The destruction of electrical distribution boxes and the theft of cables from the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Mostar in the first week of December disturbed the Orthodox believers in this city, after which the church elders asked who is bothered by the church bells, which will not ring for some time.
Danilo Maric returned to Mostar three years ago, at the time when the reconstruction of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, which was destroyed during the war, was being completed.
He does not hide his disappointment over the looting of the Church, which he perceives as an attack on the community in Mostar.
“I’m more disappointed by the fact that someone wants to turn us against each other,” he explained how he looks at the robbery.
“Recently, the Partisan cemetery was attacked, then the mosques, then the Catholic cemetery… This is an attack on both Muslims and Catholics, because now it is expected that some Serb will attack a mosque or a Catholic church, that is the wish of a thief, and not the theft of a few cables,” Maric told.
The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Mostar, built in the 19th century, is located in the settlement of Bjelusine, on the left side of the main road, which leads through Mostar to the border with Croatia. The elder of this Orthodox temple, Dusko Kojic, says that the temple has been robbed ten times this year, but that this is the first time that the robbery was reported to the police.
The Cathedral in Mostar is a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and, like the Old Bridge, is on the UNESCO list of protected monuments. According to the data of the State Commission for the Preservation of National Monuments, the Church was shelled on June 7th and 8th, 1992. On June 15th of the same year, the tower was demolished and the Church was set on fire. Other parts were mined.
“The fact that it doesn’t light up now and that its bells don’t ring is terribly worrying for us,” Kojic says, adding that the robbery took them back a few steps.
A few hundred meters away from the Cathedral, in the offices of the Majlis of the Islamic Community in Mostar, Effendi Dino Maksumic was one of the first to condemn the robbery and send a message of support to his friend Kojic.
Sanja Bjelica-Sagovnovic, a long-time journalist and president of the Serbian educational association “Prosvjeta”, stressed that the devastation of the Cathedral awakened a feeling of sadness and disappointment in every Serb in this city, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
