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‘Kur ngre fjalën Anton Çetta, falet gjaku, zgjatet jeta.’

Selman Boçolli interview extract

“The reconciliation mediations began. A sentence I seem to never forget is when Anton Çetta asked Haxhi, our paternal uncle, he said, ‘How old are you?’ He answered, ‘Eighty-three.’ He said, ‘Inshallah, I manage to live that long.’ Then a pleasant mood reigned, you know. So, they stood up and he said, ‘Who has the intention to reconcile, stand up,’ and they stood on their feet, embraced one another there […] The very second we reconciled and sat to have coffee, their children ran rushing yyyyy {onomatopoeic}, they were on the second floor and they ran, they went running to our garden and invited our children to play ball, and they played all day long. That was very interesting, I thought to myself, ‘What had become of us, how come we never thought of the children?’ It happened so that our children and their children were in the same classroom. When they ran and played in the schoolyard, they had to stay on one side and avoid contact, and they said, ‘We stood still trrak {onomatopoeic}. So it doesn’t come to…’ You know, those moments, they were more or less difficult. The difficult part was to maintain [the status quo], I mean to keep it that way up to reconciliation, us and them, to not come to a more difficult conflict or a bigger tragedy.”

The full interview can be read at: https://oralhistorykosovo.org/selman-bocolli/