During ten days in March, a group of 28 youngsters from Kosovo, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria and Germany has gathered in Velika Hoca, Kosovo for a Youth Exchange that is part of the 2 years long Balkan Myth Busters project coordinated by VCV Serbia and GAIA Kosovo supported by Erasmus+. The project is aiming to create exchange about modern political myths between young people and skills that enable them to burst the propaganda they are facing in their daily life, propaganda that is making neighbours become strangers, even enemies to each other.
The group went through the confrontation with political myths in the participating countries and the analyse how they are used in order to stabilize and justify the dominant political narrative. A lecture about Kosovo’s History by Shkelzen Gashi, author of “The History of Kosovo in the schoolbooks of Kosovo, Serbia, Albania and Macedonia” illustrated impressively how history is manmade and a subjective tool of propaganda. Discussions about identity and their relatedness to political mythology gave many participants a different point of view upon their own behaviour.
During the Youth Exchange, also “Mything Point” blog was created. The aim of this blog is to tell the story of the Balkans from a different perspective, breaking the ever-present narrow narrative of conflict and ethnical separation. The Balkans are far more than that, but stories of a interethnically shared life are mostly not covered by media.
A second Youth exchange with the goal of creating new narratives, new myths for a peaceful future in togetherness on the Balkans will take place in Trstenik, Serbia in August 2017.