Page 861 - Kosovo Metohija Heritage

Patriarch Pavle in public transportation
mouths on the journey? Or shall we turn Turks, like so many around us? The priest replied: Brothers, I am a little above you, and the pressure I have to bear is even greater But I beg you to endure A year or two, and freedom will come. They said: But, father, that is what we have been listening to for more than five hundred years, and yet nothing has come out of it! If we knew that it would come even in fifty years, we would muster our last strength and endure! and the priest said: That is what I, too, beg you!
and then the old man ended his story: “That was in 1910, and freedom came in 1912. if we had given in then, we would have lost in two years all that we had been hold- ing on to for five hundred years.”
The essence of the story is this: There would have been no trace of Serbs in Kosovo if they had not cherished the hope that they would remain on their fathers’ land and if they had not summoned up, week by week, the tenacity and resolution to endure and survive. at present, too, you can hear speculations on the loss of Kosovo, but the mod- est Serbian houses and the Serbian shrines are still stand- ing there. This shows how many difficult years has weath- ered the most valuable contribution which the Serbs were able to make, and which they did make, to the common treasury of man’s achievements.
each war is a disaster, and the civil war as it was in Cro- atia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo is the worst di- saster of all. in the civil war, the enemy is the neighbor, fellow-citizen, even a relative in the case of mixed mar- riages. There is much we have to repent for, both we and albanians, there have been great disaster and atrocities. Forgiveness comes after repentance.
The future of the Serbian nation—not only in Kosovo and Metohija, but wherever it dwells—will depend on whether it acts in full accordance with what is holy and honest, righteous and evangelical. Both the present and the future can be built on Truth alone.
Truth must be hampered, and it cannot be replaced by ingenuity in the affair of national and state importance, or, for that matter, in any other affairs.
Patriarch Pavle walking on a street in Belgrade
it has been alleged that i am subverting, together with some others, the unity of Yugoslavia with the aim of estab- lishing a Greater Serbia. But i am saying today again: if the setting up of our independent state and its preservation and progress were possible only at the cost of crime, i would rather wish that not only Greater Serbia, but also small Serbia and all the Serbs including myself may vanish than accede to anything unrighteous and inhuman. That is what the Covenant of Kosovo and the commitment to the King- dom of God means to me.
Patriarch Pavle, 2005
Serbian Patriarch Paul (Pavle)
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