As fate would have it – or, as one monastic said, someone’s ill hand – Serb sacred places were on fire last month, both on Mt. Athos and in Metochia.

The hands of that “someone” have laid low the national pride of the Serbs, a celestial row of churches who gathered the spiritual wealth of a nation; preserved the old and added the new testimonies of resistance to tyranny; protected the weak, the infirm, the persecuted and the just in defending human liberty from barbaric instincts of tyrants to dominate the souls of the living with fire and sword.

Hilandar burned first, to the very walls of the “Arbanas pirg” and the tombstones of Jovan and Repos Kastriotic, Serb nobles from Albania, father and eldest brother of Djuradj (George) Kastrotic, better known as Skenderbeg. Something halted the hand of the arsonist at the very spot that shatters the lie about the origins of the “Albanian hero.” What better proof that places that preserve Serbia history are sacred?

His mother, Voisava, daughter of a respected Serbian noble from Polog, hardly had time to know her little boy before Djuradj was sent as a hostage to the court of sultan Suleyman I. There he took Islam and the name Skenderbeg (Iskander-bey), after Alexander (“Iskander”) the Great, whose exploits were know to the Turks from eastern legends. Djuradj earned his new name in wargames on open field, besting his competitors in “wrestling, fighting and javelin-throwing,” and earning on his 18th birthday the rank of sanjak-bey and command of five thousand cavalry from sultan Murat II.

He eventually took the cavalry and defected to the Christian side, fighting the Sultan’s armies for the next quarter century. In exchange for support from Pope Pious II, who was more concerned with the Orthodox “schismatics” than with Turkish invasions and depredations, Djuradj converted to Catholicism. Therefore, when he died “of strong fever” in mid-January 1468, he was not buried next to his father and brother in Hilandar, but his body was laid to rest at an Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, above Lles.

The fires of Hilandar did not burn the truth that Jovan Kastriotic had nine children with Voisava, four sons - Repos, Stanisa, Konstantin and Djuradj, mentioned in that order in the chronicles of Athanasios, abbot of the Hilandar monastery; and five daughters - Mara, Jela, Andjelija, Vlaitsa and Mamitsa.  It was written that the eldest, Mara, married Stefan Crnojevic, Vlaitsa married Stefan Balsic. Skenderbeg’s only son, Ivan, married Irina, daughter of Lazar Brankovic and granddaughter of Djuradj Brankovic. This information was verified by Koenigsberg scholar Karl Kopf, historian, ethnographer an archeologist who researched the Kastriotic genealogy in the mid-1800s at the behest of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Skenderbeg’s Serbian origin was remembered the longest in Montenegro.  In his letter to the Venetian doge (1757), the metropolitan of Montenegro Vasilije Petrovic mentions “the Serbian hero Skenderbeg.” He repeats the same in his letters with Russian empress Elisabeth, citing as his own ancestors Djuradj Kastriotic and Ivan Crnojevic. Drekalovic, the largest clan among the Kuc tribe, nurtures the history of Skenderbeg as their progenitor, through his grandson Drekalo.

The Hilandar fire spared the main chapel, where in the inner narthex, surrounding the fresco or the Virgin with Christ, contains the images of St. Simeon (Stefan Nemanja) and his son St. Sava, and the inscription underneath: “presented by Lord’s servant Repos 6936” (1431) – an authentic testimony that Skenderbeg’s eldest brother spent time as a monk in Hilandar before his death.

Little noted these days is that Albanians were involved in putting out the fire that attacked the holy mountain’s only Serb monastery. Farm hands hired by the monks to work at the monastery estate, these Albanians saved many precious treasures of the Church.

What they saved on Holy Mt. Athos, other Albanians burned in the holy land of Metochia. Of the thirty-five churches and monasteries damaged and destroyed, the first was the church of Blessed Virgin of Ljevis in Prizren. It used to be a metropolitan seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church, granted numerous estates by King Milutin. Among its contributors stands the name of Pavle Kastriotic, Skenderbeg’s grandfather, who donated fifty florins and had estates comprising several villages in the Mata river valley.

Before their rampage, the pathetic arsonists had erected a statue of Skenderbeg in Pristina’s main square. It is good that they have done so. He can remind them they are a people without history, who destroy that of others in order to forcibly conjure up their own.