As a policy analyst and researcher, I’ve spent years converting numbers into documents: policy briefs, strategic plans and legal memos. I know how to follow facts. But I had never seen them become flesh, dialogue, stage or silence. I had never seen data become theatre. Until I got a call from the Kosovar playwright Jeton Neziraj.
Neziraj’s reworking of his 2019 play, “In Five Seasons of the Enemy of the People,” now titled “Prishtina: The Premeditated Killing of a Dream,” wasn’t a rewrite. It was something deeper. A confession, an accusation and perhaps, an attempt at redemption.
My role was supposed to be marginal. I was asked, simply, to gather data and facts on illegal construction, environmental damage and public health in post-war Prishtina, and deliver them to Neziraj. Nothing more. A technical task, really. But I overstayed. Not because I had to, but because I couldn’t look away. I wanted to witness the transformation.
“This time,” he told me, “it’s not fiction. This time we name names.” The name at the center of this play is one that’s faded from public memory, but it shouldn’t have: Rexhep Luci.
If you’ve walked through Prishtina, you’ve likely noticed the chaos: buildings crowded together, suffocating one another. Yet, you may have also seen a few neighborhoods with green parks, nearby kindergartens, and ample space between residential buildings, such as Dardania and Sunny Hill. If you’ve strolled through Prishtina’s center, you might have seen the name of the architect who oversaw the building of these neighborhoods on a street sign. Some may remember the man himself — the architect. But very few recall his warning.
Rexhep Luci was one of the first generations of trained urbanists in Kosovo. But he wasn’t just a planner. He was a believer.
In the 1970s, Luci led the Self-Governing Community of Interest (SIZ), a socialist institution in Kosovo tasked with overseeing Prishtina’s construction projects. Under his leadership, the SIZ prioritized collective housing, driving modernist urban expansion in neighborhoods like Dardania and Sunny Hill, with designs emphasizing green spaces and community needs. While most cities in Yugoslavia were adopting the concrete stamp of socialist urban design, he envisioned something else — something softer and more humane. A Prishtina with public parks, a unique character and breathable space.
“Cities,” he once said in a speech covered by Rilindja newspaper, on January 7, 1978, “should reflect the soul of their people, not just the greed of their builders.”
Yet, as an Albanian, he faced relentless persecution from the Serbian-dominated system, which marginalized him despite his dedication. By 1982, political pressures forced Luci’s transfer from the SIZ to the Urban Planning Unit within the municipality of Prishtina, where he worked on the Prishtina Urban Development Plan 2000. In the late 1980s, like many Albanians, he was dismissed. War soon engulfed Kosovo.
After the 1999 NATO intervention, Prishtina emerged in ruins under the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) administration. Appointed Director of Urban Planning, Luci returned with his Vision for Prishtina 2000–2020, a comprehensive plan to curb chaotic high-rises, protect parks, and restore orderly development. However, UNMIK required the timeline to be shortened, resulting in a five-year blueprint covering 2000–2005.
But visions, it turns out, can be dangerous, especially when they get in the way of someone’s next million.
“Rexhep Luci was the dam. When they killed him, the flood began.”
In “Prishtina: The Premeditated Killing of a Dream”, Neziraj’s play captures this moment with brutal accuracy.
There is the architect, (played with haunting gravity by Armend Smajli), dignified and defiant.
There is Meti, the smooth-talking construction mogul, (played by Kushtrim Qerimi,) who sees the city not as home but as an asset. “I see skyscrapers, fifty floors high,” Meti boasts from his rooftop perch. “Fortresses worth hundreds of millions.” He isn’t interested in public squares or green spaces. He wants a return on investment (ROI) per square meter.
And then there is Pierre, (played by Shpetim Selmani,) the international administrator, a thinly veiled caricature of the real UNMIK officials of the time, who says all the right things about stability and democracy, but who folds easily under pressure. “I want peace,” Pierre says. “Not confrontation.” And with that, he shelves the plan. Just like they did in real life.
At one point in the play, Pierre explains his delay: “We cannot afford to anger the construction companies. Stability matters more than order.” In other words, let the mafia build. Just don’t rock the boat. But Luci did rock the boat. He halted permits. He signed demolition orders, including one for a luxury complex being built illegally in Germia National Park. He pushed for hearings. He gave interviews calling out “the gangrene of illegal construction.”
There is the Head of the Construction Workers’ Syndicate (played by Afrim Muçaj), who begins as a labor leader fighting for safety and dignity, only to be bought off with a small apartment in Meti’s development. “For the good of the people,” he explains, accepting the bribe.
Then there is the architect’s daughter (played with aching restraint by Verona Koxha), a UN interpreter who returned from a refugee camp in Macedonia. She sees her father struggle, then unravel. In one unforgettable scene, Meti hands her a package for her father; inside it, a revolver. “A gift,” he says. And you know exactly what’s coming.
The murder isn’t symbolic. It happened.
On September 11, 2000, after leading a three-day workshop about his urban plan, Luci was gunned down, shot six times in the back outside his apartment. No arrests were ever made. UNMIK’s police detained three men. But no one was charged. The case faded from the headlines.
They named a street after him. They named a construction regulation after him and then they moved on. But the city didn’t. The city paid the price.
Today, Prishtina continues to drown in concrete. According to data from the municipality, millions of square meters of construction permits are issued annually. Air quality levels regularly rank among the worst in Europe, exacerbated by overbuilding, traffic and lack of regulation. Deaths on construction sites remain alarmingly high, as safety rules are flaunted or ignored. And still, the skyline rises. But with it rises a question: for whom?
This was the question we posed when I, on behalf of the Atlas Institute — an organization promoting sustainable development and environmental change — joined Neziraj’s team to provide the data: How many people had died on construction sites since the war? What was the environmental toll of unchecked urban growth? How many green spaces had been erased? The numbers were stark. But they weren’t enough. It took theatre to bring them to life.
The data on illegal buildings, environmental degradation, and their impact on public health were woven into the play, not as abstract statistics, but as narrative turning points. They helped illustrate what happened to Prishtina after the architect was gunned down: a city consumed by lawlessness, stripped of planning and suffocating under cement.
Neziraj took those statistics and turned them into characters and into scenes. Into moral dilemmas that unfold on stage like a court trial with no judge. The architect becomes a lone figure, fighting against a system too entangled to fight back. One of the most haunting lines comes during a televised interview scene, censored by the UN official, distorted by Meti and the media. “What’s the difference between the UN and the mafia?” Luci asks. “The mafia is better organized.”
Blerta Neziraj, the play’s director, leads a politically charged production, guiding the actors through a process that is half-play, half-public inquiry. The cast doesn’t just act; they testify. They speak not just as performers, but as citizens. In the final moments, one actor breaks character and says, “Rexhep Luci was the dam. When they killed him, the flood began.” That flood, he says, is still rising.
This is what makes “Prishtina: The Premeditated Killing of a Dream” more than art. It’s an autopsy. Of a man, a city and a system. It doesn’t ask who pulled the trigger. It asks who profited.
It’s easy to think of Luci as a martyr now. But what the play reveals is that he was not trying to be one. He was a man doing his job. A professional trying to restore order to the chaos. He might have believed, perhaps naively, that the institutions, local and international, would back him. That the people would rally to his side.
They didn’t.
Because cowardice comes in many forms: the silence of those who knew, the excuses of those who governed, the rationalizations of those who benefited. And yes, even the pragmatism of those of us who, for too long, filed these stories as policy cases instead of human tragedies.
But there is one thing theatre can do that no memo or white paper can: it can make us feel again. And in feeling, perhaps begin to see that Prishtina isn’t just overbuilt; it’s been betrayed. Unless we start telling the truth, not just on stage, but in the streets and in our policies, we risk repeating the same script, one where courage is punished and concrete wins.
Twenty-five years after Luci’s unsolved murder, if “Prishtina: The Premeditated Killing of a Dream” succeeds in anything, it’s this: it refuses to let us forget what was lost. And maybe, just maybe, it can help us find the courage to finish what he started.
Editors’ note: Prishtina: The Premeditated Killing of a Dream” will premiere on May 23, 2025 at ODA Theater.
Feature image: Agron Demi / K2.0.
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