Pristina demolished its old town, built a modern city on top of it and is now building on top of that.

01 A capital without an old town

The first hour in Pristina is confusing for anyone trained on European city centres. There is no obvious core to walk toward. Streets change scale abruptly — a low nineteen-fifties block, then a fifteen-storey tower in mirrored glass, then a house with a tiled roof that has somehow survived between them. Cables cross overhead. Buildings that clearly belong to different decades share a party wall. The city does not present itself as a composition, because it was never composed.

It helps to know the numbers. The municipality had 227,466 inhabitants at the 2024 census, having grown 14.2 per cent since 2011, and it sits at 652 metres on a plain ringed by hills. Kosovo lists 426 protected monuments; 21 of them are in Pristina. That is a very small inheritance for a capital, and it is the single most useful fact for understanding the streets.

02 What was cleared away

What stood here before was a bazaar town: a dense grid of low shops with tiled roofs and open fronts, workshops for metal, wool and leather, and the hans and hammams that came with them. It was the commercial centre of the whole region, and it was built the way Ottoman market towns were built everywhere — small, incremental, and almost entirely in wood, brick and tile.

From 1945 onward the city was modernised under an approach that can be summarised, without much unfairness, as destroy the old and build the new. The bazaar was cleared, and with it the street pattern that had organised the town for centuries. What replaced it was not a restoration but a different idea of what a city is: wide roads, free-standing blocks, public buildings set in open space.

A handful of things escaped. The nineteenth-century building that now holds the municipal archive is one of them — a plain two-storey house with a tiled roof and rendered walls, the sort of structure that used to be ordinary here and is now, by accident, rare. Walking past it is the closest you get to the earlier city.

03 The city that replaced it

The city built on top is the one most visitors underestimate, because it looks like background. It is not: the nineteen-seventies were Pristina's most ambitious architectural decade, and the buildings from it are the ones with real intent behind them.

The Grand Hotel, designed in 1974 by Bashkim Fehmiu and Dragan Kovačević, is the clearest example — a slab of late modernism placed in the middle of town as a statement about what the town was becoming. Next to it now stand newer, taller and glossier blocks, so you can read three construction eras in a single upward glance: stone-faced concrete, then coloured cladding, then glass.

The broadcasting complex is the other survivor worth stopping for. Radio Pristina made its first transmission in 1945 and television followed in 1974, and the buildings show it: an office tower with a slim mast on top, attached to a low hall whose concrete wall is ribbed from top to bottom like corduroy. It is the kind of architecture that is only now being looked at kindly, and in Pristina it is not preserved as heritage — it is simply still in use.

04 The building nobody agrees on

And then there is the library, which is the reason most architecture-minded travellers come at all. The National Library of Kosovo was inaugurated on 25 November 1982 to a design by the Croatian architect Andrija Mutnjaković, and nothing about it is moderate. It has 99 domes of different sizes, all glazed, sitting on a cluster of cubic volumes; the entire exterior is wrapped in a metal mesh like a fishing net thrown over the building. It covers 16,500 square metres and was built to hold around two million volumes.

The reaction has been permanent and divided. It has appeared on more than one internet list of the ugliest buildings in the world — the travel site VirtualTourist put it in a global top ten — and it is also, by a wide margin, the most photographed structure in the country. Mutnjaković described his design as blending Byzantine and Islamic architectural forms and linked it to the pre-Romanesque building tradition of the Balkans. Locally, the most repeated reading is simpler: the domes look like rows of the plis, the white felt cap worn in the region.

What the photographs do not convey is the inside, which is the argument in the building's favour. The domes are not decoration: each one is a skylight, so the reading rooms are lit from above by daylight that changes all day and never comes at you horizontally. There are two reading rooms, of 300 and 100 places, plus a 150-seat amphitheatre, and the collection sits on two underground levels. Judge it from the pavement and it is a curiosity. Judge it from a desk under a dome and it is a serious piece of work.

05 The third city

The last layer is the one being poured now. Since 2000 Pristina has built at a speed that outran its own planning: towers inserted into gaps, extra floors added to existing blocks, whole streets of new apartments on what was recently open ground. The 14.2 per cent population growth between 2011 and 2024 is the demand side of that, and it shows in the skyline, which has no agreed height and no consistent line.

It is easy to be snobbish about this and worth resisting the urge. What you are looking at is a city absorbing an enormous internal migration in a short time, with the ordinary consequences: too little green space in the centre, too many cars for the street width, and buildings whose ground floors are almost all cafés because that is what a young population uses. The result is not elegant. It is, however, completely legible once you know what you are reading.

06 How to read it

So walk it as a section rather than as a picture. Start at the library and the university campus around it, where the seventies and eighties are intact and the open space is generous. Cross into the centre for the modern city and its newer additions stacked against each other. Take a detour to the archive building and the market streets for the small amount of the earlier town that is still standing. Then go up to any high point and look at the ring of hills, which is the only part of the view that has not been rebuilt.

Pristina will not reward a checklist and does not pretend to have one. What it offers is unusually direct: a capital where three ideas of what a city should be were applied one on top of another within a single lifetime, without any of them being finished. Very few places in Europe show you that so plainly, and almost none of them will let you do it with a coffee in your hand for a euro.