European integration is not just about the possibility of acquiring economic benefits from a significantly better-doing community of states, in the light of an impoverished nation who has been under constant international embargoes for over a decade.

All the scant reading materials mention the fact that the cave was discovered in 1969 “by accident,” as if caves were commonly discovered on purpose. (No one expects a hole where there should be dirt and rock: the discovery of a cave must nearly always be an accident.) I feel foolishly proud to be one of the relatively few people I imagine has been admitted since it was opened to the public less than forty years ago. It’s not hard to go in; it’s easy. But, I suppose, relatively few people have, in the scheme of things.

Gadime Cave is named for the village of Gadime, and the walls are not the crumbling limestone I always expect. They are smooth rounded marble, sucked and lumped and emptied from an entire hill of marble. Striped and mottled red and pink and brown, with a ceiling like the bottoms of waves, the underskins of whirlpools and eddies. There are rare crystals, sexually suggestive stalactites and other unusual creations, but few things in the cave are much more wondrous than the tour guide.

“Professor” is a title granted virtually any teacher or holder of a diploma, earned or bought, so we are amused but not surprised to hear an elderly professor on a local television game show misidentify Mariah Carey as the scientist responsible for discovering radium. No, Professor—I’m sorry but the ‘T’ in ‘NATO’ does not stand for ‘Turkish.’ Let’s not be hasty to judge him. Trivia, like bread and liquor, is a cultural phenomenon. The boundaries of societal knowledge are drawn by need, and even intellectual nonessentials must be accompanied by the appropriate documents and a wad of Euros before being cleared through Customs. Like everything else, even trivia clears Customs twice: one upon entering, and once on leaving, on its way to the halls of other government buildings.

The activities that institutions of Republic of Kosovo and of Republic of Serbia seem not to have the guts to undertake neither in Prishtina nor in Belgrade and not even in the aristocratic atmospheres sealed with diplomacy in the lavish hotels of Vienna,