Montenegro DPS rejects Porfirije's Vucji Do speech

The statement issued by the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) on Thursday, July 30, is the first party-level response to the two-day marking of 150 years since the Battle of Vucji Do, led by Serbian Patriarch Porfirije. Belgrade is not a bystander here: Serbian minister without portfolio Nenad Popovic attended the ceremonies, and the argument turns on a single line from a sermon that Montenegro’s opposition reads as a political platform rather than a homily.

The programme opened on Tuesday, July 28. Metropolitan Joanikije of Montenegro and the Littoral and Metropolitan Metodije of Budimlja and Niksic met the patriarch at Podgorica airport, after which he was received at the Cathedral of Saint Basil of Ostrog in Niksic, followed by a formal academy in the church grounds. The main jubilee liturgy came a day later, on July 29, at Vucji Do itself, in the church of Saint Athenogenes.

What the patriarch said

The disputed passage describes the 1876 victory as a joint act of tribes and clans:

In that place, Serbs from different tribes and brotherhoods stood shoulder to shoulder: Montenegrins, Highlanders and Herzegovinians.

The Serbian Orthodox Church went further in its own statement, saying the victory at Vucji Do remains written in golden letters in the history of the Serbian people, as one of the brightest examples of unity and loyalty.

Among those present at the liturgy and the academy were:

• Montenegrin Deputy Prime Minister Momo Koprivica
• SNSD leader Milorad Dodik
• Russian Ambassador to Podgorica Aleksandar Lukasik
• Niksic Mayor Marko Kovacevic and local assembly speaker Milica Lalatovic Zizic

The DPS response

The Democratic Party of Socialists rejected the reading that Vucji Do belongs to the heritage of Saint Sava and to a single Serbian national and spiritual space. It describes the battle as a military victory of the Montenegrin army under Prince Nikola I Petrovic.

Patriarch Porfirije Peric has the right to preach the faith, but he has no right to adapt Montenegrin history. Montenegro is nobody’s historical province, nor an appendix to anyone’s national and spiritual space.

The same statement takes aim at the silence of state officials at an event attended by Dodik. Criticism also came from academia: Nikola Saranovic, assistant professor at the Faculty of Legal Sciences of the University of Donja Gorica, told the daily Vijesti that the Serbness of Montenegrins is being used against Montenegro, and that splitting the population into Montenegrins, Highlanders and Herzegovinians drags the country back to pre-state categories.

Why does an 1876 battle still start political fights?

Because Vucji Do sits at the base of nineteenth-century Montenegrin statehood. On July 28, 1876, the Montenegrin army broke an Ottoman corps, and the run of victories in that war led to international recognition of Montenegro at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Anything from that year lands between two competing textbooks: one that treats Montenegro as a separate state tradition, another that folds it into a wider Serbian historical current.

The quarrel also has a much shorter timeline. Serbian Orthodox Church processions against the law on freedom of religion dominated the winter of 2019 and 2020, and the DPS lost its parliamentary majority in the August 2020 election after three decades in power. The enthronement of Metropolitan Joanikije in Cetinje in September 2021 was met with barricades and clashes with police. Twenty years after independence was restored, the church calendar still triggers political reactions in Montenegro faster than any other subject.

What is left open this time is attendance rather than doctrine. The DPS is not demanding an answer from the patriarch, who came as a guest, but from a deputy prime minister who stood beside Dodik and, the party says, said nothing.