The photograph of Adem Jashari, a hero of Kosovo’s recent history, stands tall in the front of the building renaming what was known as the Boro and Ramizi Palace of Youth and Sports, named after two Second World War Yugoslav partisans. Designed in 1974 by Živorad Janković, with its sharply rising roof with two sets of beams, it took several years to build. Boro and Ramizi quickly became one of the main recreational venues of the city for whose construction contributed Pristina residents too. Inspired by Metabolist architecture, the Boro and Ramizi megastructure celebrates both function and form; built in three stages, the first two were completed before the fall of Yugoslavia and the third one consisting of the construction of an open and a closed pool and a bridge to Grand Hotel remains unfinished to this day. The sports hall burned down in 2000 and now is used as a parking lot.
Elida Pastry Shop
After having worked in Belgrade for a long time under the name Slavija, Nexhat Mustafa’s pastry shop moved to Pristina in 1978. Mahmut Bakalli, the leader of the Communist Party in Kosovo at the time, helped him transfer the business to the Boro and Ramizi Youth and Sports Palace. Mustafa, as a token of appreciation named the pastry shop Elida, after Bakalli’s youngest daughter. During the ‘90s, Elida became a symbol of civic resistance. Today, with its well preserved interior, Bauhaus-style seats accompanied by a schaumpide, Elida serves up trips back in time.
The Pristina Gallery of Arts
The Pristina Gallery of Arts was the first exhibition space in the then-Yugoslav province of Kosovo. The gallery was founded in 1979 and was located in the Boro and Ramizi Palace of Youth and Sports. Shyqri Nimani was the Gallery’s first director and, with a background in graphic design, led the institution for ten consecutive years. Similar to museums of modern art, the Gallery of Arts started off with a modest collection whose number grew to over nine-hundred works. The first pieces to become part of the collection were inherited from the Cultural Propagandistic Center, which were mainly produced during the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Gallery’s first exhibition titled Bashkëkohësit Tanë [Our Contemporaries] was curated from this initial collection. Today, the Pristina Gallery of Art’s legacy is continued by the National Gallery of Kosovo.