Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

1966, the Serbian Church expanded its educational institutions, starting
with only one seminary in 1949; by 1966, the Church had four seminaries
and a theological school. New buildings for the theological school in Belgrade
and a seminary in Krka, Croatia, opened in the eighties. Church publishing
activity soared from a single newsletter in the 1950s to hundreds of
thousands of copies of newspapers, journals, periodicals, and books in the
late 1960s. 107 Also in the sixties, the Serbian Church was busy consecrating
newly opened churches and chapels. In the first half of 1966 alone, for
example, Orthodox dignitaries celebrated consecration of 27 new churches,
temples, and chapels; 4 belfries, 2 monastic houses, and 2 new altars. 108 In
the seventies the dynamic of construction and renewal continued. According
to the Serbian patriarchate’s biweekly newspaper Pravoslavlje, from 1972
to 1984, 30 new Orthodox churches had been built in Serbia proper alone. 109
In Croatia, the Serbian Orthodox Church, which had been the target of
genocidal assault by Croatian fascists during World War II, was treated with
special care and regularly assisted with government funds. A Croatian government
document shows that the Serbian Orthodox Church in 55 counties
and municipalities of Croatia (about 80 percent of the republic) had, in the
early 1980s, the following facilities: 257 churches and temples in use for
regular worship services; 62 chapels; 148 parish houses; 9 monasteries; 1
seminary; 12 residential buildings for clergy; 4 church museums, 4 bishop’s
palaces, and 1 patriarchal palace; and 63 churches were renewed and repaired,
as well as 7 chapels, 12 parish houses, 2 monasteries, and 4 clerical
homes. In the period of 1945–82 the Serbian Orthodox Church in Croatia
opened 12 new churches, 2 chapels, and 8 clerical houses, while 14 new
churches, 2 chapels, and 6 other buildings were under construction. By
comparison, the Catholic Church in Croatia built 71 new churches, 69 chapels,
16 parish houses, 42 parish offices, 1 monastery, 8 residential buildings
for monks and nuns, 1 seminary, 13 classrooms for religious instruction, and
1 house for retired priests in the same period. 110
In 1958, the state backed the election of the moderate Bishop Germanus
to the patriarchal throne. Hranislav Djorić-Germanus (1899–1990) had
served as a parish priest in the Morava region and had a wife and children
before he entered the monastery. The government allocated 7,600,000 dinars
and granted to the patriarch 11 luxury cars and a police escort during
his inaugural ceremonies in Belgrade and in the Kosovo province. 111 The
new patriarch praised Tito’s foreign policy of nonalignment during his foreign
travels and avoided contacts with exiled anti-Yugoslav groups. Yet
shortly after his enthronement Germanus held a requiem service at the
Tomb of the Unknown Hero in the Avala hills near Belgrade. It would become
a traditional annual event, never publicized in the state-controlled
media but always attended by a large crowd. The commemorations were
aimed at raising the awareness of the suppressed memory of World War I,
which the church considered one of the most glorious moments in national
history. The moving “March on the Drina,” rarely heard in public, was per-
the first strife 39