Page 750 - Kosovo Metohija Heritage

Protopresbyter-stavrophor Savo B. jović
Mara and Nikola Savić with their children, Prizren, 1923
tolerance during this tragic crime. The destruction began in organized fashion from the beginning of 1950, more pre- cisely, on the feast of St. Sava. They say that a Muslim priest and a dervish passed there that day and asked in surprise what was going on. When they heard the explanation, the Muslim priest grabbed his hair and cried out as if seeing a great evil. it is also said that there some Muslim citizens who claimed that no good would come from the destroyed church: let them take two of our mosques but for the sake of our honor, the Serbian church should not be destroyed and no quarrel made between us and the Serbs. But those who had initiated this demonic act and who knew for whom they were doing it and why could not be influenced by such reasonable and foreseeable advice. in their senselessness and without shame, they used the bricks of the destroyed church to build public toilets. Real Muslims would not even have thought of doing something like this. The property of a religious community, no matter which one, was holy for them. But the corrupt servants of impossible and unimag- inable Greater albania saw it differently. They even bru- tally rejected the request of Prota Bulatović’s widow to transfer the bones of her husband from underneath the ruins to a grave with the cynical and sarcastic falsehood that this was already done. This destruction was carried out in accordance with pathological political-national plans being injected from albania, for centuries the maidservant of istanbul and later, as an independent country thanks to the spilled blood of our people, the mercenary of former austria, then italy, and now the betrayer of the Slavs... in battle against us, its liberators and sponsors.
That this destruction was neither the result of indiffer- ence nor even ill disposition toward religion in general but only against Serbs and Orthodox Christianity can also be seen from the fact that in Djakovica there are two Roman Catholic churches—the parish church with its great tower, which dominates over the city and its preponderance of
minarets, and the monastery of the Holy archangels with its two towers—that have not only not been touched but have even been helped in every regard even though there are far fewer Roman Catholics in Djakovica than Ortho- dox Serbs. But they are albanians by nationality and for the supporters of Greater albania the same as Muslims. Generally speaking, not one Catholic church or Muslim mosque in all of Metohija and Podrimlje Prizrensko was touched nor used for profane warehouses. (...) We must mention that the dome on the church was so solidly and firmly built that they had to use explosives to destroy it. For the foundations not even explosives could help to remove them and they just leveled them with the ground.
Here we have just the most visible attacks on the Or- thodox religion. if further similar actions are not seriously discouraged and satisfaction is not given to the injured sen- timent of the Orthodox Serbs, a risk to the interests of the other side could result. Our state authorities should be in- formed more about this and asked to issue an order to local authorities to take a little bit of care and undertake mea- sures against individual enemies and destructive oppres- sors. in Prizren in the Orthodox cemetery grave markers have been and continue to be broken, while in the old mil- itary cemetery there all have been destroyed. even in reli- giously mixed villages crosses are not left on the graves. His Grace Bishop Vladimir and his local church officials are unable to do anything if the Church is not fundamen- tally protected by state authorities from tyranny and ha- rassment. in order that this whole region can see and hear that the Orthodox Church has not been left without pro- tection, it is necessary:
1) To give approval for the restoration of the church of St. Mark and the desecrated monument to the deceased great philanthropist and educator Simo andrejević-igu- manov in it. The diocese authorities have covered a part of the roof over the completely stripped, inside and out, mon- astery chapel and installed a door, so the albanian shep- herds of Kobaša stop driving their cattle into it to rest. But they broke down the door and continue to defile this place unobstructed. We should allow the forming of a council for the restoration of this monastery by the citizens of Priz- ren and the Serbs from the village of Koriša, where the mon- astery has a house that should be the center of the restora- tion of at least one building in the monastery itself. The residents of Kobaša must be removed one way or another, and they should help the restoration with beams and other materials, thus at least partially compensating for what they have taken and destroyed in it. The igumanov endowment would support this restoration in different ways, and the people would do its part on this occasion. This monastery, like the monastery of the Holy Trinity nearby, which thanks to the deserving abbess Matrona is flowering and progress- ing were the sanatoriums of the nation and recovery cen- ters of the people. The albanians also were received and found support in these monasteries where they sought heal-
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