Kosovska Mitrovica. The city is silent — the walls are speaking. Here, letters fall from the walls the way hope fades from a face.
Entrance to a former(?) cultural institution in the northern part of Kosovska Mitrovica — Mitrovački Dvor. Above the entrance, the remnants of a sign that once read "Mitrovački Dvor – Ceremonial Hall" now form a grim abbreviation: "Mtvak". The letters have fallen off, just like the meaning of the institution they once represented.
Ironically, what was meant to be a symbol of life, spirit, and community now eerily resembles the word "mrtvak" ("the dead one") — a ghostly reflection of the real state of culture in a city where cultural institutions have become hollow shells under the control of corrupt politicians — people who neither understand, respect, nor wish to develop them. The building stands as the shadow of a fundamentally noble idea, distorted and abused for the purposes of political marketing. In this partially collapsed inscription, one can now see the silence of a forgotten identity and a loud message about the slow decay not only of physical space, but of the very idea of culture as a shared public good.
An accidental confession that culture is no longer a space of life, but an archived corpse. And in a place where cultural expression is one of the last remaining ways to preserve collective consciousness and historical continuity, the “death” of culture is not just an artistic concern — it signals a deep identity crisis. Because the cultural stage is where we ask: Who are we? And when no one asks that question anymore — you know it’s not just culture that has died. Identity is dying, too.
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