Quiet footfall, the sharp scent of incense, sunbeams flickering at the stone-step church entrance that’s been worn away by the press of pilgrim feet. Inside, worshipers embrace the tomb of the 14th century king-saint, draping their bodies across it as they murmur prayer.
For a plain New England Puritan or a West Virginia evangelist, these elaborate Orthodox rituals, gold-bordered icons, 20 cycles of fresco murals, genuflecting, and ceaselessly making the sign of the cross would be dismissed as so much flummery and superstition.
But if in a holy place, the communication “of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in the poem “Little Gidding,” surely it can be heard here?
I am six hours from Belgrade in one of the most revered Serbian Orthodox churches, the medieval Visoki Decani. The young men and women who drive from Belgrade on weekends to pray here see its status as besieged, surrounded as it is by Kosovar Albanians. Their religious faith and national identity have very much merged.
We had taken a longer route than the Orthodox worshipers from the Serbian capital and had driven a day and half from Sarajevo to reach the monastic complex, still guarded by NATO troops and located deep inside Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia in 1999.
My cameraman, translator, and I had stopped off on the way in Kalinovik, the bedraggled small hometown of Serb general Ratko Mladic, who commanded the units of the Bosnian Serb Army that carried out the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys.
A few days earlier I’d been informed by a Serb nationalist leader that the massacre wasn’t genocidal because “the women weren’t killed; we let them go.” Serb loyalists recently provocatively erected a mural lauding Mladic as a “Serb hero.”
The mural isn’t up to the artistic standards of the painters who labored on the Visoki Decani’s frescoes.
We drive through the historical landscape of Balkan intolerance and war. We pass the notorious town of Foca on the banks of the clear waters of the river Drina. Here Serbian paramilitaries established a “rape camp” in which hundreds of Bosniak women were abused.
It’s hard to square the natural beauty of the Foca valley with the utter horror of what happened here. But that is the case throughout much of the west Balkans.
We drive along windy mountain roads across Montenegro’s sparsely populated northeast — roads used for dramatic car chases in several James Bond movies.
Even in a remote pasture off one of the high mountain passes just inside Kosovo there’s an echo of war with a single, bleak gravestone marking the lonely resting place of a Muslim Communist partisan fighter who fell in 1944. Uninterested cows graze nearby, bells chiming.
Later that day in the church of Visoki Decani, the abbot Father Sava Janjic tells me, conventionally enough: “This is one of the most politically turbulent areas in Europe. The Balkans have always been on the crossroads of civilizations and invasions.”
Visoki Decani was attacked five times during the Kosovo War, the final one in a series of Balkan wars in the 1990s. But that’s just the half of it. The complex has been plundered over the centuries by Ottoman troops and Austro-Hungarian soldiery. During World War II Albanian nationalists and Italian fascists targeted it. “It is a miracle it has survived,” Fr. Sava says.
Over the centuries, people of all faiths have turned to it for sanctuary. It sheltered 200 Kosovar Albanian refugees during the last conflict. “I see it as a safe haven for all people of goodwill,” the abbot says. But he acknowledges that over the centuries the monastery’s voice is much weaker than the politicians when they beat the drums of war.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
