Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

29. Jevtić, Stradanja Srba, p. 450.
30. The daily Politika wrote: “It is shocking and unthinkable that someone
dared to register as an Islamic place of worship, even by mistake, one of the
holiest landmarks of Serbdom and Orthodoxy, as well as the invaluable monument
of world cultural heritage, [a place] such as the monastery of Visoki Dečani,
which celebrates this year the 650th anniversary of its foundation ...[I]t
seems that someone is playing games with the Serbian cultural heritage.” “I
Dečani pokrsˇteni” (Even Dečani have been converted), Politika, 25 April 1987.
31. A part of the poem follows (my translation):
They are stealing my memory,
They want to shorten my history,
They are taking away my centuries,
Converting my churches into mosques
Transcribing my alphabet.
They are hammering my cemeteries and tombs,
They want to uproot me,
They want to crush my cradle.
But where I can move my Dečani?
And how I can dislocate the patriarchate of Peć?
Pravoslavlje, 1 March 1990
32. Pravoslavlje, 1 March 1990. The very same vision of new sacred buildings
mushrooming in late communism as symbols with a “conflict-mitigating” function
was expressed to me by the chief architect of the Saint Sava cathedral at
Belgrade, Branko Pesˇić, in an interview on 26 April 1991 in Belgrade.
33. The cathedral of the Mother of God of Charity at the Studenica monastery
near Usˇće in southwestern Serbia was built by the founder of the Nemanjić
dynasty, Stephen Nemanja (1169–96). The white polished marble structure
fuses the Byzantine and Romanesque styles into what is known as the Rasˇka
type of sacral architecture.
34. Glasnik Srpske pravoslavne crkve, 6 June 1986, p. 133.
35. “Yugoslav communists, who seemed to put up with the self-assertive and
dissenting Croatian Catholicism, now have also to turn more attention to the
Serbian Orthodox Church, which they until recently routinely underestimated.”
Religion, Politics, Society, 28 May 1986. The article originally appeared in Die Velt,
25 May 1986.
36. Karl Gustav Stroem, “We Believe in the Spiritual Power of Tzar Lazar
and the Martyrs of Kosovo,” Religion, Politics, Society, 15 July 1982. The article
was originally published in the German daily newspaper Die Velt, 7 July 1982.
37. The Belgrade rock band YU-Grupa hit the charts with “Kosovski Bozˇuri,”
a tune about red flowers (bozˇuri) blossoming on the Kosovo battlefield. Legend
has it that the flowers are watered by the blood of the Serb warriors who died
there in 1389. Another popular tune of the 1980s was “Jefimija,” performed by
Lutajuća Srca, about the fourteenth-century Serb-Orthodox nunpoet. In 1982
the Belgrade vocal-instrumental assemble Idoli released a record entitled Apology
and Last Days, with a cover picture of Cyrillic letters and religious symbols that
the band’s songwriter, Vlada Divljan, had discovered in the library of the Serbian
patriarchate (the title was borrowed from the Serb author Borislav Pekić’s historic
novel on the beginning of World War II). The Idoli enriched their music
with chanting from the Orthodox church liturgy while evoking the Kosovo myth
notes to pages 127–129 281