A resurgence in life of prayer

Taught to submerge their personalities in communal life, most monks are reluctant to describe the paths that brought them to the monastery, except to say they felt called by God. They say their choice was less a rejection of secular life than a search for one more spiritual.

Father Sofronij Dimeski, who lives in an isolated 12th-century monastery high in the stony mountains of central Macedonia, finds that his life there is "filling up my soul." Like many young monks, he displays a quiet ferocity about his vocation. "My parents didn't accept it," he says. "They were very against my decision. They were raised in different times, without God."

A love of poetry and philosophy led Metodije Zlatanov to monastic life. As a young man, Mr. Zlatanov was part of a group that sought to revive Macedonian cultural tradition. "We tried to live this tradition," says Zlatanov, who teaches in a religious high school and publishes books of poetry. "And so we found ourselves living in the church." But Zlatanov went farther than the others. "Even as a teenager, a question that was very important for me was whether it was possible to live as a philosopher," he says. "Monastic life was an answer to this question."

Men are not the only ones drawn to monastic life. Three years ago, Abbess Sister Kirana led a group of young nuns to the village of Jankovec, in southern Macedonia, to begin to restore an abandoned 16th-century nunnery. "It's rewarding and exciting, but also very difficult," says Sister Kirana, who studied architecture before turning to religion. In the beginning, the nuns lacked water and electricity, and the neighbors wondered about the grave, black-garbed women who had moved in next door. "When they got to know the life of the monastery, all their suspicions were gone," says Sister Kirana, who declined to give her full name.

Of all the monasteries in the former Yugoslavia, Decani is perhaps the most remarkable. After NATO evicted Serbian forces from Kosovo three years ago, ordinary Serbs fled the Decani area, making the monks the only Serbs for miles around. Today, Italian soldiers guard the monastery's approaches, and the monks do not leave without an escort.

But Decani's predicament only increases its appeal. With 33 monks and novices, it has the largest brotherhood of any monastery in Serbia. "The outer situation has not affected the inner, spiritual life at all," says Father Sava Janjic, the deputy abbot. "I can say it's even become more intense. In the history of Christianity, spiritual life increases under repression."

The monks take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that date to the dawn of monasticism. But they do not reject modernity altogether. The typical monk today is educated and city-bred, uses computers and e-mail, and can be reached by cellphone. The icon painters at Decani mix pigment with egg yolk in the old way, and then blow-dry the paint with electric hair dryers.

No one exemplifies the new monk better than Decani's deputy abbot. University educated and fluent in English, Janjic set up a monastery website in 1997. As civil war loomed in Kosovo, he cautioned against violence and criticized Milosevic. During the fighting, he and his fellow monks protected ethnic Albanians from Serb paramilitary gangs.

Today, he publishes sharp commentaries rebuking the province's United Nations and NATO overseers for failing to curb ethnic Albanian extremists.

"The monastic way is no longer seen as some kind of time machine, going into the past," Janjic says. "It's not a petrified form of spirituality. We wear strange clothes and follow strange rules, but Orthodox Christianity is able to give something spiritually to these people today."

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