Letter From Peć: The “Lost” Monasteries

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.

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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.

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West was an astute writer, historian, and political commentator, and in 1937 she saw the small countries of Eastern Europe as easy prey for Hitler’s growing legions.

When Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published in 1941, Yugoslavia had already been overrun by the Axis powers. As has famously been said about Yugoslavia, “once, twice there was a country.” But in reality there were at least three Yugoslavias, if not four.

The hybrid country that emerged after World War II—with workers’ councils fused onto the legacies of the medieval kingdom (Marshal Tito was, in effect, the new king and archbishop)—had too many internal contradictions to survive much past Tito’s lifetime (he died in 1980).

But West’s own vision and hope for Yugoslavia—as a confederation of cantons, not unlike Switzerland—lives on in her 1218-page book, difficult as the book is to read in the 21st century.

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I only managed to read it to the end in 1990, when stuck in Europe between two work assignments. I spent three days in a deck chair at the Hotel Argentina in Dubrovnik, and that got me over the hump of her (at times) dense prose.

Here’s how (in 1941) she describes the defenestration of the Serb king and his wife in 1903, when they were pitched out of a Belgrade window (how Serbia often handles its political transitions):

The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.

Fast forward to 1992: Yugoslavia yet again breathed its last, and the country came apart along its Tito-gerrymandered borders (not along its ethnic seams); hence the bloodshed of the civil wars in which Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians in particular often found themselves consigned to a country that wasn’t theirs.

Think of the Serbian monastery at Peć (now in Peja, Kosovo) as yet another disenfranchised Yugoslav.

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While the monastery at Peć is close to the city downtown, the monastery of Visoki Dečani is located on a remote hillside, some distance from the main road—south of Peja and behind several formidable military checkpoints.

At the last, just outside the main gate, a NATO soldier from Croatia took my passport and photographed my rental car inside and out, and then said I was free to explore the grounds.

I confess I was astounded to be speaking to a Croatian soldier who was on duty in Kosovo guarding a Serbian church. But then I realized that he was born around 2003, well after the last battles of the wars of the Yugoslav succession, and he had only a hazy knowledge that Croatia, where he was born and grew up, was once part of Yugoslavia. “Oh,” he said to me, “that was a long time ago,” which gave me some hope for the region’s future.

Inside Dečani, one of the brothers from the monastery watched me closely, which took some of the pleasure away from the visit. Nor did I find the frescoes there as haunting as those at Peć. But I bought candles from the front desk, and outside the church I lit them for my grandparents, Milivoy and Beatrice Stevenson Stanoyevich, whose lives together rose and fell, much as did Rebecca West’s Yugoslavia.

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Milivoy was born in 1882 on a small farm near the Serbian town of Zaječar (near the Bulgarian border), and through willpower and intellect made his way from tending sheep (as a five-year old boy) to teaching in a high school in Belgrade, where in the early 1900s he was chosen to tutor the Yugoslav crown prince, Alexander. In that role, he antagonized his pupil’s father, King Petar I Karađorđević, by writing a book titled Youth and Democracy.

For his Jeffersonian ideas, Milivoy was sentenced to three years in prison or three years in exile. His father sold twenty hectares of the small family farm to pay for his exile; and in 1908 Milivoy crossed to the New World, where he learned English (his sixth language) and earned a PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. He ended up on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, teaching history and Slavonic languages.

Milivoy never went home to Serbia, distrusting its kings and later the commissars of Yugoslavia, although he wrote many books about its democratic and liberal potentials, few of which were realized. He was a free thinker (Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of his heroes), but all the country of his birth wanted was royal subjects and, later on, the party faithful.

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By contrast my grandmother, Beatrice Stevenson, grew up on lower Fifth Avenue in New York, the daughter of a successful insurance officer and railroad executive (it explains the love of trains in my genes). While getting her own PhD in anthropology at New York University in the early 20th century, she fell in love with one of her professors, who happened to be a Serb.

Alas, he was married and had children, so he suggested that she meet his colleague from Berkeley—Milivoy. So, as if characters in a Henry James novel, my grandmother and her mother took the train to California to see whether “the professor” would make a suitable marriage partner. (There were qualities of Daisy Miller in my grandmother, who at the same time was a more serious intellectual.)

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For his part, Milivoy immediately fell in love with Beatrice—clearly a vision of the New World. She was beautiful, smart, well-read, and came from money. What more could he want?

They married in 1917, but I don’t think her heart was ever in the marriage. They had one child, my father. Beatrice learned to read, speak, and translate Serbo-Croatian, and published several books of her own on the Yugoslav dream. But by the late 1920s, both Yugoslavia and her marriage were dissolving.

I knew both of my grandparents, especially my grandmother. She worked as the executive director of the Institute of World Affairs and spent her life attending to students, books, and lectures. She only went once to Yugoslavia, when it was the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, but like Rebecca West she wanted it to reach its potential as a enlightened democratic country with deep ties to both the Renaissance and the enlightenment (through Milivoy she knew Nicola Tesla).

Mercifully, Beatrice died the same year as did Marshal Tito, 1980, and she never saw Yugoslavia disintegrate along the lines of its religious and ethnic contours.

She would have found such a destruction of her ideals to be inconceivable, just she would have despaired that both Peć and Dečani have become hostages to the fortunes of another (hostile) country. But she would have loved the candle in the wind.

This is the third in an occasional series about travels through the Balkans to and from the Green Line in Cyprus.