Page 863 - Kosovo Metohija Heritage

The Chronicles of
the Renewed Crucifixion of Kosovo Diary and Other Records: March 1999—june 1999
Metropolitan Amfilohije (Radović)
A certain man, an old sergeant called Dimitrije, a Serb from Vojvodina, visited the Bishop Peter II Petrović Njegoš dur- ing his visit to Italy Having first made sure that the Bishop was not sleeping, having lunch or being busy and that he was by himself,DimitrijecheckedinandenteredtheBishop’sroomsaying:“I’veheard,YourGrace,thatyou’rehere SoIcameto see you out of my pure yearning for Serbia and venerate the hand of such a renowned lord of the renowned Montenegro Thisisallwehaveleft!”Thetearsstartedflowingdownhisheroic,seriousface TheBishopwasverymovedbythesewords andtears HeextendedhishandforDimitrijetovenerate,somethinghewouldusuallyneverdo,tellinghiminaverymov- ing and sad voice: “Oh, my poor people! You’re scattered around serving and working for foreigners while the fire in your own hearth is dying down...!” “Forgive me, my lord”, Dimitrije said, “I’m very sad I haven’t been home for eight years!”
“Ourhomeisnowheretofind”,theBishopreplied,“ItburneddowninKosovo!” LjubaNenadović,TheLettersfromItaly
Tintroduction
he Kosovo drama and tragedy are not from yesterday. They have lasted for more than six centuries.1 Their culprits and participants are various and miscella-
neous. Kosovo and Metohija are a centuries’ old stage of a Jerusalem / Golgotha type on which there has always been and always will be waged a warfare between good and evil, God’s justice and human injustice, until the end of the world and time.” The crazy wind” of this world that lies in evil has tried through the centuries to blow out “the holy lamp” of the New and Old Testaments in the earthly jerusalem. it has also raged during the centuries through the historical countries and the Catholic soul of the people of St. Sava. it blows in order to wrest and remove without a trace the fruit- -bearing sprout of their Kosovo covenant born out of the votive jerusalem lights. it hearkens to cause the Serbs to forget and estrange them from their centuries-old Catholic consent to Christ the Savior and His Heavenly Kingdom. The consent which was revealed and sealed on St. Vitus Day by the martyring of the Holy Prince Lazar and his champions in 1389 at Kosovo Field, the place sown with the bones of thousands of witnesses to Christ who have been cut down by the foreign hand during the long Cross-Res- urrection history of Serbia to this very day.
1 Kosovo was the scene of the famous battle held on St. Vitus Day (june 15) in 1389, when Serbian Prince Lazar and the Ottoman emir Murad both lost their lives. The Ottoman’s breakthrough into the heart of Southeast europe also marked the beginning of the five cen- turies long clash of two civilizations: european (Christian) and Near eastern (islamic). The conflict, alive to this day, is generated in the visible layer also in the clash of the two nations: the Serbs, mainly Orthodox Christians, and the ethnic albanians, mainly Muslims— transl note
The Throne of the Serbian Patriarchs,
Church of the Holy Apostles, the Patriarchate of Peć
The New Testament is the Covenant with God through
the Blood of the Lamb “slaughtered for the life of the world.”
2
The Kosovo pledge, which grew out of it, is a covenant
with Christ and a Christ-yearning choice of the whole peo- plefor“HisKingdomwhichisnotofthisworld.”Thischoice, like living evangelic pith of our Saint Sava tradition as well as of the historical church being, was witnessed by the great suffering of St. emperor Lazar and his army “in flat Koso- vo.” The battlefield of a centuries’ long slaying of God’s faith- ful Serbian heads, it was later on witnessed and sealed by posthumous martyrdom of St. Sava’s3 holy relics at the oth- er renowned Serbian field, the plateau of Belgrade’s Taš- majdan—the Old Vračar. Being for that reason named “Vra- čar field,” the Old Vračar is an earthly Serbian memorial pledge of healing. “Vrach” in the Church language always means “physician”, a servant of God, such as the Holy Heal- ers Cosmas and Damian, but never a “fortune-teller.”4 Our
2 On Vidovdan (St. Vitus Day), june 15, 1389, on the Kosovo Field, the Serbs led by Prince Lazar chose once and for all their religious, cultural, ethical, and national identity. Their choice, in the form of an unwritten pledge, the choice of freedom in the kingdom of heaven instead of humiliation and slavery in the temporal world was handed down to all post-Kosovo Serbian generations—transl note
3 Saint Sava (1174–1236), enlightener and the first archbishop of the autocephalous Serbian Church, the son of the Serbian ruler and founder of the medieval Serbian state, Stefan Nemanja. in the time of the Ottoman occupation, the Serbian people gathered together round St. Sava’s relics in Mileševa Monastery, to seek support and healing. Fearing that a rebellion against the Ottomans might be stirred up in that place, Sinan Pasha of Belgrade commanded that St. Sava’s relics be brought to Belgrade and burned there on april 27, 1594—transl note
4 in the contemporary Serbian language, the word “vrach” is obso- lete and is mainly used as a synonym for “fortune-teller”—transl note
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