c. 1999 Religion News Service

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Ensconced in a spartan dormitory room in the Serbian Orthodox Church’s seminary here, Roman Ilyushkin, a master icon painter from Russia, has spent weeks making his contribution to the defense of Serbia.

Using materials begged and borrowed from local believers, Ilyushkin painted a reproduction of the Icon of the Savior Not Created by Human Hands, an image of Jesus Christ said to have been originally imprinted on a piece of cloth used by Jesus to wipe his face. In Russia, the same icon has been credited for centuries with helping defeat foes.

Even after the NATO bombing stopped in early June, Ilyushkin toiled away for weeks on the icon, applying tissue-thin gold and layer after layer of mineral-based paints. An intense man with an elfen face and a neatly trimmed beard, Ilyushkin said he felt an intense kinship toward Serbs that prompted him in April to depart his monastery in Volgograd and go to Belgrade.

At the time, Ilyushkin, 36, said he had had a lot of explaining to do to his worried mother, telling her,”Ma, how can I sit quietly in my studio in the monastery when I know they are killing my brothers, when they are shooting up those same monasteries that I teach my students about. I must paint this icon, precisely in Serbia, precisely in war conditions.” In the first weeks of NATO’s bombing campaign, Orthodox Russia was aquiver with such sentiments. Many Russians were convinced that if NATO went unchecked, Russia would be next.

A vocal minority viewed the NATO action as an attack by Western Christian nations on Eastern Orthodoxy. At mass prayer meetings and protests, Orthodox priests and lay leaders exhorted believers to pray, send aid and, if so moved, to journey to Yugoslavia, if not to fight then to bear witness and provide moral support.

The response was noisily enthusiastic, especially from the Cossacks, who have traditionally cast themselves in the role of defenders of Orthodoxy.

In reality, however, only a tiny number of Russian Orthodox believers responded to the call. The one man in Belgrade who would know best is the Rev. Viktor Tarasev, rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, the city’s one Russian Orthodox Church and a focal point for Belgrade’s small Russian community. “I also thought I would find a crowd of Cossacks here when I heard on the radio what they were doing in Moscow,”said Tarasev, referring to church-sponsored, anti-NATO demonstrations in the Russian capital. It was just a lot of noise, believe me.” Across town at Russia House, a cultural and social center funded by the Russian government, administrators had sighted only one Orthodox volunteer for the Serbian cause and it was Ilyushkin, the icon painter.

An organizer of one of Belgrade’s leading Russo-Serbian social groups, Viktor Salnikov, said he saw neither hide nor hair of the promised volunteers during the war. “They talked and talked of Russian help. Maybe the naive were waiting. I wasn’t,”said Salnikov, 72, the son of White Russians who fled the 1917 Revolution.

On an institutional level the 80-million-member Russian Orthodox Church helped its sister Serbian Orthodox Church with humanitarian aid at a time when Russia itself is receiving food aid from the West.

But the calls to Russian believers to defend Orthodox Serbia from the Western and Muslim infidels went largely unheeded, even by Russia’s several million Cossacks.

Ilyushkin, himself a Cossack, attributed their absence to the hassles and expense of traveling from Russia to Yugoslavia. Tarasev, the Russian priest, said it was just as well that the warlike defenders of the faith never made it”with their uniforms, sabers and vodka.””I may have been born in Yugoslavia but I know something about Cossacks and the ones who come here don’t always behave themselves,”said Tarasev, a third-generation Russian Orthodox priest whose church was severely damaged when NATO bombs destroyed the television center next door.

Ilyushkin said he had heard accounts of a Cossack presence in Belgrade in the early days of the bombing. About 10 of them took part in forming the nightly human shields designed to protect the city’s bridges from NATO attack. The relatively small number of Cossacks on the bridges led to some Serb kidding.”The Serbs on the bridge would joke, `Don’t worry, brother Cossacks. Don’t be afraid, we are with you,'”said Ilyushkin.”I heard there was some arguing between them about who was a real Cossack.” Although Ilyushkin had a sense of humor about the poor Russian Orthodox response to the conflict in Serbia, he was intent on doing his part. Ilyushkin said he carefully chose which icon he would paint and give to St. Sava’s Church in Belgrade.

This was the image carried into battle by Russian czars and princes, including Ivan the Terrible, as they slowly expelled the Muslim Mongol hordes.”I don’t have an S-300,”said Ilyushkin, referring to the Russian-made anti-aircraft missile that could have been used against NATO jets.”But I do have an icon which is also a weapon against that aggression.”DEA END BROWN