Belt of the Virgin Mary in Belgrade: kilometre-long queues of pilgrims

Six days after the arrival of the Belt of the Virgin Mary from the Vatopedi Monastery, queues at the Temple of Saint Sava in Belgrade stretched more than a kilometre and a half by seven o’clock on Tuesday morning. The first pilgrims had lined up before dawn, some on coaches that left Nis at two in the morning. Volunteers of the Serbian Orthodox Church distributed water, benches for the elderly, and blessed cotton ribbons handed to every pilgrim after the veneration of the relic. The Church plans to prepare 300,000 such ribbons, made, according to the volunteers, from cotton that has been in contact with the Belt.

The relic arrived in Belgrade on May 21, with a formal reception at Nikola Tesla Airport, where it was received by Serbian Patriarch Porfirije and President Aleksandar Vucic, a moment that drew varied readings in the Serbian public sphere given the timing alongside the protests and the crisis at the Interior Ministry. The transfer was carried out under a protocol agreed between Vatopedi and the Serbian Patriarchate 14 months earlier, with display dates running from May 21 to 29. After May 29 the Belt returns to Vatopedi, where it is kept in a hand-wrought silver casket made in Constantinople in 1864.

What exactly is the Belt of the Virgin Mary?

According to Church tradition, the Belt was woven by the Virgin Mary herself from camel hair given to her by a shepherd in Nazareth. Tradition further holds that after the Dormition of the Theotokos, the Apostle Thomas arrived late at the burial, and the Belt was given to him through a cloud as a sign that the Virgin had truly been assumed. For that reason the Belt is considered, in Orthodox theology, a direct witness of the Dormition. The surviving material object, with two silk belts and one of camel hair, arrived in Vatopedi from Constantinople in the 12th century, after the fall of Byzantium, as part of an exchange of treasures between the Komnenos dynasty and the Athonite community.

The Belgrade display is preceded by three earlier visits to Serbia: first in 2000, for the millennium celebrations; second in 2009, marking 800 years of autocephaly of the Serbian Church; and third in 2018. Each of those visits was shorter, with the longest display lasting four days. This visit, at eight days, is the longest in the history of relations between Belgrade and Mount Athos. According to information released on Tuesday by the Serbian Patriarchate, more than 280,000 pilgrims had venerated the Belt by Tuesday evening, with projections that the figure will exceed 600,000 by Friday May 29.

How is the logistics for pilgrims travelling from outside Belgrade?

The Patriarchate, in cooperation with the BSP coach operators and Serbian Railways, has organised additional lines from Nis, Kragujevac, Novi Sad and Subotica, with departures at 10 p.m. and returns at 11 a.m. In Belgrade, where coaches had brought roughly 14,000 pilgrims from outside the capital by Tuesday afternoon, parking is organised at Usce with a direct shuttle to the Temple. Djordje Stojicic, director general of the GSP city transport company, told RTS that on Tuesday city transport carried three times the average number of passengers on Line 9, which runs from Slavija Square to the Temple.

Pilgrims are advised to arrive in the morning hours and prepare for queues of three to five hours, with water, a hat and some food. Elderly and disabled pilgrims have a dedicated queue with shorter waits of up to an hour, entered from the east side of the Temple. Families with children under three also have a separate queue. The Patriarchate’s prota Aleksandar Vlajkovic said fourteen priests are on duty at any given time and the Belt is blessed with prayers at fixed intervals.

From a cultural perspective, the arrival of the Belt raises a question that the Serbian Church and its faithful base reject as a political framing. Around the Patriarch, who on Tuesday received Romanian Patriarch Daniel at the Patriarchate Palace, the line that the arrival of the Belt is “a spiritual moment for the people, not a political one” is repeated as the formal position. On the other side, the coincidence with the Interior Ministry crisis and Vucic’s visit to China has, for parts of the Serbian public, particularly sociologists of religion, opened the question of how, at critical moments, state structures and ecclesial authorities symbolically support one another in the public sphere.

The Belt returns to Vatopedi on Friday May 29 at 6 p.m., with a closing liturgy led by Patriarch Porfirije.