Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

and Ohrid, consisted of the archbishop-metropolitan of Ohrid as head of the
Church, an assembly of bishops, and the Holy Synod as the Church’s executive
body of several elected bishops, chaired by the archbishopmetropolitan
of Ohrid. In 1981, the following were under the jurisdiction of
the Church of Macedonia: 6 dioceses in Yugoslavia, one in Australia, and
one in Canada; 225 parishes, 102 monasteries, about 250 priests, and some
15 monks. In the 1970s, a seminary and theological school were opened in
Skopje, and there were about one hundred students in each at the beginning
of the 1980s. 49
Religious Minorities
In addition to the four mainstream religious institutions, Yugoslavia was
also the homestead of around 40 religious minority groups, organized in
religious communities and recognized by the state under the names they
referred to themselves. They are worth mentioning not merely to complete
the presentation of the ethnoreligious mosaic of Yugoslavia but also to contrast
them to the mainstream religious organizations with regard to the
crucial interaction between religion and nationalism. In contrast to the
four major denominations, in which religion and nationality commingle
and religious leaders carry out a “national mission” in the political sphere
and through mutual competition, the religious minorities, though not altogether
apolitical, are definitely less nationalistic. Most religious minorities
are multiethnic (only two are ethnically based: the Slovak Evangelical
Christian Church of the Augsburg Confession and the Romanian Orthodox
Church).
In the early 1980s, the Federal Commission for Relations with Religious
Communities in Yugoslavia, listed the following as the largest among the
minor religious communities: (1) The Evangelical Church, headquartered in
Zagreb, is an association of several evangelical denominations; it had several
dozen places of worship and more than 40 ministers throughout the country:
(2) The Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia embraced 29
Jewish communes and 5 commissariats, with headquarters in Belgrade.
There were two professional rabbis in Zagreb and Belgrade. According to
the census of 1953, the number of Jews by nationality was 2,307 and by
religion 2,565: (3) The Calvinist Reformed Church had 43 parishes in Vojvodina
and northern Croatia: (4) The Baptist Church, with its seat in Zagreb,
had 20 professional preachers and 54 parishes: (5) The Methodist
Church, headquartered in Novi Sad, Vojvodina, had 40 preachers and four
church districts in the eastern part of the country: (6) The Christian Community
of Jehovah’s Witnesses had its seat in Belgrade and more than 130
communities in all Yugoslav republics: (7) The Pentecostal Church of Christ
maintained its main administration and its Theological Institute, for the
training of preachers, in Zagreb and in regional communities in all the
Yugoslav republics: (8) There were Seventh-Day Adventist churches in Vo-
religion, ethnicity, and nationhood 13