By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
As soon as he was enthroned on the wings of the North Atlantic Alliance in Cetinje, which Porfirije’s Praetorian Guard in Montenegrin police uniforms turned into a biblical “valley of tears”, not metaphorically, but literally: with tear gas, Joanikije started to sing about the army returning to Kosovo. Then NATO took him and Porfirije to eat and drink in Sipcanik. Then Joanikije fell asleep, after which, cheerful and rested, he continued to spread love and heal divisions in Montenegro: among other things, by promising again to take care of “Djedo’s testament” concerning the top of Lovcen and thus bring the country to the brink of conflict. Again.
Slaven Radunovic reacted and proposed on social media to not destroy the mausoleum but rather place a chapel on it with the cross dominating on the top of it.
I mean: if you put a cross on something, it can’t be wrong, right? Only satanists and communists can protest against it, therefore, satanists again: is that right?
Blasting and demolition of a piece of art provokes awkward (as a matter of fact: accurate) associations with the Taliban and Buddha monuments … So Slaven would like to do this job “wiser”…
Montenegro has already been flooded with billboards and large posters from which Amfilohije is watching with that look “I can see you, watch what you’re doing”. The call to fulfill Amfilohije’s “testament” is smiling from the advertising space: to return to the top of Lovcen the chapel that was built by Aleksandar Karadjordjevic, honoring himself and his conquest of Montenegro.
Unfortunately, Mestrovic’s masterpiece is already there. Which, obviously, provokes strong Taliban impulses in some voters of the ruling coalition.
There seems to be a debate among them: whether to demolish Mestrovic’s mausoleum, remove it or install a chapel on it. All three options are Taliban-inspired and there’s no other word for it.
If what Slaven Radunovic proposes happens, there would be nothing more to limit the revisionist urgency of the winners: they would be able to erase and rewrite Lalic’s descriptions of Chetniks immediately, and “creatively” re-edit Bulajic’s films. There’s no difference between that and the “remodeling” of the mausoleum. What Radunovic is proposing is the same as grabbing Picasso’s painting and drawing/crossing out what, in the opinion of your ideology, the painting “lacks” or is “unnecessary” on it.
Vesna Bratic, the Minister of Science, Culture, Education and Sports, that is, thinking and singing, and learning and running, summed up her view as follows: “Well, let the mausoleum be moved. Now, thank God, there are, uh, techniques, there’re all those technological and technical possibilities … The chapel should be returned where it belongs. The mausoleum as well, somewhere lower, because, of course, it shouldn’t be where it’s now.”
The mausoleum, whatever you’re saying, stands exactly where it should stand, just as the domes on Hagia Sophia and St. Peter’s Basilica stand exactly where they should. If Mestrovic had built the mausoleum “somewhere lower”, he would have built it differently. This mausoleum is a whole with Jezerski Vrh. It’s what it is not only because of Njegos, not only because of Mestrovic, but also because of Jezerski Vrh. It’s difficult to “think any lower” than saying that the mausoleum should be placed “somewhere lower”.
Any intervention of the “liberators” – even if Aleksandar’s chapel were drawn on a single Mestrovic stone – on the mausoleum would mean vandalizing an extremely valuable piece of art. Of course, the authorities can make such a decision – but the act would not be less vandalistic. That would only mean that vandalism has become the official state ideology of Vucic’s Montenegro, ruled by the Democratic Front and its satellites.
The mausoleum-related issue in the Montenegrin public is dominantly, or even exclusively, treated as a national issue and as means of demonstrating power.
If you ask me, as you don’t, it’s a matter of the integrity of a piece of art, the relation towards authorship, culture and its monuments. It’s, first of all, a matter of civilization.
All this has been at a low, miserable level in Montenegro so far. Under the rule of the DPS, churches owned by the state of Montenegro were illegally “remodeled” and architecturally “transferred” to another, foreign tradition, in addition to being illegally registered to the Church of Serbia. Thousands of exhibits have disappeared from the National Museum: Montenegrin cultural treasures would have been better protected if, instead of being kept in a state institution, they had been kept by a host in a drying facility in Njegusi.
The new winners were left to complete the work that was successfully, very successfully pushed by the old winners as well.
Removing the mausoleum was Amfilohije’s obsession. Those who today demand the removal of the mausoleum want the same thing that their metropolitan wanted: the final act of humiliation of Montenegrins, a symbolic proof they’re defeated and enslaved.
But Mestrovic’s mausoleum is not only Montenegrin – it’s no less, and I would say – even more – a Yugoslav monument. This mausoleum is, among other things, a monument to Njegos’ Yugoslavia, which cannot be rationally disputed. For Amfilohije, the mausoleum represented the five-pointed red star on the roof of Montenegro. The five-pointed star put there by the communists, while Montenegrins, as he used to tell, are their “breed”. Obsessed with great gestures and their “symbolism”, he tried to remove that “five-pointed star” and replace it with the symbol of “unity” he believed in – the chapel with which the Karadjordjevic family marked their exit to the sea – from the first day on the throne of St. Peter of Cetinje.
Sublime ideas make words insufficient and small: you clearly feel that, no matter how rhetorically skilled you are, you haven’t communicated even close to everything that a great idea implies.
Basic instincts, however, require great words and incomprehensible constructions: in fact, their hyperinflation. Basic instincts need: inclusion, diversification, legitimacy, legality, overcoming divisions, culture of remembrance, everything that the media and NGO Vucic’s service, in the name of EU integrations, use to justify their active participation in Montenegro’s integration into the Serbian World.
Basic instincts need testaments, oaths, and promises that reach into eternity. They need a thick curtain of smoke, in order to create an illusion that where there’s nothing but revenge for the always thirsty ideology of blood and soil, there’s something just and progressive.
Like the bells on the necks of a herd of cows ringing their empty words and empty gestures.
High above that concert of vengeful nothingness stands Mestrovic’s mausoleum.
And you won’t even touch it.
