Pite

Pite is the word Kosovo uses for savoury pies made from layers of thin dough with a filling of meat, white cheese or spinach. In Albania the same pie is called byrek, and in Kosovo’s bakeries it is an everyday food for breakfast or a snack.

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Key facts

Origin
Kosovo and Albania; known as byrek in Albania
Other local name
Trejte
Pastry
Several layers of thin, hand-rolled dough
Common fillings
Minced meat, white cheese, spinach
Served
For breakfast or as a snack, often with a yoghurt drink

One pie, two names

Wikipedia’s article on börek notes that in Kosovo and a few other regions byrek is also known as pite, and its article on Kosovan cuisine adds a second local word for pies, trejte. Wikipedia’s article on Albanian cuisine describes pite as one of the national foods of Albania and captions a meat pie as pite me mish, or byrek.

According to Wikipedia’s article on Kosovan cuisine, the cooking of Kosovo is mainly an expression of Albanian cuisine, with some elements from other Balkan countries.

Layers of hand-rolled dough

Traditionally, the pie is built from several layers of dough rolled out thinly by hand. In Albania and Kosovo the layers and filling are usually laid in a round baking pan and covered with a final sheet of dough before baking. A correspondent for the education charity Reach the World, buying it from a Kosovo bakery several times a week, found it crunchy outside and soft and doughy within, cut from the round pan into big slices like a pizza.

The most common fillings in Kosovo are minced meat, white cheese and spinach. For Albania, Wikipedia’s börek article also lists salted curd cheese (gjizë), ground meat with onions, and spinach with eggs, and the World Travel Guide adds potato to the list of fillings for pite.

A whole family of pies

Kosovar cooks make many pies besides the classic three. Wikipedia’s article on Kosovan cuisine lists pite me spanaq, filled with spinach; kungullore, with pumpkin; resenik, with cabbage; purrenik, with leeks; and hithenik, with nettles. Kollpite is a baked crust with nothing inside, covered with yoghurt, and bakllasarm is a salty pie with a yoghurt and garlic topping.

A related dish is flija, which Wikipedia describes as mainly cooked in Kosovo; the World Travel Guide calls it a layered, pancake-like dish cooked slowly over an open fire and usually served with yoghurt or cream.

Breakfast, snack and yoghurt

The World Travel Guide describes these flaky pastries filled with cheese, spinach or meat as widely eaten in Kosovo for breakfast or as a snack. Across the former Yugoslavia, Wikipedia notes, burek is often eaten with a plain yoghurt drink, and the Reach the World correspondent noticed that many people in Kosovo eat their byrek with drinkable yoghurt.

In Emblem World, pite sits in the Kosovo food collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.

Sources

Checked by Emblem editorial on 9 October 2026.

More food from Kosovo