Travel Guide SuhaReka (Suva Reka)

The town is known by three names: Suharekë/Suhareka (pronounced "sourharéka") and Therandë/Theranda in Albanian, Сува Река/Suva Reka ("souva réka") in Serbian. It has about 10,500 inhabitants and is the capital of the municipality of the same name (59,000 inhabitants, 98.9% of whom are Albanians). The town is located 18 km east of Rahovec/Orahovac, 18 km north of Prizren.This small industrial city in crisis is not really a dream place: its rubber, chemical and wine factories from socialist Yugoslavia were privatized in 2005-2008, leaving many workers out of work. It was also hit hard by the war in Kosovo. In March 1999, 48 members of the same Albanian family, including 16 children, were murdered by Serbian police. As a result, immediately after the conflict, Albanian nationalists dynamited all Serbian Orthodox places of worship in the area, including the precious Mother of God-Hodegetria Church in Mušutište (12 km southwest), which housed some of the most beautiful 14th century frescoes in the Balkans. To make people forget all this, the town of the "dry river" (Suva Reka in Serbo-Croatian) was renamed "Theranda" in 2001, in reference to a nearby Roman city mentioned in texts, but never formally located. In order to find a new past, the city is now trying to promote its numerous Neolithic sites recently discovered in the area, but none of them is yet developed for visits.