CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Letter From Peć: The “Lost” Monasteries

The Serbian Orthodox monastery at Peć, now Peja, Kosovo. Photograph by Matthew Stevenson.

Before heading toward Skopje and my flight to Cyprus, I visited the two Orthodox monasteries for which Peja (as Peć) is famous—the Patriarchal Monastery of Peć and nearby (about 20 km) the Visoki Dečani Monastery, both remnants of the Serbian renaissance in the 14th century and, more recently, central rule in the Balkans from Belgrade—that which ended in a series of civil wars during the 1990s. In many ways, the fighting can best be understood as a parish quarrel with guns.

The Patriarchal Monastery of Peć was not far from my hotel and easy to find, since the compound was surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. Still, I struggled to find the front gate, until I drove past it several times and saw evidence of a guardhouse.

There I slid my passport into what resembled a bank cashier’s window, and in no time the security barrier lifted in front of my rental car. I drove about 500 meters to the small entrance in the monastery walls. Inside the doorway, I stood alone in what looked like a stone village, wondering how I might get inside the famous church.

As I waited, a man with keys came striding briskly up one of the walkways. He opened the front door of the church and ushered me in—to what seemed a variation on heaven, with a panoply of frescoes covering the vaulted ceilings.

Often in the Balkans or at Armenian churches in eastern Turkey, one finds that frescoes from the Middle Ages have washed away, but these had a freshness that stunned me.

I had thought that during the rule of the Ottomans from the 14th to the 20th century many of the churches had decayed, but some of sultans allowed the Serbian Orthodox Church to operate from Peć, and even tolerated the burial of some archbishops on these grounds.

To be sure, the major works of restoration and preservation came only after the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes took formal control of the region. This occurred when the newly minted kingdom was founded on December 1, 1918, before the Peace of Paris and Versailles and after the Central Powers (largely Bulgarian here) were routed in the mountaintop battle of Dobro Polje in September 1918. (It can be argued that this was the crack that broke Germany’s frontlines in the war.)

I don’t spend a lot of time in churches. Nor am I drawn to frescoes of the Archangel Gabriel or baby Jesus, but I found Peć to be a glorious medieval vision and understood better what Rebecca West was searching for when she and her husband (and their guide and driver, who was also her lover) set off in an open touring car to explore Yugoslavia from Slovenia to Macedonia.

West was an astute writer, historian, and political commentator, and in 1937 she saw the........

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