Once, twenty-five years ago, we were in Kotor. This was before the "clan war", in the time immediately after NATO bombing. There was no visible crime, but the streets of this marvelous medieval city were crowded with special police on the corners.
However, we were not interested in that at the time.
We were impressed by the city, which stood so vertical and a stone below the hill we called San Giovanni. Even to this day, I'm not sure that that's the name of that hill, but the cafe at the entrance to the town was called that, and when you turn a little around the corner, the big Church of St. Tripun "bursts" in front of you - for such and such a town. There is a small square in front of which there are many in Kotor, there was a pizzeria on the square and we sat and ate pizza in the shadow of the monumental bell towers of this church, which we were told was from the ninth or tenth century.
That was before internet, and there weren't even books about famous tourist places on every corner, so we looked at the cathedral with our lips smeared with peels and told ourselves that it was fantastic that we are in the same place where people have lived for more than a thousand years and, admittedly, they don't really eat pizza, but they certainly pass by, talk and so on from generation to generation, for centuries.
There is something religious when you find yourself in such old places, it seems to you that the fact that life there continues continuously for centuries is an indication that this is the right place for people to live, who once settled there, never left. It seems to you that he lives in such places Bog, but I won't lie, I came to that feeling much, much later - at that time we walked around the city, climbed San Giovanni and visited places of worship. St. Tripun, indeed, was built in the ninth century, that is, in the era of unified Christianity, and it is one of the few places of worship that I have visited and in which, it seemed to me, the original Christian god, undivided into incomprehensible little things from which two new religions were born.
My friend Dušan, with whom we have been traveling together "all our lives", then said a sentence that we have used for years as an ironic explanation of why, on earth, we visit places of worship.
"I'm not interested in religion, I respect real estate," Dule said, and that sentence will follow us all our lives.
WHERE GOD LIVES
Do people go to churches because God lives there or because they are architectural wonders for the age in which they were created and with their monumentality or refinement of details, they raise human work and work to a special religious level? Does God live in the churches, be it the terrible Old Testament one or the soft and warm Christian God, the progenitor of a new covenant, a new faith, a new morality that, more than 2000 years later, remains an unreached ideal for people who are part of the Christian community? Or in the churches does God live incarnate through the works of people who are so great that superhuman characteristics are attributed to them?
Just last year, we visited several holy places in our travels, so I thought, when I was counting in my head all the possible churches and cathedrals and monasteries that I visited since that day in front of St. Munich, Siena, Pisa, Liverpool, to the unquiet heart of St. Naum in Ohrid and the venerable relics of St. Milutin in Sofia, under the sentence "I respect the unfaithful", he asked for what all pilgrims are looking for - whether they are going to Mount Athos, Mecca, Jerusalem or Tibet.
This comes to mind as I watch footage of tens of thousands of people visiting places like the monastery in recent years fog, which in the last ten years has become the main place for pilgrims and threatens to take over the glory of the Ostrog monastery in Montenegro, and the local Catholic phenomenon of Our Lady of Medjugorje, which experienced worldwide recognition in one moment.
In the absence of answers, people go after what they have, so if they are told "go there and pray", "go there and pour yourself with that water", "go there and lie down on a stone that they say is a tombstone under which a saint lies", they go looking for answers, hope, check the strength of their faith, all with the desire to be delivered from some evil that oppressed them.
I remember the prayers for Kosovo in 2008, in which the entire Government of Serbia participated together with the united opposition and priests of the Serbian Orthodox Church and tens of thousands of people. However, as if the prayer did not bear fruit - Kosovo is increasingly independent, and on that day, instead of canceling Kosovo's independence, the center of Belgrade was set on fire and looted, the mosque in Belgrade and one poor young man died.
To return to my pilgrimages, because I was not at the Temple that day, I was a reporter from Kneza Milos Street, where large hooligan forces were stationed, who fought with the police behind the symbol of the cross and vows, and then set fire to the American Embassy building.
...NEITHER IN THE SKY, NOR ON THE EARTH: Meteors
MONASTERIES FLOATING IN THE AIR
Last year, in the summer, in the heat, I decided to go to Meteora on my 49th birthday - when I was already in Greece, only 170 kilometers from that important place. Meteors, those who have been, know that, offer three dimensions: spiritual, architectural and pantheistic - the latter I stretched a bit when it comes to defining the natural phenomenon that actually leaves many pilgrims breathless - after the lamb in Kalambaka, a nearby town.
But everything else is also wonderful, monumental, in the incredible relief of that part of Thessaly, where monasteries stand on unique stone pillars like some kind of pavilions neither in the sky nor on the ground that hang in the air, because that's how they look when the fog descends on the plain. We were at Meteori for the first time in 2008. We were returning from Corfu and sometime late in the afternoon, it was still daylight, we stopped by to see "that miracle". It was pleasant, we easily parked at the last monastery in the row - the monastery of St. Nicholas and St. George. It seemed to me that we easily climbed up that ten-story building, they gave us those skirts that we wrapped around our dogs and we quite casually went around that - one of the nine - monastery. Apart from the fact that it is in an incredible place and that we found a document signed by Stefan Dušan from the 14th century, there were no "incredible" impressions. The buildings were dilapidated, the frescoes were covered with a layer of paraffin from candles that had been burning for centuries...
Seventeen years later, everything was different.
Although we tried to arrive as early as possible, after ten in the morning it was almost impossible to find a parking space. I climbed back down and squeezed between the two vans. Buses with dozens and hundreds of tourists were constantly arriving, thousands of people were milling about. Wherever you look, crowds of people in front of the entrance to the monasteries, and the monasteries are reached on foot, by stairs placed at an angle of 70 degrees, which can create a feeling of religiosity in anxious people that they certainly didn't have before.
It seems to me that I have never been so grateful to God, whoever he was, than when we finally made it to the ticket office at the entrance to the monastery complex. It was hot, crowded, we were touching each other so much with those coming down and there were so many stairs that I thought I was going to drop my soul in that holy place. When we got to the entrance square, I found a fountain and washed myself with that holy water, which made me vomit. After five minutes I was as good as new, just like that monastery complex, which looked as neat and fresh to me as if it had been built yesterday. At the very entrance, there is a huge fresco depicting, in addition to traditional Orthodox saints, Aristotle, the wise Solon, Plato, Archimedes - who, as far as I know, are neither saints nor Christians. Moreover, they are the embodiment of paganism that preceded Christianity. I understood, that's my interpretation, that for the needs of tourism it is good that those Greek sizes are also on the fresco because they are the biggest that Greece has given, although these Meteors in themselves are a kind of wonder of the world, only that Greece is not too responsible for that.
The half-hour tour showed what has changed since our first stay: now everything is trimmed and cleaned, the frescoes in the church look like they were painted yesterday, the colors are fresh and bright like in Marvel comics, the facades and stone are cleaned, the roofs are new, the crosses shine. Here and there you can buy juice, water, coffee or beer.
In the lower parts of the complex, as well as on other rocks, there are museums, in my opinion the most important parts of this sanctuary, where everything about that place - and how it was created - is described in detail. and how it was built, and how it flourished in the 14th century and how it later fell silent under the onslaught of the Ottomans, and how it was then rebuilt. Meteors are, in a way, a combination of the best in nature with the best in man, because every stone in that place tells the story of what nature had to do to shape such rocks in one plain and what the tortured and weak hermit, who first lived in caves like a bird, had to do in order to build anything there.
It is a tribute to the power of nature and the power of technology throughout the ages, because it is amazing what people have managed to do with the most primitive "cranes". Does it arouse some religiosity in people? I wouldn't say, and I don't insist on it either - even though they are lively places, they are the biggest tourist attraction in Greece after Athens and the Acropolis.
As we ate lamb later at the foot, the waiter informed us that over seven million tourists visit Meteora every year. That's quite a number and doesn't leave much time for contemplation and checking religiosity: you come, climb, pay the ticket, walk around a bit, drink something, take a maximum of pictures, then the second hill, then the third, then as long as you can stand it, then down to lunch, buy magnets and that's it.
SUPERNATURAL PEACE
That rhythm reminded me, as well as the architecture, of the monastery of St. Naum at the "Ohrid springs", which I visited for the last time a year ago. Placed on a promontory above the lake, next to the largest sandy beach in that part of the lake and in front of the confluence of the Crni Drim river with the lake, the small monastery guards the shrine - the relics of Naum of Ohrid - which are stored under a large stone in one of the rooms of the monastery. There come people in underwear, as if from the beach, they put their heads on the stone under which the relics of this saint are. And, they say, if you exert yourself well, you can hear his heart still beating!
I admit that I didn't go that far - it was hot, it was crowded, bro, it didn't work out for me to look for the saint's heart in my underpants. Instead, we found a gondolier and went literally to the spring of Black Dream under the Galicica mountain, a fascinating place of peace and literally untouched nature, where the mere presence of ice water around you is enough to make you feel some supernatural peace. After that we had a bath and then went to the barbecue.
...THE PEARL OF THE SERBIAN CHURCH AND STATE: Monastery of St. George Stupovi
In contrast to that, last year I was moved after visiting the Sopoćani and Đurđevi stupovi monasteries, in the atar of the city of Novi Pazar. I don't know how it happened that I came there often in the last twenty years, but I never went to these medieval pearls of the Serbian church and state.
In Sopoćani, it was still a magnificent event because a man appeared who is obviously either a curator or a former curator, who told us in detail the details of the construction of the monastery, its painting, its decay and restoration. The frescoes in Sopoćani are, in my opinion, the greatest range of fine art of the Serbian medieval state, and what they are particularly famous for is the use of the color "Byzantine blue". It is also the name of the film with Laza Ristovski and then the young Katarina Žutić, and today it is the color of buses in Belgrade's public transport. I have no confirmation that Aca Šapić visited the people of Sopoć and that he fell in love with a color that was more expensive than gold, but the fact is that our buses and Turkish trams are painted in the same color as the cloaks of saints and rulers represented on the walls of Sopoć. In sum, of everything in that holy place, the most significant was the story of that man who might have been God himself who descended that day... But, let's not exaggerate.
On the other side of the city, high up in the hill, which is quite atypical for Serbian medieval monasteries that are always next to the water, at the entrance to the gorge, stands the restored and still unfinished monastery Đurđevi stupovi, the last in my last year's travel selection from the series of religious tourism. This monastery is reached all the time by going uphill, and even when you reach the end of the road, there is still a sharp angle of 70 degrees to climb to the gates of the sanctuary. At the beginning of the 2000s, it was a place where rockers from Belgrade and other cities of Serbia were happy to go, helping in the "Raise the Pillars" campaign. A wonderful building with two bell towers stands on top of a hill waiting for more money to be raised to complete the restoration. Next to the monastery is a very beautiful and exclusive inn where, I believe, every pilgrim would be happy to stay for a few days.
Besides Easter in Thessaloniki and the bells of its ancient churches, that would be more or less all for the past, simple, year 2025 and my religious research. I guess I became a believer from visiting so many places of worship and began to see where God is when he is not in all these important buildings. Sometimes I see him in looking at my watch at the same time every day, and sometimes in a neighbor whom I literally meet every day when I go out on the street. It can't be that much of a coincidence! And maybe there are ways to scientifically verify this condition of mine. Until the next reading, God help me!
Excuse
(published in issue 1828)
Due to a gross editorial error, the text incorrectly states that "a mosque in Belgrade burned down during the Prayer for Kosovo". This did not happen then, but in 2004, after violence against Serbs occurred in Kosovo. We apologize to our colleague Slobodan Georgiev and the readers.
F.Š.
