Summary
Having remained in the shadow of the neighboring Bosnian tragedy, Montenegro has not attracted much scholarly attention and anthropologists are seldom aware of its ethno-religious heterogeneity. This also applies to the study of intercommunal relations regarding the uses of religious sanctuaries, cults and religious objects, both sharing and conflictual or competitive. 

Sometimes, these relations are intertwined with largely secular, or pseudoreligious, relations regarding certain categories of cultural goods or persons, typically relations of exclusive appropriation or sharing within a wider horizon. This paper will be dealing with such entanglements in Prćanj, a small town in the Bay of Kotor. The town is one of South Dalmatian towns sharing a rich history of an early Illyrianism (from 16th century onwards) that eventually developed into Yugoslavism aspiring to transcend the Orthodox-Catholic divide. Prćanj was also a favorite summer residence of the Montenegrin vladika (both secular and church ruler) Petar Petrović Njegoš. Njegoš was also a great poet, enjoying the recognition as, in this order, Serbian, Yugoslav and (currently) Montenegrin national poet. Due to its many links with Njegoš, Prćanj is entitled to certain claims regarding its role in the cult of the Poet as “cultural saint”. At the same time, Njegoš is captured in the conflict between the Montenegrin state and the Serbian Orthodox Church (its Montenegrin patriarchy), which is in the process of making the poet the religious saint of the Serbian Church. The consequences of this deep conflict that is made especially virulent because of the contested Poet’s tomb are clearly visualized in Prćanj as a spatial juxtaposition of the imposing local Catholic cathedral and a small recently-built rotunda of the Orthodox Church, represented as a (replica of) the Njegoš’s Chapel and located on the opposite side of the local cemetery. Can the clearly disruptive act of planting the rotunda as an aggressive reminder of “Communist barbarism” be at least to some extent neutralized by being dropped in the very site of memory conveying the values of Yugoslavism, religious symbiosis, and past prosperity?

Bojan Baskar is Professor of Social Anthropology and the Mediterranean Studies at the University of Ljubljana (Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology). His recent research has been focused on the Eastern and Northern Adriatic cultures, in particular Montenegrin. His current research interests also include history and theory of anthropology, ethnoecology, anthropology of food, comparative mythology, racism, travel writing. Some most recent publications: 
Baskar, B. (2021) ‘Austronostalgia and Bosnian Muslims in the Work of Croatian Anthropologist Vera Stein Erlich’. In: Šistek, F. (ed.). Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers and Exchanges. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 155-169.
Baskar, B. (2020) ‘A Mixture Without Mixing: Fears of Linguistic and Cultural Hybridity in the Slovenian-Italian Borderland’. Acta Histriae, 28(4), pp. 605-622.
Baskar, B. (2019) ‘The Third Canonization of Njegoš, the National Poet of Montenegro. In: Dović, M. and J. K. Helgason (eds). Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood. Leiden; Boston: Brill, pp. 269-293.