‘I wish the stones here could talk’: an epic hike through Kosovo’s Accursed mountains

A trek along the Kosovo section of the Via Dinarica offers majestic Balkan scenery, magical stories and sobering reminders of this area’s recent history

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here are stone bunkers shrouded in the mist on the hillside to my right, just shy of the ridgeline marking the Albanian-Kosovo border. To my left, the view is not just clear but startlingly beautiful.

I’m able to see back down to the tiny mountain hamlet of Gacaferi, where I’d slept the previous night, to look across the deep greenery of Deçan Gorge beyond, over dense pine forests and grasslands that pop with pink and yellow wildflowers, and gaze all the way to the 2,461m summit of Çfërla and the rugged peaks of western Kosovo’s Accursed mountains.

We are on stage nine of the Via Dinarica Kosovo, a 75-mile, 13-stage hiking trail through this storied country. The route links up to the Via Dinarica, a Balkan trail that runs from Slovenia through to Albania. The Kosovo section opened in 2015, but was recently remapped and relaunched as part of a three-year, £1.2m project funded by the Italian agency AICS.