Gornje Vinarce, Kosovo and Metohija, December 27, 2023
Photo: eparhija-prizren.com
In yet another offensive move against the Serbian Orthodox population, Kosovo authorities has declared a 600-year-old Serbian Orthodox church to be “Catholic.”
Moreover, the Kosovo Ministry of Culture has begun a self-initiated reconstruction of the allegedly Catholic church, the cemetery church in the village of Gornje Vinarce, without consulting with the authorities of the Diocese of Raška and Prizren of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the diocese reports.
“Besides not contacting the SOC regarding the reconstruction, the Ministry has taken a further step by proclaiming this church ‘Catholic,’ clearly intending to take over the heritage of the Serbian Orthodox Church,” the Church states.
The church has been listed as a protected monument by the Ministry of Culture since 2016, and now it has hired two companies to carry out restoration work at the “Catholic” church.
The diocese,
expresses the strongest protest against the process, which obviously shows the clear intent of the Kosovo authorities to “reconstruct” churches that were demolished or damaged by Albanian extremists without any consultation with the Church to which these holy sites belong and to completely change their identity, despite existing historical testimonies.
The Church authorities also report that they will inform international organizations and representatives dealing with religious rights.
Of course, the Serbian Church does not oppose the reconstruction of its churches, it states, but rather the way they are used “as a pretext to take over Serbian Orthodox cultural and religious heritage and change identity for the sake of historical revisionism.”
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The diocese provides the history of the church:
For public awareness, this Orthodox church has existed since the 14th century in a village that was then purely Serbian, with 15 Serbian households, as recorded in a Ottoman census of Isa-beg Ishaković in 1455, shortly after the conquest of Kosovo in the area. A document published by the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo in 1964, with other Ottoman censuses of that time, shows the demographics at that time. The census mentions vineyards (vinari in Serbian mean wine-makers) in this village, which is apparently how it got its name. The church’s architectural structure clearly shows it resembles cemetery chapels from the 14th-15th centuries, with an altar apse and a niche for proskomide, typical of Orthodox Christian tradition. In the village, no presence of a Roman Catholic community is mentioned, and as far as the Raška-Prizren Diocese is aware, the Roman Catholic diocese has never used this church, nor does it have any written data or material evidence of its ownership in history.
Until 1999, the church was regularly used by Serb Orthodox believers who gathered here on the first Friday after Easter, as the church was dedicated to the “Life-giving Spring,” further evidenced by a nearby spring and a cistern. After the expulsion of the Serbian population in 1999, the church in Gornje Vinarce was desecrated, burned, graffitied, and its entrance doors broken. Unfortunately, this is the state of many SOC churches that were damaged or destroyed by Kosovo Albanian extremists during the war in 1998-1999. This is further testimony that the church was considered Serbian by the local Albanian population, otherwise it would not have been desecrated and burned, which is the case with many other churches and monasteries that were attacked and are now (paradoxically) being proclaimed “Albanian churches” in the media or through the Ministry in Pristina.
According to earlier data from the Raška-Prizren Diocese archives, during the communist Yugoslav period, the church was attacked and devastated in 1972 when a group of local Albanian villagers broke the doors and windows and demolished the interior of the church, trying to set it on fire.
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