina, the play is expected to make its appearance in Belgrade on November 22 and 23, at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination.
“The space in Belgrade is very much for this kind of thing. I expect a lot of spectators, especially at this time, when it always looks like something is happening but, in the end, nothing happens,” Mitic said, referring to the current tensions between Kosovo and Serbia, which have put normalisation efforts by the international community on hold.
Photo: BIRN
“For this performance that’s talking about war and massacres, at the moment we have Gaza or Somalia. In the 1990s, we had the Balkans, ex-Yugoslavia; so somewhere, all the time, the same things are happening,” she added.
A quarter of a century after the war ended in ex-Yugoslavia, the play’s Kosovo director sees the region going backwards in terms of coming to terms with what happened in the last decade of the 20th century.
“The generations that experienced the war have a more thorough opinion about what happened. They know that what’s reported in the media is not always true and can reflect. Younger generations are completely detached from this part of history,” Zana Hoxha said.
“It is only the artistic community and civil society to some degree which try to improve things,” she added.
“Some of the media want to provoke hate speech through clickbait articles because victimisation produces clicks and, of course, those clicks then feed this hate speech. I wonder how it’s possible that this hate speech is more used now than it was 10 or 15 years ago.”