UNIVERSITY OF COPENH AGEN FACULTY OF THEOLOGY PhD Thesis Emil Bjørn Hilton Saggau Only Unity Will Save the Serbs Eastern Orthodox history, memory and politics in Montenegro post- Yugoslavia Supervisor: Carsten Selch Submitted on: 29th September 2020 Name of department: Section for Church History, University of Copenhagen Author(s): Emil Bjørn Hilton Saggau Title and subtitle: Only Unity Will Save the Serbs – Eastern Orthodox history, memory and politics in Montenegro post-Yugoslavia Supervisor: Dr. theol. Carsten Selch Submitted on: 29 September 2020 Number of characters: 276,016 (115 pages, but without bibliography + 128 pages from the articles (without list of references)) = 243 pages. Appendix: summary and acknowledgement “Such is history. A play of life and death is sought in the calm telling of a tale, in the resurgence and denial of the origin, the unfolding of a dead past and result of a present practice.” Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History Front image: The sanctuary in the church of the monastery of Kom on the Island of Odrinska Gora on Lake Skadar, June 2019. The monastery was built between 1415-1427. Author’s own photograph. 2 Table of contents CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 6 Context: At the periphery of the European mind .......................................................................................................... 6 Focus of this thesis: The making of a modern Orthodox history of Montenegro........................................................ 8 Research questions.......................................................................................................................................................... 11 Scope and overview......................................................................................................................................................... 12 Articles in this thesis .................................................................................................................................................... 15 Language and names .................................................................................................................................................... 16 Religion in Montenegro .................................................................................................................................................. 17 Orthodox historiography in Serbia and Montenegro .................................................................................................... 17 Orthodox historiography as national historiography .................................................................................................... 18 Religion in Montenegro ............................................................................................................................................... 20 Montenegrin national historiography ........................................................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER II: THE THEORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE SOCIAL FORM OF RELIGION ......................................................................................................................... 32 Church history: Towards a theory of historiography ................................................................................................. 32 De Certeau – history as “A labor of death” .................................................................................................................. 34 De Certeau and the social world of history: place, practice and infrastructure ............................................................ 38 Nationalism and religion – the same order? ................................................................................................................. 41 Theory: Religious practice and place-making .............................................................................................................. 43 Functionalism and the sociology of religion ................................................................................................................ 43 Place-making: pilgrimage, memory and materiality .................................................................................................... 47 Primary sources .............................................................................................................................................................. 52 Article 1: Unblocking the Sacred: New perspectives on the religious revival in South Eastern Europe ................ 54 CHAPTER III: ORTHODOXY IN MONTENEGRO ............................................................. 56 Article 2: The self-proclaimed Montenegrin Orthodox Church:A paper tiger or a resurgent church? ................. 57 Article 3: The revival of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro from 1990 ................................................. 59 CHAPTER IV: ANALYSIS OF ORTHODOX HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PRACTICE AND RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY IN MONTENEGRO .................................................................... 61 3 Article 4: The Return of Duklja: The Montenegrin Orthodox Church’s Recasting of History .............................. 62 Article 5: A Shrine for the Nation: The Material Transformation of the Lovćen Site in Montenegro ................... 64 Article 6: The beast from the abyss – a contemporary Serbian Orthodox historiographical response to war ...... 66 Article 7: Hallowed be thy war helicopter – forging and forgetting the past ............................................................ 68 CHAPTER V: THE PRACTICE OF CONTEMPORARY ORTHODOX HISTORIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................... 69 Summary of analytical conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 69 Towards a definition of Orthodox historiographical practice in Montenegro .............................................................. 75 Comparison with the developments elsewhere in the Orthodox commonwealth ...................................................... 76 North Macedonia – the history of the Archbishopric of Ohrid revisited...................................................................... 77 Bulgaria – the homecoming of national neo-martyrs ................................................................................................... 83 A final outlook to Ukraine – from brotherhood to division ......................................................................................... 90 History and memory ....................................................................................................................................................... 93 CHAPTER VI: ORTHODOX HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ORDERS ...................................... 96 Towards Eastern Orthodox historiographical orders ................................................................................................. 97 Eusebian and Ignatian ecclesiology ............................................................................................................................. 98 Ecclesiological models in the Montenegrin case ....................................................................................................... 101 The development of state-centered historiography: The Eusebian history of salvation ............................................. 102 A modern reinterpretation of Eusebios ...................................................................................................................... 104 The dismantling of a state-centered historiography .................................................................................................. 105 Florovsky’s historiography ........................................................................................................................................ 106 Athanasian historiography ......................................................................................................................................... 111 Serbian Orthodox historiography ............................................................................................................................... 114 Njegoš’s notion of history and the Divine ................................................................................................................. 114 Velimirović and the return to St. Sava ....................................................................................................................... 118 Popović – Orthodoxy beyond the confinement of the state ....................................................................................... 123 Amfilohije and the embodiment of salvation ............................................................................................................. 129 Athanasian historiographical theology ....................................................................................................................... 132 State and history ......................................................................................................................................................... 133 The history of the saints or of the nations? ................................................................................................................ 135 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................