Crosses of blood: sacred space, religion, and violence in Bosnia-Hercegovina - The 2002 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by Michael Sells

In 1989, on Vidovdan, the feast day of commemoration for the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, religious nationalists solidified their hold over Serbian society and imagination. In the mid 19th century Seth revolutionaries fighting Ottoman rule had re-imagined the Battle of Kosovo as the central point in the history of Serbia, the "Serbian Golgotha," the crucifixion of the Serb people. Lazar, the Serb killed at the Battle, was presented at a Last Supper surrounded by twelve knight disciples, one of whom was a traitor, another of whom (Milos Obilic) later avenged Lazar by killing the sultan. A Mary Magdalene figure, the Maiden of Kosovo, administered to the fallen Serb warriors (Emmert 1990). With each decade the national and mythic importance of Vidovdan increased. It was on Vidovdan that the Austrian Archduke was assassinated, triggering The First World War (Greenawalt 1994; Anzulovic 1999). The 1989 commemoration, being a centennial, was bound to be viewed as an historic, if not epochal event, particularly in the context of the dissolving Yugoslavia. With the approach of that day marking the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, "the Serbian Golgotha" increasingly dominated Serb public discourse. At the same time, the Serb Orthodox Church organized an international campaign to fund a massive new Cathedral, Saint Sava, in Belgrade. The Kosovo organization and the appeals for contributions to the Saint Sava contained increasing anti-Islamic invective as well as dramatic claims that Albanians were destroying the rich heritage of Serbian art and architecture in Kosovo, a heritage referred to as the Serb Jerusalem.

The preparations for the commemoration led to a revival of The Mountain Wreath, the poetic drama, composed by the 19th century bishop-prince (Vojvoda) Petar Petrovic II (known also as Njegos), that glorifies an event known as the "extermination of the Turkifiers" and the annihilation of their homes, towers, and all traces of their existence (Njegos 1973). The charge of Turkification as it was taken up by later Serb nationalists leads to the ideology that I have called Christoslavism: Slavs are Christian by nature and conversion to another religion entails ethnic or racial betrayal and the adoption of a new ethnic and racial identity (Sells 1996:29-69). Serbia, the Serb knights in The Mountain Wreath announce, will never be pure and whole until cleansed of the traitors (converts to Islam) in their midst. By considering Slavic Muslims as Turkified, it became possible to categorize them as Turks, as late occupiers of the area that belonged to Christians before them. The notion of Turkification was increasingly racialized, so that by 1994 Serb academic Biljana Plavsic was referring to Slavic Islam as caused by genetic deformity perpetuating greater genetic degradation; and her arguments--preposterous by the standards of the scientific discipline that she had long practiced--were enabled by and even made a certain sense within the Christoslavic ideology she had adopted (Sells 1998:13).