Taste -- Houses of Worship: Prayer and Politics

THe Wall Street Journal / Weekend Journal | 10/17/2003 | Tunku Varadarajan

[Whitebread]

WEEKEND JOURNAL

Taste -- Houses of Worship: Prayer and Politics

By Tunku Varadarajan Gracanica, Kosovo 831 words 17 October 2003 The Wall Street Journal W19 English (Copyright (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

-- The ceremony was elaborate. First came espresso cups, filled with sweet, viscous coffee. Then glasses of faintly cloudy water. Finally the priest who was serving us -- a bearded giant about 6-foot-4, sheathed dauntingly in a black cassock -- brought us thimbles of plum brandy. He must have seen eyes light up (it was four in the afternoon, well in advance of cocktail hour), for he allowed himself a brief, toothy smile. "Please!" he said to our small group, beckoning us to partake. He then withdrew to a corner, where he stood sentinel, an adamant Serb statue.

The little old man presiding nodded his head hospitably, and once we'd each reached for our liquid of choice, he began to speak his mind. "They killed two of our boys recently," he said, in the clipped sentences of a dignitary accustomed to an interpreter. "Shot them while they were swimming in a river." He shook his head mournfully, and his acolytes murmured their revulsion. "We asked parliament to have a minute's silence in their memory. They refused. They refused!"

The emphasis in the little old man's last words was disconcerting. Until that moment, he, Bishop Artemije -- Serb Orthodox bishop of the Kosovo region of the former Yugoslavia -- had seemed only to whisper. Now he appeared to want to be heard. The boys were Serbs, his parishioners; their killers were Kosovar Albanians, Muslim separatists who are hell-bent, Bishop Artemije believes, on driving the Serbs out of Kosovo, where they now constitute only a small minority in a demographic sea of Albanians -- the same Albanians who dominate Kosovo's parliament, where a technicality, that the rulebook only allows silence for dead legislators, was used to frustrate Bishop Artemije's plaintive request for a formal, public mourning for the murdered Serb boys.

"This is what I spend my time doing," the bishop said ruefully, as if apologizing for the temporal nature of his business. His measured tones were in contrast to the feelings of some of the parishioners present at the meeting, who, it was clear, saw their lives as an irreducible conflict between Christian Serbs and the Albanian Antichrist. The gloom in their hearts was palpable, as if they knew that their days in Kosovo were numbered and that their only option now was to stage an elaborate theater of outrage -- in hopes of getting the outside world to come to their aid. "They will dynamite everything, even our church in Gracanica," one told me. "They" are the Albanians; and the church is one of a score of Serb Orthodox churches, dating from the 13th to the 18th centuries, whose presence imbues Kosovo with near-mystical importance for many Serbs, making Kosovo, as one Serb told me, "like our Judea and Samaria."

Gracanica is five miles from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and is the bishop's seat. He lives in the monastery adjacent to the church, a haunting place -- now afflicted also with that contagious Serb gloom -- built in 1321. The Byzantine frescoes inside the church are stunning and, as Edith Durham once described them, "old-world, barbaric, and decorative," with gaunt saints, their cheeks made more sunken still by the ghostly light. The iconography even explains, in a curious aesthetic way, the Serbs' stubborn atavism. Ars longa, vita brevis, Serbia forever.

History is but a flash to the Serbs, for they still kindle themselves with fuel from the 14th century. They were defeated in battle by the Turks in 1389 -- in a place near here, called the Field of the Blackbirds -- and have turned that defeat into an elaborate myth, a kind of Balkan "nunca mas," or "never again," an eerie, vengeful national myth of regret and reprisal. "Losing" Kosovo to the Muslim Albanians today is unthinkable because it evokes the loss of Kosovo to the Muslim Turks 600 years ago. So when prayers are conducted at Gracanica, they are not so much an attempt to transcend political conflict as an extension of existential polemics. Orthodox prayer is politics in Kosovo.

Albanian extremists have only heightened Serb fears by blowing up numerous churches since 1999, when NATO intervened to put a stop to Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic terror against the Kosovar Albanians. That said, there is now a groundswell in Albanian civil society that offers hope of a way forward. Many nations have their spiritual roots left behind in other territories: the Iranians in Najaf and Karbala; the Turks all over Central Asia; the Greeks in Istanbul. If the Albanians can make promises to protect Serb shrines, and the Serbs can bring themselves to believe those promises, there should be no reason why Bishop Artemije and his flock cannot arrive at a modern way of living with reality.

And then perhaps the year 1389 might cede, at last, to the present.

[FormerLib]

If the Albanians can make promises to protect Serb shrines...

The first Albanian leader to make such a promise will be killed by the KLA. This is why no such promise will ever be made and why the only solution is to remove the NATO troops and return Kosovo back to its rightful owner, Serbia.