Albanian workers tore down the gates and destroyed the temple grounds at the Church of the Holy Week in Brnjač near Orahovac in Kosovo.
They explained their actions by saying that they were expanding the road from this Serbian enclave to Prizren.
As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, local Serbs perceived the incident as a “quiet pogrom.” Now a busy highway passes just a meter from the XNUMXth-century church, although, according to the original plan, it should not have touched the church territory.
“We saw that work was underway, that there was no church gate, fence, trees next to the road, everything was destroyed,” Milan Petrovic from Velika Hoca told the Serbian edition of Sputnik radio. “On Sunday we went there to pray so as not to attract attention, and we photographed the whole thing and posted it on social networks.”
It turned out that no one informed the parish priest of Orahovac, Velja Stojkovic, about the work carried out. The Albanians took advantage of the fact that neither he nor the parishioners visited the temple, since they were locked in an enclave “for quarantine.”
“This will be a serious road, the speed limit on which is more than 80 kilometers per hour. And it’s clear that no one thought how dangerous it was for the building when the highway passes just a meter away from it. Local residents are very attached to this shrine; it was first mentioned in 1348 in the Holy Archangel list of King Dushan. This is one of the few, perhaps even the only shrine that was restored during the communist era - in 1975,” notes Petrovich.