The warlord’s wedding theatrically fused genocide with Kosovo martyrdom mythology

Evidence

For the ceremony, attended by Christian Orthodox bishops from Serb-controlled Bosnia and Croatia, Arkan wore an old Montenegrin warrior costume festooned with a huge cross, as his supporters waved paper flags with an Orthodox cross and nationalist slogans. Ceca was dressed as “The Maid of Kosovo” (Kosovka djevojka), the Mary Magdalene figure who nurses the Kosovo martyrs as they lie dying on the battlefield. Of the atrocities in Bosnia, Arkan said: “We are fighting for our faith, the Serbian Orthodox Church.” — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 232

Categorization

• FICTION: A wedding staged as sacred allegory — bishops officiating a war criminal’s marriage to a pop star dressed as a national martyr — is a fully realized set piece of theatrical sacralized violence.
• BMF: The Maid of Kosovo nursing the dying martyrs on the battlefield — and a pop star dressed as her at a warlord’s marriage — obliquely evokes the centralizing Marian/martyr icon imagery and sacred-warfare identity in the religious imaginaries of Things Fall Apart and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but more precisely the way A Very Minor Prophet frames institutional complicity. Close but not exact; suggest the resonance is partly there.