On 2026-08-12 22:46, Neti Baho via tz wrote:
I am writing to respectfully raise an issue concerning the representation of Kosovo in the IANA Time Zone Database and to request that you consider adding a dedicated "Europe/Pristina" time zone identifier.
Thanks for bringing this up. Although my reply may not be exactly what you want, I hope it helps explain the current situation better.
For many people in Kosovo, seeing “Belgrade” as the only available location for their own local time
As explained in our "Timezone identifiers" documentation[1], this is an issue for the user interface, as timezone identifiers are not supposed to be visible to end users. I suggest that users who see inappropriate names like "Belgrade" report the issue to the developers of the software that they are using. I also suggest reporting the issue to the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)[2], which maintains localized names for places. For example, the current CLDR has a line "<mapZone other="Europe_Central" territory="XK" type="Europe/Belgrade"/> where "XK" is short for Kosovo, and I imagine that this contributes to the problem observed by users in Kosovo. It sounds like CLDR should change that instance of "Europe/Belgrade" to something like "CET", though unfortunately I am not an expert in CLDR and so would defer to the CLDR maintainers for details about this.
Kosovo is located in the Balkans, alongside Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece and other European countries, each of which has geographic locations represented through appropriate time-zone identifiers.
In TZDB proper, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia are all in the same category as Kosovo: they all have the same time zone history since 1970 and they all share the same timezone identifier. Although years ago we used more-political guidelines for timezone identifiers (see [1]), and therefore TZDB has backward-compatibility links for those old identifiers, moving forward I hope we do not get back into that political business. The more that politics intrude into TZDB maintenance, the more likely TZDB's maintenance will degrade. [1]: https://www.iana.org/time-zones/theory#naming [2]: https://cldr.unicode.org/
