Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

1998 described earlier. The old myths were recently reinvented to incorporate
reinterpretations of the past and constructions of histories of the Yugoslav
state, World War II, the Cold War, and the recent Balkan wars suitable
to the mythmakers and new relations of power in the successor states. The
two versions of the Deep Roots Myth today constitute the bases for two
official national patriotic historiographies in Croatia and Serbia.
In sum, architects of the Deep Roots Myth have labored to create a “visible”
link between ancient ethnic communities and nation-states founded
after the collapse of communism and disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.
Their favorite word is “tradition,” which they perceive as something
immutable in ever-changing history, created centuries ago yet somehow
coming to us intact and unaltered. As they make people conscious of these
allegedly immutable things that resisted the power of historical change and
invite the people to “wake up” and “return” to their “genuine” identities,
their chief aim is to profoundly alter the current situation in the society,
culture, economy, government, identity, and mentality of the people. In other
words, ethnic nationalists say that nothing has changed since the Middle
Ages in order to change everything today.
Second, the Serbian Orthodox Church, assisted by Serb nationalist intellectuals,
has constructed the Jerusalem Myth. The myth draws from the
established Kosovo myth while also borrowing from the immensely influential
post-1945 histories, narratives, and uses of the Holocaust, the state
of Israel, and the Jews. The Serbian Church consecrated two national “sacred
centers”—sites of Serbian glory and martyrdom located in Kosovo (the
Kosovo battlefield and medieval shrines) and in northern Croatia (Jasenovac).
The myth was symbolically inaugurated between 1984 and 1989 by
commemorations at Jasenovac and Gazimestan and consolidated between
1998 and 2000 by the canonization of eight Serbian martyrs or “new
saints,” victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp who thus joined the
army of Serbian saints who reside in the mythical Heavenly Serbia. The
myth prepared the ground for Serbian ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia-
Herzegovina, and Kosovo. It generated the lust for revenge and justified
crimes committed by Serbs during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The lasting
function of the Jerusalem Myth will be to boost national pride and cohesion,
strengthen the status of the Serbian Orthodox Church as partner in the
national leadership, and secure Jewish sympathies for the Serbs. In addition,
the myth’s future functions include undoing the Serbian territorial losses in
Kosovo and in Croatia, maintaining a perpetual stigma against Croats, Albanians,
and Muslims, and creating a symbolic rallying point for another
national awakening and possible Serbian reconquest of the lost territories.
The Balkan version of the Jerusalem Myth is an archetypal myth. It
evolved from archetypal civilizational myths such as the Myth of Lost Jerusalem
and the Myth of Lost Paradise and the “Eternal Return,” phrases
familiar to students of myth and identified by Mircea Eliade as progenitors
of myths that occupy a pivotal place in all religions. 39 The Jerusalem Myth
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