During the final week of the 2026 PISU Anthropology Summer School course on “Ethnographic Film”, taught by Eralda Lameborshi from East Texas University and Arsim Canolli from UP, students left the classroom for two days of field visits, encountering different histories, landscapes, museums, communities, objects, foods, and forms of cultural memory in Krushë e Madhe and Mitrovica.
On 14 July, the class travelled to Krushë e Madhe, where we visited the historic Museum of the Krushë e Madhe Massacre, the local farm Korr e Ha n’Katun, and Bella Agrotourism restaurant.
The visit to the Museum of the Massacre offered a powerful and deeply moving insight into the massacre committed against the Albanian and Ashkali communities of Krushë e Madhe by Serbian forces in March 1999. Evan Grifitth, a student from the US said” “Our tour, led by a survivor who was 8 years old when the event took place, was a moving lesson on this important recent history of Kusha e Madhe which is often overlooked. The museum showcased interviews with survivors, artifacts of the massacre, belongings of the victims and more. “
The museum brings together filmed interviews with survivors, photographs, personal belongings of victims, objects recovered after the massacre, documentary materials, and other forms of testimony. It showed students how a local museum can become a space of mourning, public education, community memory, and memorial justice. The experience also raised important questions about how traumatic histories are documented, narrated, exhibited, filmed, and transmitted to future generations.
After leaving the museum, the group visited Korr e Ha n’Katun, a beautiful local farm filled with wildflowers, blackberries, apples, walnuts, vegetables, and many other plants and fruits. Students enjoyed freshly picked watermelon and plums while talking with the farmers about cultivation, seasonal work, local knowledge, and the relationship between people, land, and food.
The farmers explained how much they enjoy teaching visitors where food comes from and why it is important to understand the work and natural processes behind what we eat. The visit offered a different but equally valuable ethnographic encounter: one centred on agriculture, environmental knowledge, everyday labour, hospitality, and the sensory experience of rural life.
The day concluded with a generous dinner at Bella Agrotourism, where the students shared a large selection of traditional Albanian dishes prepared with fresh ingredients from local farms. For the international students in particular, the meal offered an opportunity to experience Albanian food culture not simply through explanation, but through taste, conversation, hospitality, and eating together.
On 15 July, the class travelled north to explore the cultural, geological, industrial, and archaeological heritage of Mitrovica. At the Trepça Crystal Museum, students encountered the extraordinary mineral wealth of the Trepça mining complex. The museum’s remarkable collection of crystals, minerals, and geological specimens revealed the hidden beauty beneath the region’s landscape while also opening conversations about mining, labour, industry, natural resources, and the historical importance of Trepça. They also learnt about Trepça’s history and miners’ strikes.
The colourful and unusually shaped crystals allowed us to observe how natural materials become scientific specimens, museum objects, aesthetic forms, and symbols of regional identity. The visit demonstrated that anthropology can begin with people and social relations, but it can also follow objects, materials, landscapes, and the complex connections between nature, work, economy, and culture.
At the Museum of Mitrovica, the students travelled through many different historical periods and forms of material culture. The exhibitions included fossils, archaeological objects from the Neolithic period, historical artefacts, traditional clothing, embroidery, lacework, domestic objects, and other examples of the region’s rich cultural heritage.
Moving through these collections allowed the students to consider how museums organise time, select objects, construct historical narratives, and connect distant periods of human life. From prehistoric artefacts to finely made textiles, embroidery, and lace, the exhibitions demonstrated the diversity of skills, traditions, aesthetic practices, and everyday forms of creativity preserved in the museum.
Together, these two days turned the region into an extended ethnographic classroom. These visits were exercises in attentive observation, listening, participation, conversation, and reflection, the fundamental practices of ethnographic fieldwork and filmmaking.
Through museums, survivor testimony, farms, meals, minerals, archaeological objects, textiles, and landscapes, the students experienced anthropology as a way of being present in the world: looking carefully, listening and filming respectfully, asking questions, and learning from the people, places, materials, and histories they encountered.