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BRESJE, Yugoslavia, Nov 2 (AFP) - When Lajos Balog stepped on the Pristina theatre stage in February to play the leading role in the drama "Collective Centre", he could have hardly imagined that few months later, he would live in one, as a refugee.
Balog, 72, an ethnic Hungarian, has been a prominent actor of the Serb-language drama in the National theater for 50 years, before being expelled from the stage and his home by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in August.
He now lives with his wife in a centre for displaced Serbs in Bresje, a village 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of Pristina, along with 450 other Kosovo Serbs who share his fate.
"After the arrival of KFOR troops in June, all the actors who played in Serb language were expelled by the Albanians who took over the management of the theatre," Balog said.
When he tried to get into the theatre in late June, he found an inscription on the door saying "No entry for Serb actors."
The National Theatre in Pristina was renamed "Adem Jashari" after a martyr-turned leader of the ethnic Albanian pro-independence guerillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, killed in clashes with Belgrade security forces in 1998.
"A guard at the entrance told me that one of my former Albanian pupils and a famous actor in Belgrade, Enver Petrovci, upon his return to Pristina personally forbade that I and other Serb actors enter the theatre," Balog said.
Balog said that both Serb and Albanian-language plays were performed in the Pristina Theatre before the beginning of NATO air strikes in March.
When all other Serb actors left Pristina because of rising threats by the Albanians, or after being expelled from their homes, Balog decided to stay in his flat.
"For a month and a half I verbally fought against extremists and looters who tried to kick me out of the flat," he said.
But on the night of August 7, looters managed to get in, put a knife on his throat and ordered him to leave.
"I could only take my documents and my theatre awards," he said with resignation, showing his three prestigious Yugoslav theatre diplomas.
He and his wife found shelter in the collective centre for displaced persons in Bresje. Despite calls from relatives and friends from his native Vojvodina province, in the northern Serbia, Balog decided to stay.
"I will never leave Kosovo, I spent 50 years here," he said.
"I am the only Hungarian who stayed in Kosovo, and the oldest actor playing in Serb language in Kosovo - all my life is here."
Balog, who once dominated the theatre with his tall figure and a deep voice, now looks broken, his eyes filled with tears.
"When I arrived here in August, I only had a T-shirt and sneakers on me, everything else I wear was given to me by these people around me in the centre," he said.
"I have never seen these people in my life, but we now live like one family."
Around 450 displaced Serbs, mostly from western Kosovo, now live in a local school turned into a collective centre in Bresje.
They sleep in the school's gymnasium with little or no heating, and depend on humanitarian aid for survival.
Serbs in Bresje do not have their own shops since a grenade attack in early October on the village marketplace that left four of them dead and 37 wounded.
"We cannot go out on the streets and speak Serbian, we cannot shop, we are simply prisoners," said Mira Jaksic, a displaced woman from Prizren, in south-eastern Kosovo.
Jaksic vowed to to stay in Kosovo, and she dreams of returning to her home.
But Balog said he "is determined his dream will come true."
"I have faith and I believe that I will once again step on the stage of the Pristina theatre and be able to act in Serbian," he said.