Dragash

Dragash is the furthest south we went in Kosovo, and it felt like it — the roads narrow, the phone signal drops, and the villages start looking less like anything else in the country and more like something out of the mountains of northern Greece or Albania. This whole municipality sits in the Sharr range, and it’s home to the Gorani, a Slavic Muslim minority with their own dialect, their own dress traditions, and their own sense of not quite belonging fully to any of the nearby national narratives — Kosovar, Albanian, North Macedonian, or Bosnian. Lia’s family has Balkan roots and even she said the dialect she overheard in a Dragash café sounded like nothing she’d heard growing up.

We based ourselves in the town of Dragash itself for a night and used it to reach a few of the stone villages scattered up the valleys — Brod and Restelica stuck with me most, houses built from the same grey local stone as the mountains behind them, roofs low and steep against snow that apparently piles up hard here in winter. Even in late summer there was a chill in the morning air that told you this wasn’t lowland Kosovo anymore.

What I didn’t expect was how much of a hiking base this could be. The Sharr range here forms the edge of a proposed cross-border peace park connecting Kosovo, Albania, and North Macedonia, and trails head straight up from villages into alpine meadows that felt genuinely untouched — no huts, no signage, just sheep trails and the occasional shepherd who’d clearly walked these paths his whole life. We didn’t get far, maybe two hours up and back, but even that gave a sense of scale I hadn’t felt anywhere else in the country.

Food-wise, Dragash surprised us too — a Gorani specialty involving layered dough and local cheese that our guesthouse host called by a name I’ve since forgotten and never found written down anywhere. That’s Dragash in a sentence, honestly: things that exist here and pretty much nowhere else, half-documented, worth the long drive to catch before they change.

When to go: Come in July or August for hiking weather and open mountain passes; roads and trails can be genuinely difficult or closed once winter snow sets in.