I grew up in Kašuni at the foot of Marjan, and the greatest wonder of my childhood world was the small church of St. Jere with the hermitage of St. Cyriak, a small hermitage built in a crevice of the high Marjan cliff above our dilapidated house. Even today, in Ciriak's cell, on the frame of the window with a wonderful view of the wide blue world, there is my name clumsily carved, also in the seventies, from a time when we still did not fully understand the concept of cultural heritage protection.
That small walled cave with two small windows was mysterious and unknown to me like some Nepalese Buddhist temple under the heights of the Himalayas. It is not difficult to imagine, let alone remember, the childish enchantment with which I first saw the Ostrog monastery from the main road to Nikšić a few years later, on a family trip to visit relatives in Montenegro.
If it weren't for its whitewashed surfaces, which make me wonder if it's snow or swans, the Ostroš monastery - high up in the hurricane heights above the Zeta valley, like an eagle's nest organically fused into the vertical cliff of the Ostroška greda - would not have been noticed by the intending traveler not even in front of the port itself. In my child's eyes, he was just like our Saint Cyriacus, only a thousand times taller, bigger and more inconceivable. From the foot of the mountain there was a winding narrow path three or four kilometers long, along which I craned my neck in vain attempts to see the monastery built into the rock above our heads. I saw him again only when we finally arrived under the gate of the famous hermitage, having lost the little breath I had left after the ascent.
At that time, and it was more than forty years ago, Orthodox monasteries were not places of mass pilgrimages, and we were the only guests that day. Some unusual bearded monks, quite different from our brother Ferda, led us through a narrow passage to the cell of Saint Vasilij Ostroski and the cave church with his relics. During that time, my father - an old communist and an engineer - walked around the complex like Bata Stojković on that wooden bridge in 'Who's singing there', looked closely at the walls embedded in the rock and nodded his head with satisfaction, somehow admiring the engineering marvel of the ancient builders, rather than the foolishness about the miracles of St. Basil.
It is not difficult to imagine, let alone remember, the disbelief with which I stumbled upon Nikšić a few years ago, and after four decades went to see again one of the greatest miracles of my childhood, which in the meantime had grown into the most popular and most visited Serbian monastery, something like St. Sava's Medjugorje, and in thoroughly restored over the past ten years under the supervision of experts from the Serbian Orthodox Church.
I experienced the first shock when I realized that the monastery can now be reached by car. The second shock I experienced was seeing a large parking lot under the monastery filled with buses of all possible Serbian and Montenegrin registrations. I experienced the third shock when I was drawn into a tight crowd similar to those in which a person finds himself at the entrance to a football stadium. I experienced the fourth shock when I saw a monstrous concrete church erected on the plateau of Eznebuha, like the ones that sprout here on the dusty outskirts of the city.
I experienced the fifth shock when I saw the extension at the place of the inn: like an illegitimate child from drunken sex, Đukanović's Budva with the monstrous Andrićgrad, which lost control on the Nikšić-Danilovgrad road, ran off the road and crashed into Ostroška Greda - that's how it looked like an awful concrete pseudo-Byzantine complex with shops and souvenir shops stuck on a vertical cliff.
I have already seen such expertly restored monasteries and experienced similar shocks, with the same rare privilege of being a witness of the recent past, from the time when those Serbian holy places were at the end of the world, neglected and abandoned by their own flock. In that long interlude between childhood and mature middle age, as a student of art history I wandered around Serbia from monastery to monastery, doing an ambitious seminar on the topic of 'Serbian sacral architecture of the Middle Ages between Byzantium and Romanesque': I saw, for example, above Novi Pazar the famous St. George's columns, which in the eighties looked just like the ruins of the Irish castle Moydrum from the cover of the U2 album 'The Unforgettable Fire', and I saw them again twenty years later, 'expertly restored' in the fever of the suddenly awakened Serbian Orthodoxy. Mute with horror, I looked at the building and everything that had ever been in Đurđev Stupi and what had never been there, with upgraded walls, souvenir shops, cafes, a bus parking lot and spits for piglets.
"Mysterious buildings in which the eastern mysticism of Byzantium was in harmony with the Romanesque style of the West became a trading chain with a large offer of the Svetosava tradition, and then also barracks of Serbia: every monastery was a Serbian Alamo, moving from professional literature, studies of serious scientists and seminar papers of aspiring students, into television vignettes, tasteless brochures, newspaper posters, kitsch monographs, tabloid covers, tourist guides, plastic frames, fridge magnets, stickers for Orthodox taxis and labels for monastery šljivovica', I wrote in a text at the time, as a man, comrade and atheist deeply disgusted by the destruction of the fantastic Serbian architectural heritage. And yet, none of those interim experiences could have prepared me for the shock with which I finally saw the famous Ostrog monastery itself, with the small church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and the cave church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The hundred-year-old hermitage - which in that long-ago childhood I saw as a Nepalese Buddhist temple under the heights of the Himalayas - now I found in a sweaty mass, all covered in concrete outside and inside, from which iron fittings, plastic pipes and electric cables protruded. Just as if some smuggler from Danilovgrad got hold of his grandfather's antiques by the main road, intending to set up a Monastery night club in it for truck drivers from Albania and children from Nikšić - hungry for money, he opened it even before the masters had finished installing the sound system for karaoke parties - this is what the famous old monastery looked like, restored under the watchful eye of the Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral and the famous Rista Radović, the so-called Archbishop Amfilohi.
I remembered that upgraded, concreted, devastated and irretrievably destroyed architectural miracle in the crack of Ostroški greda a few days ago, browsing the South Slavic portals and seeing the news about some kind of protests in Belgrade, illustrated with a photo of banners with the words 'Save Serbian holy places!' and 'Let's save Ostrog!'
Thank God and Saint Vasilij Ostroška, who heard and who didn't: someone finally remembered to save the historical architectural miracle on Ostroška greda. Or at least that's what I thought until I read the report and realized that the concerned Serbian saints were not thinking at all about the catastrophic devastation of category zero monuments: it was about some kind of Law on Freedom of Religion, an act by which the Montenegrin parliament - as I understood the worried saints - under the guise of freedom of religion intends to seize centuries-old monasteries headed by the mythical Ostrog from the Serbian Orthodox Church, and rewrite them in the cadastral books to the Montenegrin state.
Aside from the fact that, don't be lazy, I read the proposal of the Law and searched in vain for the paragraph about the seizure of the Ostrog monastery and other Serbian holy places in Montenegro: I was struck by the sudden concern of the entire Holy See for the monastery, which in ten years of so-called restoration - just like dozens similar ones in the recorded territory of Svetosava - irreparably destroyed precisely by their archbishops and bishops.
Everything, namely, if the disputed Montenegrin law would hand over the magnificent Ostrog to Đukanović's mafia state, everything and if the Podgorica authorities would sell it to the British Museum in London - or, even better, take it apart stone by stone and wedge it into the vertical cliff of one of the giant hotels above Budva, as a casino for Milo's Russian and Zemun colleagues, to be closer to them while they take off the heavy golden necklaces from their tattooed necks and hang them to their patron Vasilij - the wonderful Ostrog would not screw up worse than he screwed up like this, under the care and attention of the born Serbian Orthodox Church .
Perhaps, therefore, it is really best to pass some kind of law that would take away the ancient Serbian monasteries from Serbia and the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Let's save Serbian holy places, save Ostrog!
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