Roadworks resume in Visoki Decani protected zone
Trucks unloaded crushed stone and a grader leveled the track two kilometers west of the monastery on July 29. The Raska-Prizren Diocese says nobody asked the Church.
- Work on the road inside the Special Protective Zone of Visoki Decani monastery restarted on July 29, about two kilometers west of the monastery.
- Trucks were unloading crushed stone while a grader belonging to the firm Lika spread the material and leveled the surface.
- The Raska-Prizren Diocese says neither the monastery nor the diocese was told in advance, and that the Serbian Orthodox Church was never asked for consent.
- Similar work began in 2018 and again in 2020, and the diocese says a November 2020 agreement has gone unenforced for six years.
Heavy machinery is working again inside the protected zone of Visoki Decani. The site sits on an existing road alignment roughly two kilometers west of the monastery complex, within the Special Protective Zone created by a dedicated law. Trucks have been hauling in crushed stone and dumping it along the stretch, while a grader belonging to the construction firm Lika spreads the material and levels the surface.
The Raska-Prizren Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church said on July 29 that it received no advance notice of the work, no design documents and no explanation of its purpose, and that nobody sought the Church’s consent. Lika holds contracts on several road sections across Kosovo. The alignment where its machines turned up is tied to the Decani to Plav transit road project, which has caused friction before.
Monks from the monastery went out to the site and reported what they found back to the diocese.
“Monks of the Visoki Decani monastery visited the site where the work is being carried out. On the ground they observed heavy trucks bringing in larger quantities of crushed stone, along with construction machinery distributing and leveling the material along the existing alignment,” the diocese said in its statement.
The scale of the job, the diocese argues, goes past ordinary road maintenance and amounts to reconstruction or a substantial upgrade of road infrastructure inside a protected area.
Why is a road through the zone contentious?
Protection of the monastery rests on Law No. 03/L-039 on Special Protective Zones. Article 7 is what established the zone around Visoki Decani in the first place, Article 5 bars the construction of transit roads through rural protective zones, and Article 6 places road building and reconstruction among the restricted activities for which authorities must obtain the Church’s prior consent.
That, the diocese says, leaves the legal position unchanged whatever label the work is given. If the aim is to push the Decani to Plav transit route through the zone, the law forbids it. If the job is presented as repair of an existing local road, the duty to consult and obtain consent still applies.
The third attempt since 2018
Work on the same or a connected alignment started in 2018 and again in 2020, and on both occasions it stopped after international representatives objected. In November 2020, the Implementation and Monitoring Council settled on a formula: an international bypass built outside the Special Protective Zone, with strictly limited work on the local road inside it.
Two Kosovo ministers and the mayor of Decani signed that agreement, backed by guarantees and signatures from the heads of the European Union and OSCE offices at the time. The diocese says it has gone unhonored for six years, and that it authorized neither unilateral work nor the gradual conversion of a local road into a banned transit route.
Visoki Decani is on the UNESCO World Heritage list and is the only Serbian Orthodox Church site in Kosovo under continuous KFOR guard since the end of the conflict in 1999. The diocese wants the Kosovo Police to establish who ordered and approved the work and to have it halted, and it is asking the European Union, the OSCE and KFOR to take the case seriously.
“The Raska-Prizren Diocese remains committed to peaceful and constructive dialogue, but points out that the special legal protection of the monastery must not be reduced to a formal declaration. It must be consistently applied in practice, without exceptions and without unilateral interpretations, because that is the only way to preserve the rule of law, mutual trust and peace,” the statement concludes.
The Implementation and Monitoring Council, which seats two Kosovo ministers, Metropolitan Teodosije and the heads of the EU and OSCE missions in Kosovo and Metohija, is the only body where a dispute like this is meant to be settled. Nothing that has passed through it since November 2020 has held up on the ground, and the machines are back in the zone for the third time in eight years.
