The Serbian Orthodox Church in the autonomous province of Kosovo in the period under communists (1945-1990)

Kosovo and Metohija, the lands of monuments of the Serbian church architecture of the Nemanich dynasty (13th-15th centuries), gained fame under the Turks due to the dramatic displacement of Serbs by Islamized Albanians. After the liberation from Turks in 1912, the quantitative superiority and irreconcilability of Albanians persisted, which more than once resulted in crimes against the Serbian population and the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC). This tendency reached its climax in the mass destruction of Orthodox shrines by the “Kosovo Liberation Army” in 1999. The article is devoted to the problems of the state of the SOC in Kosovo from 1945 up to the reforms of S. Miločević in the late 1980s. The paper uses reports of Rashsko-Prizren diocese to the Synod of the SOC, which were published, but not analyzed, as well as a number of unpublished documents from the State Archive of Serbia and the State Archive of the Russian Federation. Concrete examples of the problems caused by atheistic politics, as well as by the growth and radicalization of the Ablan extremism are given. The article studies the state of the SOC under the conditions of extensive autonomy of Kosovo in 1974-1989, which resulted in the virtual separation of the province from Serbia. Also presented is some documentary information about the attempts of Serbian Patriarch Herman to overcome emerging negative trends in the late 1970s.