Dr. Gurakuq Kuçi
Senior Researcher at the Institute for Hybrid Warfare Studies “OCTOPUS”
Serbia has long launched a well-structured propaganda campaign aimed at portraying Serbs and Slavs in the Balkans as the rightful heirs of the Illyrians. What began as ideological rhetoric has now taken on an academic facade, increasingly promoted through pseudo-scholarly engagements, and is gradually escalating into a historical provocation with serious implications for the Albanian people.
While Serbia has effectively infiltrated Kosovo with divisive structures, it is simultaneously exploiting the institutional and public inattention of Albanians as part of a long-term strategic play.
The historical record is unequivocal: the claim that Serbs or Slavs are descendants of the Illyrians is a politically motivated distortion of history. Slavic tribes, including those who eventually formed the medieval Serbian state, arrived in the Balkans in the 6th–7th centuries AD, as extensively documented by Byzantine sources, including De Administrando Imperio.
The Illyrians, by contrast, were an indigenous Indo-European people, rooted in the Western Balkans long before the arrival of the Slavs. Their cultural and territorial continuity is most directly preserved today through the Albanian people.
There is no historical, archaeological, or linguistic evidence to support the existence of an “Illyro-Slavic” culture. This concept is a fabricated construct, devised by nationalist circles to forge a false autochthonous identity for Slavic populations in regions where they were never indigenous.
This narrative is part of a broader strategy of historical appropriation and hybrid propaganda, aimed at displacing Albanian heritage and replacing it with manufactured myths. By labeling Kosovo as “southern Serbia,” dressing in folk costumes, and posing in front of monasteries, Serbia attempts to cloak historical truth with choreographed symbols.
But history is not a costume one wears for a photo.
It is language, continuity, archaeology, and fact, and the facts are not on Serbia’s side.
Serbia is not preserving heritage, it is waging a battle against historical reality.
What remains is a pressing responsibility for Albanians and historians of the world: to protect truth, identity, and memory in the face of revisionist aggression.
/Argumentum.al
