Dragan Bakić1; 1 Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, Serbia
Discussion
Since the Great War, the Church of England and the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) established most cordial relations on the foundations of brotherly refuge provided by Anglicans to the Orthodox seminarists and their teachers exiled from Serbia after the Central Powers had run over their country in late 1915 and humanitarian aid provided to the Serbs in general. It was during those difficult times that close personal friendship was forged between the prominent church figures, most notably between Father (later Bishop) Nikolaj Velimirović and the likes of George Bell, Anglican theologian and later Dean of Canterbury and Bishop of Chichester. Father Nikolaj and some of the Anglican churchmen engaged in the Anglican and Eastern Association came together on the grounds of their shared commitment to ecumenical movement. A symbolic expression of their increasingly strong bond was the honour bestowed on Nikolaj to become the first Orthodox clergyman to preach at St. Paul’s Cathedral in July 1917. This bond carried on throughout interwar years with the continued efforts to promote ecclestiacal reunion of Christian churches, exchange of visits and the staunch Anglican support for the SOC in its struggle to prevent the conclusion of Concordat between the newly-founded Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Holy See in 1937. However, the end of the Second World War brought about a radical change in Yugoslavia. The communist partisans under Josip Broz Tito emerged victorious from the multiple civil war in that country under the Axis occupation to which Britain contributed by switching its support from the royalist resistance movement (Chetniks under the command of General Draža Mihailović) to Tito’s partisans. The new communist regime imbued with the atheistic and materialistic Marxist doctrine and determined to eliminate religion as a social force embarked on the campaign of persecution of both the Roman Catholic Church and SOC in Yugoslavia. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, did his best to help the prominent Anglophile prelates from the ranks of SOC (Bishop Nikolaj, Bishop Irinej Djordjević of Dalmatia, Bishop Irinej Ćirić of Bačka, Metropolitan Dositej Vasić of Zagreb) who had suffered at the hands of the Axis invaders during the war and then incurred hostility of the Tito government because of their visceral anticommunism. Aware of the changed political realities underwritten by the British government, the leaders of the Church of England could do little more than try to alleviate personal difficulties of their loyal friends often acting against the line taken by the Foreign Office. As they endeavoured to provide as much comfort as possible to the unfortunate Serbian prelates, the Foreign Office was seeking a working relationship with Tito which would reach its peak during the Yugoslav dictator’s visit to London in 1953.
