Communism, Atheism and the Orthodox Church of Albania

Cooperation, Survival and Suppression, 1945–1967

Artan R. Hoxha, Artan Hoxha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000608588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the relations between the Albanian communist regime and the Albanian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (AAOC) from 1945, when the communists came to power, to 1967, when Albania became the only atheistic state in the world, and religion of all kinds was completely suppressed. Based on extensive archival research, the book outlines Orthodox Church life under communism and considers the regime's strategies to control, use, and subordinate the Church. It argues against a simple state oppression versus Church resistance scenario, showing that the situation was much more complex, with neither the regime nor the Church being monolithic entities. It shows how, despite the brutality and the constant pressure of the state, the Church successfully negotiated with the communist authorities and benefited from engaging with them, and how the communist authorities used the Church as a tool of foreign policy, especially to strengthen the regime's ties with their East European allies.

1 Nationalism and the Orthodox Church in a Country with a Muslim Majority

DOI: 10.4324/9781003207726-2

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the post-communist revival of Albania's Autocephalous Orthodox Church (Kisha Orthodhokse Autoqefale e Shqipërisë), one of the largest Orthodox churches in the Balkans, the Resurrection of Christ cathedral officially opened in the heart of the capital, Tirana. On June 24, 2012, inauguration day, this massive temple instantly dominated the surrounding urban landscape with its grand blue dome rising 32 metres from the ground, as well as a 46-metre-high bell tower, atop which firmly stood a gilded cross. But not for long. Only a few years later—literally a few metres away from the cathedral—a building known as “4-ever Green” (a 95-metre-high skyscraper), part of the urban renewal plan for Tirana, was erected. As I write these lines, this high-tech tower is almost complete, proudly rising towards the sky, casting its long, tremendous shadow over the golden cross and cathedral. This multifunctional building now commands the surrounding landscape demeaning, even suppressing to the point of submission, the presence of the cathedral.

Built to commemorate the defeat of atheism and celebrate the triumph of religion's revival in post-communist Albania, the country's largest Christian Orthodox shrine is shadowed by the symbol of capitalism's triumph, whose outlays are closely linked to political power. The gilded cross set high on the bell tower and the one adorned on the cathedral's dome aim to reach the sky. The 95-metre-high tower does the same. In this confrontation for greatness and power, it's clear that the alliance of secular power with capital wins. Despite the best efforts of the AOCA to imprint post-communist Albania through its architecture, the construction of “4-ever Green” demonstrates the superiority of secular symbolism. A similar confrontation is also evident in other parts of the capital, shedding light on the unequal relations between temporary power and religious institutions in post-communist Albania. Perhaps not so accidentally, opposite the neighbouring Catholic St. Paul's Cathedral and the enormous Sunni Islam Namazgah Mosque, defiantly rises, in excess of 140 metres high, the giant “Downtown Tirana One” skyscraper. A playful architectural configuration in the arrangement of the balconies on its façade reveals the map of Albania. The message is clear: within their religious diversity Albanians first remain united as Albanians.

What this unfolding architectural race to reach the sky affirms isn’t limited only to the years following the fall of Albania's communist system. On the contrary, the symbolic competition for power in society, as well as the triumph of secular power, are equally distinctive elements of modernity and the process of nation-building and state-formation in Albania since its establishment in 1912. In this small Balkan country, the need to build a unified Albanian identity to transcend the plethora of provincial and religious divisions was underlined by a need to conceive a discursive and material, non-religious universe. This phenomenon, which took shape during the Albanian National Movement for independence in the 19th century, when Albania was still part of the Ottoman Empire, was strengthened during the 20th century, regardless of the political systems governing the country. It continues in the early 21st century in the religious open market of liberal globalization with its emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity.

As a result, an analysis of the Orthodox Church's narrative in communist Albania should be incorporated within a broader historical framework; a framework which transcends any kind of essentialization aiming to reduce the relation between the Orthodox Church with the state Albania into an ahistorical formula. One of the chief principles that has traditionally guided the Orthodox Church's relations with secular power has been the notion of the symphony, first formulated in the 6th century AD by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. This concept required close cooperation between the holders of the earthly power and those of the heavenly one. In the Byzantine socio-political universe, the symphonia distinguished between the duties of the church and those of the state; imperial and religious authority were seen as complementary, mutually supporting the fulfilment of their Christian mission.¹ The perception of the symphonia as nothing more than the imposition of the emperor's will on the church continues to endure, but the relationship between religious and secular power in the Byzantine Empire was more complex.² The Patriarchate of Constantinople considered the imperial power as its supportive arm spreading Christian faith in the world, while the task of the Church was to prepare the flock for the afterlife.

Based on this tradition, there are authors who see the origin of symbiosis between the Balkan nation-states and the Orthodox churches in the region in the symphonia. This includes the cooperation between the Orthodox churches and their corresponding communist regimes.³ On the other hand, the unwavering position of the Polish Catholic Church against the communist regime in Warsaw can be explained by the lack of symphony in the relations the Vatican had historically built with secular power. Still, the staunch anti-communism of Polish Catholicism during the Cold War—widely regarded as the antithesis of the Orthodox church's deferential status in the socialist countries in the region—does not exemplify the totality of experiences of the Catholic churches in the rest of the Eastern European bloc. In fact, Catholic Church structures in countries like Hungary or Czechoslovakia were far more flexible and inclined to cooperate with their respective communist parties than their Polish counterparts were.⁴ It's important to underscore that while symphonia serves as an important analytical tool for understanding the history of the Orthodox Churches during the communist period, it nevertheless leaves out many important dynamics intrinsic to the advances of modernity. As Sabrina Ramet has argued, the politicization of religion is a modern phenomenon, closely linked to the nation-building project, by no means limited to Orthodoxy alone.⁵

Various historians point out that the diminishment of the Church's power contributed to the establishment of the modern state in Europe. The historians of the Orthodox church Paschalis Kitromilides and Sotiris Mitralexis have argued that it was this model of Western modernity, based on the Protestant experience, which inspired Gallicanism. Gallicanism asserts the supremacy of secular power over the Catholic Church, and that fostered the process of annexing the Orthodox churches in their individual nation-states.⁶ These counter-arguments on the symbiosis between state and religion are closely linked to the violent history of the Balkans during the 20th century. The efforts of the individual states in the region to build homogeneous societies—religiously and culturally—often led to genocide and multiple ethnic cleansings. The dominant thesis has been that these brutal events are the result of Balkan societies’ partial embrace of Enlightenment principles, representing the alter ego of Western societies. Maria Todorova's seminal work of and within the post-modernist critique has challenged this thesis on all fronts.⁷ Modernity and Enlightenment are seen as the actual sources of the projects that sought to dismantle the heterogeneous cultural landscape of the Ottoman Empire and build ethnically, religiously, and linguistically homogeneous blocs oriented with exclusive loyalty towards nation-states.

Despite the validity of these arguments as to how Western academia and chancelleries construe the image of Balkan countries, these authors do not shy away from trying to find the agents of Southeastern Europe's turbulent history over the past two centuries. While moral judgements towards the past are inevitable, these arguments often embrace the executioner and victim dichotomy which do not fully explain the actual historical experience. Proponents of the multiple modernities paradigm such as Dominic Sachsenmaier and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt argue that the historical dynamics of the last two or three centuries are complex, embodied by the interaction of many endogenous and exogenous factors.⁸ The establishment of modern states and the forging of homogeneous nations can’t be regarded as either merely imports of Western archetypes by Balkan nationalist elites or as the imposition of a foreign model on a tabula rasa. Obviously, no historical innovation arises in a vacuum. All models that came from West European countries interacted with preceding factors, forces, traditions, and institutions particular to each nation. In fact, as various scholars have recently demonstrated, far more than being passive recipients, many Balkan societies actively participated in the elaboration of thought, cultural and modern state models.⁹

Regarding the nationalization of the Orthodox Churches in the Balkans and their submission to the secular structure of nation-states, this was the result of an interaction between Byzantine and Ottoman traditions and the imperatives of spiritual sovereignty inspired especially by the Lutheran experience.¹⁰ Various German princes who the great European powers elected as the head of the newly-established Balkan states were important agents of this strategy.¹¹ The curtain-raiser was the Bavarian king Otto I of Greece who unilaterally declared the separation of the Orthodox Church of his kingdom from its dependence on the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1833. When the Patriarchate recognized the autocephaly of the Greek Church in 1850, the precedent was set in the Balkans for the founding of national Orthodox Churches, which meant subordination to the state within the boundaries in which they operated.¹² The example of the Greek Church was soon followed by other countries in the Balkans. If, up until then, the Orthodox tradition of autocephaly meant the right granted to a group of bishops to govern themselves, beginning from the 19th century onwards, ecclesiastical autonomy began to imply that the churches were primarily national in nature.¹³ Eventually, the other states in the region rushed to imitate the model.

The model of the modern European state, which implied the supremacy of secular power over the church, intertwined with the Ottoman political legacy. The Sultan saw the Patriarch of Constantinople as his servant of the sultan and maintained the right to both appoint and dismiss him. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II integrated the structures of the Orthodox Church within the bureaucratic apparatus of the Ottoman-ruled Empire.¹⁴ Under the Ottoman Empire, which essentially remained a theocratic state until the end of its existence, the Byzantine symbiosis between state and religion continued to define the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the holders of secular power. While proclaiming the ideal of separation between state and religion, the Balkan nation-states regarded the Orthodox Churches as instruments of their power and the Orthodox clergy as part of the state administration. Modernity reinforced this puzzling tradition, which, under the banner of nationalism, reinvented itself under the not-so-orthodox and ecumenical slogan “independent state, independent church.”¹⁵

Indeed, as a great number of authors have comprehensively argued, national identity in the Balkans openly followed the Ottoman millet system.¹⁶ This system was the cornerstone which maintained the social order allowing the Sublime Porte to administer, in a decentralized manner, the populations within its jurisdiction. Although the millet system was not static and was altered over time, it essentially turned the clerical institutions within its remit into key components for governing their flock in the interest of Ottoman rule. The millet system sought to establish a complex network of agreements, operating between different levels of government in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multilingual social fabric over which the Sublime Porte ruled. The Balkan nation-states were committed to bring an end to the pluralism of the Ottoman era and doggedly implemented policies to build religiously, culturally and linguistically homogeneous societies. To achieve this goal, the Balkans’ nationalist elites utilized and manipulated the legacy of millet system to forge new nations. Exploiting this political ploy to its maximum leverage, the Balkan nation-states nationalized their respective Orthodox Churches. These states used their churches as critical tools for social engineering that excluded the ethnic and religious minorities from the nation's political body.¹⁷ The members of non-Orthodox minorities in Orthodox-majority countries were marginalized into second-class subjects rather than being seen as citizens of an atomized society: in the millet system, it was the group's religious identity that determined their status in society.

Great care must be taken with generalizations because they might distort the reality of daily life in Eastern Europe. The Balkan history is complex and it does not easily fit into analytical moulds. A number of studies have shown that the lives of ordinary people in the Balkans freely operated beyond state, church, and mosque controls. Religion was just one of many identities operating in an open and highly resilient field of social relations.¹⁸ As Mary Neuburger points out, the state authorities in Bulgaria clearly separated Slavic-speaking Muslim Pomaks from the Turkish minority. The Bulgarian government regarded the first group as ethnic Bulgarians, striving to assimilate them within the national body, while considering the latter to be foreigners, a non-integrating entity within the national framework.¹⁹ In the Balkans, religious identity was not the only variable in determining the formation of the statutory notions of Us and the Other, notions that are critical for the formation of the national community.

Nation-building in Albania falls outside the framework of the millet formulae. In addition to the myriad of provincial identities, the Albanians were split into four religious affiliations: Sunni Muslims; followers of the Bektashi order (a syncretic Sufi sect); Catholics Christians, (based mainly in northern Albania); and Orthodox Christians who were to be found in a vast majority in the southern part of the country. In forging a nation, the overcoming of multiple geographic, dialectal, and cultural fractures—spontaneo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Photos
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Nationalism and the Orthodox Church in a Country with a Muslim Majority
• 2 Looking for Support
• 3 The Regime’s Crackdowns and the Reactions of the Orthodox Clergy
• 4 Long Life to the Peoples’ Power
• 5 The AOCA in the Service of the State
• 6 The Erosion of the Church Body
• 7 “Unheard of—Not Even in Turkish Times”: The Road to 1967
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index