Eparchy Vows Charges Over KLA Flags in Lipljan
A Kosovo Police patrol caught two men hanging KLA flags in Lipljan, arrested them and removed the flags from a church fence. The Eparchy says it will file a criminal complaint.
Two men spent the evening of August 10 hanging flags of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and the Republic of Albania on the fence of a church courtyard in central Lipljan, home to the fourteenth century Church of the Presentation of the Holy Virgin and the Church of the Holy Martyrs Flor and Lavr. A Kosovo Police patrol caught them in the act, detained both men, and then removed the flags from the fence.
Local residents who spotted the flags from the street reported them, and the Eparchy of Raska and Prizren issued a statement the following morning, its second in under 24 hours.
“According to the information we have, on the evening of August 10, 2026, Kosovo Police officers, while patrolling this part of Lipljan in the city center, found two perpetrators putting up the flags, detained them, and then removed the flags from the church fence,” the Eparchy stated.
The Eparchy said it has surveillance camera footage of the incident and will file a criminal complaint with the competent prosecution against both men once Kosovo Police officially hands over their identity information. It is also asking authorities to determine whether the act amounts to incitement of ethnic and religious hatred, intimidation of the Orthodox Serbs still living in the area, and desecration of a protected medieval heritage site.
Why the Eparchy rejects the label of vandalism
The Eparchy’s entire request rests on a single distinction: whether a flag on a church fence is a public order disturbance or a message aimed at the community.
“Placing a KLA flag on the fence of a Serbian Orthodox church is not a neutral display of a political symbol,” the Eparchy of Raska and Prizren said.
That assessment is tied, in the statement, to the position of Serbs in the town itself. Once several thousand strong, the Serb community in Lipljan now numbers only a few hundred, and the two churches sharing the courtyard remain their main gathering place.
The motive the men gave for their own actions
Lipljan priest Dragisa Jerinic told Radio KiM that the two detained men were angry over a traffic ticket a police officer of Serbian ethnicity from Kosovo Police had written to one of them the day before. He said he learned that detail from an ethnic Albanian officer while police were handling the incident on site.
“Angered by that, they came to hang flags on our fence,” Jerinic said, adding that anger over a fine cannot justify the act.
Jerinic said he called the church custodian to notify police, who arrived quickly and found two adult men. Church custodian Jovica Miric told the same outlet that two KLA flags and one Albanian flag had gone up, with one man hanging them while the other pulled flags out of a car and filmed.
A third incident at the same site
The Eparchy notes that the previous night’s events were not an isolated case. In December 2025, a masked person removed a Serbian Orthodox Church flag from the same complex, one that had been put up for the churches’ patron saint celebration, and a similar case was recorded in June 2023. No one was sanctioned in either case, which the Eparchy cites as the reason behind what it calls a sense of impunity.
The Kosovo and Metohija Office called the flag placement a shameful provocation that same evening and said it had unsettled worshippers. Kosovo Police, for its part, issued no statement and left the case out of its morning report on the previous 24 hours of incidents. That report logged gunfire in Lipljan around 5:30 p.m., while the entry for the Pristina region’s other incidents read that there was nothing to report.
The incident took place hours after KFOR, citing an improved security situation, announced it was beginning to gradually hand security of the Visoki Decani Monastery over to Kosovo Police, the same day a shift began in KFOR’s permanent presence at the main bridge over the Ibar River in Kosovska Mitrovica. The Eparchy had previously asked that this responsibility not be transferred, and it now says the assessment of improved security does not reflect the reality Serbs in Kosovo live in.
What happens next comes down to one step: until Kosovo Police hands over the identities of the detained men, there is no criminal complaint to file.
