Feature

Enmity and Neglect Take Toll on Serb Churches in Kosovo

Damaged church building in Shipashnica e Poshtme/Donja Sipasnica. Photo: BIRN.

Enmity and Neglect Take Toll on Serb Churches in Kosovo

Many Serbian Orthodox churches in Kosovo are derelict and decaying, unpreserved by the authorities, after Serb villagers fled their homes, while some have been vandalized and desecrated.

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp

After the St. Nedelja’s Day service was over, the church was locked to be up and again will stay locked until the annual service is held again in 2022. Few Serbs live nearby, and the young priests who used to have lodgings on the church’s premises are long gone.

For the rest of the year, no one looks after the site, even though it is on the Kosovo Culture Ministry’s temporary protection list, one of a total of 46 Serbian Orthodox churches. This makes them eligible for rehabilitation by the state, and prevents anyone from building other structures close by.

Like the Church of St. Nedelja, many other Serbian Orthodox churches in Kosovo have remained closed since local residents fled their homes after the war in Kosovo ended in June 1999 after Slobodan Milosevic’s regime pulled its forces back into Serbia.

The vast majority of the Serbs who left Kosovo at that time have never returned, greatly reducing the number of worshippers at churches in Kosovo. Many Serbs see Kosovo as the cradle of their religion and the site of some of Serbian Orthodox Christianity’s important churches and monasteries, so it has remained a flashpoint issue ever since.

Last month, ethnic Albanian students in Pristina staged protests after the Serbian Orthodox Church held a liturgy in an unfinished church on the Pristina University campus whose ownership is hotly disputed and the subject of court proceedings. Kosovo Albanisn have claimed the church was built in the Milosevic era as part of a Serb ‘colonisation’ project.

There have also been altercations at the annual celebration of Vidovdan (St. Vitus’ Day) at Gazimestan near Pristina on June 28, an important date for Serbs as it is also when Ottoman forces defeated the medieval Serbian kingdom in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. A court in Pristina last week sentenced an Orthodox believer to six months in prison for chanting nationalist slogans at the Vidovdan gathering.

Serbian officials have repeatedly complained that Orthodox churches have been vandalised in Kosovo and sometimes defaced with anti-Serb or Albanian nationalist slogans. The Serbian Culture Ministry complained last week that the Church of St. Peter and Paul in the Kosovo village of Brod had been “desecrated” with Kosovo Liberation Army graffiti.

Kosovo’s population is 95.6 per cent Muslim, 2.2 per cent Roman Catholic and 1.4 per cent Serbian Orthodox, according to the US State Department. But the country has no official state religion and its law on religious freedom states that the rights and freedoms of all faiths are protected.

But the Serbian Culture Ministry claimed that the incident in Brod showed once again that the Kosovo authorities, despite insisting that they safeguard Serb cultural monuments, are “not able to protect the churches and monasteries of the Serbian Orthodox Church from continual attacks”.

‘Many attempts to damage churches’


Clean-up operation outside the Church of St. Nedelja in Bernjacka/Bernjak. Photo: BIRN.

“No statements, no photos,” repeats Milan Stanojevic, the priest at the Church of St. Nedelja, stressing that he is not allowed to speak to the media.

Nevertheless, he explains that the church building was damaged during widespread unrest across Kosovo in March 2004, when many Serbian Orthodox Churches were burned down. It has since been renovated.

People who used to worship at the church, who came to help with the clean-up before St. Nedelja’s Day, explained that only a few Serbs have remained in the nearby town of Rahovec/Orahovac and they observe their religious rituals at a church there. Inactive churches like the Church of St. Nedelja inevitably suffer from neglect.

“The eparchate [the Serbian Orthodox Church’s Diocese of Raska and Prizren] cannot manage to look after all the churches’ needs. Very often they are falling down by themselves,” said Dragan Nikic, a Serb from Rahovec/Orahovac.

“But there have many attempts to damage and steal from churches, which requires continued protection and maintenance,” he added.

The Diocese of Raska and Prizren declined to comment on the condition of inactive churches for this article. In a statement issued in June, it alleged that a “series of aggressive attacks and organised violence is being carried out against Serbs and Orthodox religious buildings in Kosovo”.

Kosovo Police told BIRN that in the past five years, 19 cases of damage or theft have been recorded at Orthodox church properties. A US State Department report on religious freedom around the world for 2020 said meanwhile that last year, police received reports of 57 incidents targeting religious sites – of these 45 took place at Muslim sites and eight at Orthodox sites.

According to a report by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, the generally poor condition of Orthodox churches and graveyards has been largely the result of widespread desecration of Serb religious sites which took place in the aftermath of the 1999 conflict and the March 2004 unrest. The most significant factor in their continued decay has been the lack of a Kosovo Serb community in the areas around the churches, the OSCE said.

The US State Department report on religious freedom also noted that there had been “reports of incidents of vandalism throughout the year at Serb cemeteries” in 2020.

Graves lie empty after families flee


Disused church in Gurrakoc/Durakovac. Photo: BIRN.

The rusty lock on the Orthodox church in the village of Gurrakoc/Durakovac, in the western Kosovo municipality of Istog/Istok, reflects how long it has been since the site last served worshippers.

The grass in the courtyard has grown so high that it has obscured the entrance door. With nests dotted throughout the church’s dome, birds fly from inside through its broken windows and spiders’ webs hang all over the interior.

In the yard, the bushes are overgrown. The church remains a relic of a time when the village was inhabited by people of a different ethnicity and religion. Now the church is damaged and abandoned.

Jovan Cvetkovic, the local priest who serves in the Serb-majority village of Osojan/Osojane in Istog/Istok municipality, was tasked by the Diocese of Raska and Prizren with supervising the site.

He said that the church, which was built in the 1990s, was in bad condition and that the 14th Century Church of St. Nicholas, which also once stood at the site, was totally destroyed in 1999. However, Cvetkovic declined to be quoted without permission from the diocese.

The lack of care for religious sites and graveyards in places where worshippers no longer live is also evident at the Orthodox church in the village of Shipashnica e Poshtme/Donja Sipasnica in the Kamenica municipality.

The door handle of the Church of St. Petka is rusty, the walls of the building are cracked and many tiles are broken. Grass has grown up all around the abandoned church which was built more than a century ago.

In the graveyard, some graves lie empty because some families who left Kosovo decided to exhume the remains of their ancestors and rebury them where they are now living in Serbia.

At the end of May, police reported that vandals had targeted the Church of St. Petka and that an old votive candle stand had been overturned.

But Asllan Dermaku, the head of the village, whose house is close to the church, said he has doubts about the incident. “I think the wind blew the candle stand down. The church is very old and in bad condition. I don’t believe there was any vandalism,” he said.

Dermaku believes that reports of attacks on churches are frequently exaggerated. “Such things happen before the UN Security Council meetings [about Kosovo] in particular because the Orthodox Church wields conservative, at times nationalist influence, especially among Kosovo Serbs,” he claimed.

He added that he hoped that the village church will be preserved, however. “Since I was a child, I used to hear the sound of church bell. I wouldn’t like to see it destroyed,” he said.

Kosovo’s Prosecutor’s Office declined to provide any information about investigations or cases against people who have been prosecuted for vandalising churches.

Nora Arapi Krasniqi, an adviser to Kosovo’s minister of culture, insisted that buildings classified as part of the country’s cultural heritage are being preserved.

“In addition to restoration and rehabilitation, in cooperation with the Council of Europe and the European Union, numerous programmes have been developed in order to raise awareness about protecting cultural heritage sites, including Orthodox churches,” she said.

Serbeze Haxhiaj


This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp


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