Balkan Insight reports:
A year-long celebration marking 1,700 years since the Roman Empire granted Christians religious freedom will start on January 17 in the Serbian city of Nis, where Roman emperor Constantine the Great was born. …
On the opening day of the celebrations a concert of spiritual music performed by the choir of Sretenjski Monastery from Russia will be held at the National Theatre in Nis in the presence of Serbian Patriarch Irinej and President Tomislav Nikolic.
Planned events include an exhibition on Christianity in Niš through the Ages, a play about the Emperor called Constantine: The Sign of Angels, and public lectures on a variety of related topics. In preparation for the jubilee, the Serbian Orthodox Church hosted a conference on the Edict of Milan and religious freedom this past May, an English write-up of which can be read here.
Constantine is sometimes mistakenly thought to be the Emperor who made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire; while the Edict did protect Christians from persecution, it wasn’t until the reign of Theodosius sixty-seven years later that Christianity became the legitimate imperial faith.
There has been some controversy about whether Pope Benedict will attend any of the planned events. Orthodox Christianity is by far the majority religion in Serbia (as of 2002, roughly 85% of the population is Orthodox, with Catholics in a distant second at 5%), and memories of recent Orthodox-Catholic hostilities remain fresh in many minds:
The patriarch [of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Irinej], however, reiterated that there were problems that could make the pope’s visit to Serbia problematic, such as security issues, “bearing in mind the still fresh memories of World War II and also of the recent wars that had taken place in the Western Balkans”.
Whether the pope makes it to Niš or not, Catholic faithful are expected to turn out in droves:
It’s expected that more than 100,000 believers will join the liturgy due to be held by the Catholic Church on September 21st. Because of the large numbers, the organisers are considering whether it might be possible to hold it on the runway of Nis’s Constantine the Great Airport.
The official English language website for the jubilee can be found here.
January 16th, 2013 | 11:03 am
Wow, wish I had seen this sooner. It is a 6 hour drive so the train is probably double that! Would love to here the choir. Train leaves at 5 am tomorrow which makes it impossible.
January 16th, 2013 | 11:05 am
Huh, hate when you cannot correct stupid mistakes!
January 17th, 2013 | 12:18 pm
The persecution of Christians was actually ended by the emperor Galerius (Gaius Galerius Valerius). On April 30, 311, nearly two years before Constantine’s Edict of Milan, an “Edict of Toleration” was posted at Nicomedia in Anatolia in the name of Galerius, Constantine, and Licinius (who, along with Maximinus Daia, were co-emperors at the time); but the text was clearly written by Galerius, the senior “Augustus” in the East. One of the reasons given for toleration ws that the persecutions had succeeded, not in coercing emperor worship by Christians, but only in persuading them to cease professing any religion at all, which was unfortunate!
Both Eusebius in his church history and Lactantius in his history of the persecutions mention Galerius as being the emperor who ended the persecution of Christians of Diocletian, which, it should be remembered, had also been instigated by Galerius in 303, when Diocletian was still alive. I have always been puzzled by the fact that Galerius has not received more credit for his edict and in fact has been utterly forgotten, possibly because Constantine wanted all credit for himself. The name of Licinius, Constantine’s final rival for sole imperial authority, eventually disappeared in historical documents mentioning the Galerian edict. The survivors get to write the history, else the current celebrations might be taking place in Sofia (ancient Serdica), where Galerius, son of a shepherd, was born (c. 260).
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