Albanian-Serb marriages in pictures

TIRANA, April 3 – Albanian women wedding Serbs might seem an unlikely matchup but is highly present in northern Albania where southern Serbian men seek arranged marriages with Albanian women. The phenomenon which has been increasing in the past five years is being featured in a photo exhibition at the University of Arts.
The pictures feature the coexistence of the couples despite prejudice about Serbs because of the bloody-conflicts with neighbouring Kosovo-Albanians in the late 1990s.
The flurry of Serbian-Albanian marriages started in 2008 when a group of elderly men from southern Serbia formed a group called “the Old Raska bachelors,” after their region which includes the village of Sagonjevo.
Serbia and Albania have been uneasy neighbors for generations. But when war exploded over ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo’s attempt to break from Serbia in the late 1990s, disdain turned to murderous rage.
Both Serbia and Albania like most of the Balkan nations are faced with a massive exodus of young people from rural areas in search of a better life, turning many small settlements into ghost villages. The ethnic wars in the Balkans in the 1990s accelerated the problem.
In Serbia, it’s mostly women who are fleeing poverty and stagnation. But in Albania, it’s the men who are relocating, says Momir Kovacevic, an Old Raska activist, explaining why this interethnic marriage arrangement works as quoted by the AP in a 2011 article.