First off, an apology. I wrote last time that I saw the late Serbian Orthodox archbishop Amfilohije in Kosovo, after Nato forces entered the country in 1999, carrying a rifle under his cassock.

First off, an apology. I wrote last time that I saw the late Serbian Orthodox archbishop Amfilohije in Kosovo, after Nato forces entered the country in 1999, carrying a rifle under his cassock. That wasn’t, it seems, quite true. It was the young monk who was with him. I was with a friend, an aid worker, when Italian officers asked him to give a lift to the archbishop and his companion to the patriarchate of Pec.

My friend asked them whether they were carrying weapons, as, since he was in an aid vehicle, he wasn’t allowed to have anyone armed in it. The archbishop, rather brusquely, said no. But in the back of the vehicle, the young monk observed that he had only a Kalashnikov and two grenades with him; and when the two of them left, I did indeed see the rifle under the cassock of one of them. So, the archbishop’s companion had the weapon, but it was he who did not tell the truth about it.

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