Churches and flags

Today I visited Gračanica, a Serb enclave close to Prishtina. Not much goes on on a Sunday. The market traders that line the main Prishtina-Gjilan road on other days are nowhere to be seen. That’s a shame, as the home-grown produce sold by the local Serb peasants is worth visiting for.

I strolled in a graveyard. Most of the tombstones are in a similar big, showy black marble style, with photographs of the dearly departed. It would appear that many older graves have recently been given newer stones. Most are Christian, but one stands out for me, with a five-pointed star in place of a cross. The occupant was a man who had come of age just as the communists came to power, and had presumably risen on the revolutionary tide. In placing the star on his new-looking stone, his relatives had stayed true to his communist faith. One thing that strikes me is that on many of the stones there are two names, and two pictures, but only one giving the year of death, the other left open. I think I would find it depressing to see my name and picture on my tombstone while I am still alive.

Gračanica monastery

At the centre of Gračanica is the 14th Century Orthodox monastery. It has survived fires and the removal of its lead roofing in the Ottoman period, yet still stands, its icons worn and damaged, the eyes poked out in many cases, a typical Muslim desecration. Nowadays its entrance is guarded by a couple of Swedish soldiers, razor wire topping its walls. Standing among the saints and medieval Serbian kings, the biblical scenes, one has a sense of timelessness. Some of the participants in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, which took place not far from here, are said to have prayed in this church before the fray. It is small and intimate, enclosed, until one looks up to the small dome high above, the face of Christ looking down, as if ones attention is deliberately being drawn upwards to the heavenly.

I’ve never managed to understand the Orthodox Church. With its intense conservatism, it is an alien world. On the one hand is its rich artistic heritage, its icons and churches, its mesmerising chants that seem to connect it to a spirituality largely lost in the modern world, and consciously given up in western Christianity. On the other is the poisonous nationalism that pollutes and discredits it in the eyes of so many outsiders. In a corner of the church at Gračanica is a huge Serbian flag, wound around its wooden pole. How does the pretension to be a universal church, embodying timeless values taught by a God who is said to have created all mankind in his image sit with this narrow, chauvinistic nationalism?

I am tempted to see it as a kind of paganism, worshiping at the altar of the nation. But as I am not a part of it, I really have no idea how its adherents see their Church, their worship, their God. I have no idea what this mystical entwining of a universal faith with the body of a nation means to them. This is one of the features of religious faith. Outsiders see alien faiths largely in political terms, never properly understanding the spiritual element which is generally central for the adherents themselves. It is the same with Islam. Outsiders are scared by the massed ranks of the bowing faithful, seeing them as dangerous, threatening fanatics. Brought up as a Catholic, I am often aware that outside critics generally just don’t get what it is that Catholics are about. Without having ever experienced the simple spirituality, the heart-swelling faith in God, the hope for a better hereafter, seeing only the strange ceremonies and priestly robes, the overtly political, and sometimes discreditable role that the Church has played in history, they cannot understand that, as with other faiths, at its centre is the strange but simple belief in God. Whether or not one continues to share those beliefs, it is only those who have been on the inside who really understand them.