Banja Luka // You Are More Than Welcome to Leave Us Alone
The Mariastern Abbey in Banja Luka // © Makic Slobodan / Shutterstock
“We don’t want tourists coming here. Like you two, they just tend to turn up and expect us to show them around, to put our lives on hold so that they can take some pictures of this place. I understand why, but we don’t want them”.
We’d tried calling plenty of times before making our way to the Mariastern Abbey, but these were some busy monks. We had loitered outside for a short while before one of the monks came out to ask what we wanted, eager to help as long as it didn’t actually require too much in the way of assistance. A little bit like Ron Swanson, if Ron Swanson was a Catholic monk living in a large abbey on the outskirts of Banja Luka.
It isn’t outside the realm of imagination that Ron Swanson ended up doing that sort of thing. He’d respect the hardworking nature of these guys, along with their lack of interest in outside life.
For some reason, I was surprised that the monk had a phone.
The history of the Mariastern Abbey is plenty curious, although that adjective can be placed with anything if the mood turns. Known locally as Opatija Marija Zvijezda, this is the only Trappist monastery in Southeast Europe. In 1910, it was the largest in the world, with 219 monks living, working and praying here. Today, it is the smallest, with just two men left to take care of all the tasks.
Marianhill Monastery, South Africa // © David Buzzard // Shutterstock
It all began with the man honoured in bust-form outside the entrance to the monastery. His name was Franz Pfanner, a 19th-century Austrian abbot who travelled the globe and is remembered for setting up two monasteries in particular. One of these is the Marianhill Monastery in South Africa, 16km (or so) west of Durban. The second was the one directly in front of me, manned today by two chaps who had no real interest in my presence. I didn’t hold that against them, obviously.
“You see, people come here expecting things that can’t be received so easily, and they don’t show the necessary respect in the first place. In summer, we have people in miniskirts here, hoping to pray. I have to tell them that we can’t help. They should go and pray in the forest, not here.”
This wasn’t Franz Pfanner’s first choice location for a monastery in Southeastern Europe. In fact, it was his 24th. His plans had been scuppered at every other turn, and it wasn’t until he heard that the Ottomans were allowing Christians to buy land for these purposes that he turned to Banja Luka, then a small regional centre in the westernmost part of the empire. Pfanner arrived in Banja Luka on June 10, 1869, and purchased 100 acres of land. 11 days later, Trappists came to get the ball rolling. It took another year or so for that ball to really get moving as permission was required from Rome, but that permission soon came, with the caveat that Pfanner must also build an orphanage alongside his monastery. That was more than fine, and on September 9, 1870, the first of many bricks were plonked into the ground. By Christmas Eve of that same year, the first Trappists were ready to move into the ramshackle accommodation.
To cut a long story short, everything grew from there. That should be plainly obvious because it would be somewhat pointless to waste a solid 500 words on a set-up that had nothing to do with the final destination. The Mariastern Abbey grew and grew as the Monks continued to buy the surrounding land. Before long, there was a hospital, a school, a church, a bell tower, extra wings and the orphanage that Rome had demanded. Electric lighting came here in 1899 before most of Banja Luka had that same luxury, itself eight years after the city’s first printing press was put into use at the abbey. By 1910, the Mariastern Abbey was purring like a well-oiled machine.
The monk’s phone rang, and he excused himself to take the call. An agitated conversation followed, one that ended abruptly before he returned to us with fresh complaints. “That was a call from a tourist group, numbering 168. They wanted to turn up and check out the place, they said they only needed five minutes. Five minutes! What can you do in five minutes? Nothing. You can do nothing in five minutes. Anyway, you are here now, would you like to see the shop?”
We weren’t about to say no to such an offer, so we waddled into a nearby cabin to see the products that helped keep the abbey afloat in modern times. Cheese and tinctures dominated the offer, the latter covering any and all herbs that you could care to imagine. I asked if the tinctures were for specific maladies, and the monk’s response was magnificently deadpan. He said, “You tell me what’s wrong, and I will tell you what they are for”. Touche, touche.
It was the cheese that made the most noise, although not literally. Cheese has no voice.
As the abbey continued to develop in the late 19th century, the Trappists started making their own cheese. The first batch was completed in 1882 and it soon conquered the region, being served in the royal palaces of Belgrade, Vienna and others. The recipe was passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, never written down, and it soon became the calling card of this beautiful piece of land on the outskirts of Banja Luka.
A charming tale, a romantic one, but the current plight of the monastery should create an obvious issue. If a recipe is only passed down by word of mouth, at some point you will run out of mouths. The 20th century saw mounting debts cause untold problems for the monastery, and the violence of World War II didn’t exactly help matters. Neither did the godless communists, who took the abbey into their own hands and didn’t exactly pay much attention to its survival. The 1969 earthquake obliterated the place.
And then, at a year that I failed to note down in my tatty notebook, the monk in charge of the cheese recipe passed away. There was nobody left who knew how to make this special cheese.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and one monk took it on himself to save the day. He headed to France, a journey that took a month, to consult other monks and see if the recipe could be salvaged. Call it divine intervention if you like, but the recipe was resurrected, and cheese once again flowed out of the Mariastern Abbey in Banja Luka. It remains the biggest selling point of the place today.
Our time at the monastery was coming to an end. We hadn’t actually been inside anything other than the shop, but that was fine. I have this fascination with places of worship that isn’t predicated on a need to go inside and gawp at walls. They aren’t zoos, after all. They are real, living places of spiritual importance. There is no value in me wandering inside, taking ill-advised photos and remaining numb to it all. I try not to use the word too often, but I respected the anti-social attitude of this monk. If you wanted to understand, you would. No amount of prayer or perseverance would matter.
“If you come back on Thursday, at one o’clock, I will be happy to show you around. I will be at your service. Thursday, one o’clock, not before, not after.”
Long live the two monks at Opatija Marija Zvijezda.
