The Adem Jashari Family Memorial is an expansive compound located on about four acres of land in the village of Prekaz, Kosovo. It is a site which commemorates the man and the sacrifice of Adem Jashari, a Kosovar freedom fighter who, along with 54 members of his family, were killed on or within a day of 7 March 1998.
The Jashari Family houses which were besieged by the Yugoslav National Army have been preserved; covered by free-standing roof structures and surrounded by scaffold-style catwalks. There are a few small souvenir shops near by. A great, three-dimensional, triangular building has also been erected near by; serving as a marker of infamous slaughter.
There is a pathway, paved in blood-red marble winding its way throughout the memorial. One path leads up a gentle incline to a bunker where Adem and his family would travel to from time to time. The central focal point of the entire complex is, however, the 59 solid-core, Carrera marble grave markers which line three steps of the hillside across the street from the Jashari family plot. The graves have been placed chronologically by generation beginning with Adem’s father and succeeding to his brothers and himself, followed by their wives and children.
This was murder, the murder of an entire family. Of the 59 markers, 55 of them read “Jashari.” In the tradition of ethnic cleansing, only one member of the family was found alive. Blerim Jashari, the youngest to die in the tragedy, was born in 1992. I wasn’t able to find a more specific birthday than that.
A few years ago I had the good fortune to visit the Good Hope Baptist Church in Adair Oklahoma. Five of the six founders of that church have my last name; Hughes. Looking over the graveyard outside of that church I found about forty grave markers with my last name engraved in the stone. It was unsettling. If 55 members of my family were to die on the same day, who would that leave? Would there be anyone to remember us? Would anyone remain to pass on our legacy to historians and future generations? For the Jashari Family, the day they died marked the birthday of the nation of Kosovo.
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