The oldest and most important buildings of the Serbian Orthodox Church stand outside the territory Serbia administers. The Patriarchate of Pec, the historic seat; Visoki Decani, whose fourteenth century fresco programme is among the largest surviving in the Byzantine world; Gracanica; and Our Lady of Ljevis at Prizren are all in Kosovo. UNESCO inscribed them as a single World Heritage property and placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger.
The danger is not neglect. Several of these buildings were attacked in the violence of March 2004, and Decani has been under international military protection since 1999, first by Italian troops of the NATO force and continuously since. A monastery that receives visitors under armed guard is an unusual object: it is simultaneously a functioning religious community, a world heritage site, a Serbian national symbol and a security problem.
Two further complications belong in any honest account. First, the legal status of the monastery land has itself been litigated: Kosovo's Constitutional Court ruled in favour of Decani in a long running property dispute, and implementation of that ruling has been slow, which the monastery and international observers have both raised repeatedly. Second, the reciprocal loss is real. Ottoman era mosques, tekkes and Orthodox churches alike were damaged across the region during the wars of the 1990s, and framing the Kosovo monasteries as the only heritage at risk misdescribes what happened.
The monasteries are living communities, not ruins, and the monks at Decani in particular have a documented record of sheltering people of the other community during the conflict.