A religious festival in Split

I arrived back in Split a couple of days before the feast of St. Domnius, St. Duje in Croatian, the patron saint of Split. St. Duje, who hailed from Antioch, was bishop of Salona, the capital of Roman Dalmatia, just inland from present day Split. He was martyred in AD 304, during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian was himself Dalmatian, and is believed to have come from near Salona. The only Roman Emperor to abdicate, he retired to Dalmatia, and his retirement palace later formed the nucleus of Split.

The ruins of Salona today are hemmed in by the encroachment of Split and the coastal highway. Sacked by Slav and Avar invaders in the early 7th century, some of the inhabitants sought refuge within the walls of Diocletian’s palace, and in time Split spread out from there. Among the ruins in Salona are graves of early Christian martyrs. While St. Duje fell victim to Diocletian’s persecution, the former Emperor’s mausoleum was later converted into the cathedral of St. Duje in Split.

For the feast of St. Duje on 7 May, the riva, the seafront in Split, was packed with stalls selling traditional crafts. In the evening there was a pop concert. The main event was supposed to be a religious service in the morning, although it was in fact not especially well attended. A few hundred people gathered in front of the stage, but many others just sat outside the cafés or milled around the stalls.

I listened to the sermon, which was given by one of the Dalmatian bishops. I was already used to the practice in Croatia of infusing religious observances with rabid nationalism, but I had not expected such an outpouring of nationalist fervour in a church feast more than 15 years after the end of the war. The bishop appeared to be carried away with euphoria and ecstasy as he spoke in Dalmatian dialect about the defence of the Croatian language and the Croat identity. His father was a Croat, his mother was a Croat, “and I am of their blood, a faithful Croatian son”. Any religious content was secondary, a mere afterthought. He concluded with a call to “love of God, love of man, love of homeland”. The content and the whole tone of his sermon was focused above all on the last of those three loves, and there was no doubt where the main stress lay. The bishop’s religion had little to do with Christianity. The universal nature of the Catholic religion was not present. Christianity was a mere veneer for his real religion, the religion in which he passionately believed, a pagan religion, centred on worship of the nation.

The bishop bewailed the fact that the feast day was not a state holiday, noting that in times gone by the calendar was stuffed with religious holidays, but that now a holiday for St. Duje could not be found in this “so-called progressive state”. There is the rub, of course. The Catholic Church in Croatia is thoroughly alienated from the modern, secular world. Still wedded to a world of yesteryear, when faithful sons and daughters of the nation flocked to village churches in traditional, national costumes, it frowns upon the very notion of progressiveness. In the evening, young people came out in much greater numbers to listen to the pop concert. Probably he would be appalled. For myself, I prefer progressive Croatia to his vision.