CHURCH OCCASIONS IN OCCUPIED SERBIA DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR (WITH A VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN TERRITORIES)

Abstract

The paper provides an overview of church conditions in the Kingdom of Serbia under occupation during the First World War. Sharing the fate of the state and people, the Serbian Orthodox Church entered a period of great human and material suffering during the Great War. Other religious communities in this area came out of the war without major consequences, but the Serbian Church, with its unbreakable identity bond with the Serbian people and the state, could not avoid the fate that befell it between 1914 and 1918. Propaganda Austro Hungarian slogans like “Serbien muss sterbien!” (“Serbia must die!”) and the theses of the Bulgarian authorities about the Bulgarian ethnic and territorial character of the southern Serbian areas, which could be heard even before 1914, were an ominous hint for all that what befell the Serbian people and its Church in the years that followed. Already in the first days of the war, major crimes were committed in the area that would remain without the protection of the Serbian army and where enemy Austro-Hungarian troops would be located. Temples also came under attack and were subject to looting and various types of desecration. An even more severe wave of violence against the Serbian Church followed during the triple invasion in the fall of 1915. Churches and monasteries once again found themselves at the mercy of Austro-Hungarian and German troops. The attitude of the Bulgarian occupying forces in the ecclesiastical aspect was different and was related to the earlier exarchist policy according to which the Serbian regions with the associated temples were to come under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian church authorities. The attitude of the Bulgarian authorities that the inhabitants of the regions in the south of Serbia are actually “Moravian Bulgarians” led to systematic and brutal attempts made for the purpose of forcible assimilation and Bulgarianization of the people in this area. The Bulgarian church authorities established during the occupation should have contributed significantly to the realization of these intentions. In both occupation zones, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian, there were liquidations and internments of the clergy, as well as the looting of movable material church property, which by the end of the war had reached massive proportions and was the subject of post-war restitution under the international allied commission.