DECANI, Kosovo - The sky is clear and starry above Decani monastery as bearded men in black robes hurry across the yard and through the wooden side door of the Church of the Ascension.
Standing in the dark they begin to pray, briskly and without pause, their voices at times rising into song and filling the church with rich harmonies. Around them, barely visible in the dim glow of oil lamps, saints and warriors of the Orthodox Church look down from frescoes painted nearly 700 years ago.
These Serbian monks belong to a line that goes back to the 14th century, when King Stefan Uros founded a monastery in a cleft of the Accursed Mountains in southern Kosovo. Rising long before dawn, they pursue a life of work and prayer whose essential rhythms have barely changed over the centuries. The stone threshold of Decani's church has been worn smooth by the feet of generations of monks coming to pray.
A decade ago, this way of life had nearly died away. Forty-five years of communist rule in the former Yugoslavia had cut off the supply of new monks. A handful of older monks remained, keeping tradition alive, but only barely.
Today, young men come from all over the former Yugoslavia to embrace the rigors and, they say, blessings of monastic life. The monastery's cells are overflowing, pre-dawn prayers swell with dozens of voices and the days are busy with farming, writing, translating, icon painting, woodcarving and more. For the first time in generations, Decani is thriving again.
"Of course it is difficult," says the Rev. Ilarion Lupulovic, 28, a successful actor on the Belgrade stage before he joined Decani monastery six years ago. "That is one of the reasons why I came. But there is also an opportunity for great peace and joy, and you can even say love, when you are a part of a community like this."
All across the Orthodox lands of the former Yugoslavia - Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and parts of Bosnia - monasteries are enjoying a revival. Tito's Yugoslavia suppressed religion and turned old churches and monasteries into "cultural monuments." Religion is permissible again, and many young people are turning to it even as their society falls increasingly under the spell of Western secular culture.
The monastic revival coincides with the resurgence of nationalist feeling in the former Yugoslavia. In Kosovo, monks of the Serbian Orthodox Church fight to protect their monasteries and the province's remaining Serbs from hostile ethnic Albanians. In Macedonia, new monks are reoccupying dozens of abandoned monasteries, animated in part by a desire to shore up Macedonian identity in a region dominated by more populous nations.
Though Decani's monks were credited with protecting ethnic Albanian Muslims from marauding Serbs, their humanitarian gestures have done little to change the way Kosovar Albanians feel about the church.
Most Albanians blame the church for promoting Serb nationalism in the 1990s or for doing too little to curb its excesses. They view the church and its institutions the way they view the whole Serb presence in Kosovo: as an imposition.
There is a widespread belief among ethnic Albanians that centuries ago Serbs built Orthodox churches and monasteries on the site of Albanian churches.
"They came to our land and they occupied it and took our churches," says Uka Gashi, 32, a former fighter in the Kosovo Liberation Army, sitting in a Decani cafe about a mile from the monastery.
The monks see it otherwise, in a view that goes beyond land and into the spirit.
"The revival of the monasteries is a revival of our people," says the Rev. Stefan Sanjakovski, a professor at the Theological Faculty in Skopje.
The Rev. Sofronij Dimeski, 28, and a few other monks moved into an empty 12th-century monastery high in the mountains of central Macedonia. The isolation and harsh beauty make the monastery, called Treskavec, uniquely suited to monastic life, he says.
"There's no place like it in Macedonia."
Not only men are choosing monastic life. Three years ago, Abbess Sister Kirana, 38, led young nuns to the village of Jankovec, in southern Macedonia, to resurrect an abandoned 16th-century nunnery.
It was exciting work but hard. In the beginning, the nuns had no water or electricity. The neighbors, too, were suspicious of the grave, black-garbed women.
"When they got to know the life of the monastery, all their suspicions were gone," says Sister Kirana, who declined to give her full name.
Of all the monasteries in the former Yugoslavia, Decani's is perhaps the most remarkable. After NATO forced Serbian authorities out of Kosovo three years ago, ordinary Serbs fled the Decani area. The monks are the only Serbs left for miles around. Mortar rounds have been lobbed in their direction. Italian soldiers guard the monastery's approaches, and the monks do not travel without a military escort.
But all of this seems only to heighten Decani's appeal. With 33 monks and novices, it has the largest brotherhood of any monastery in Serbia. "The outer situation has not affected the inner, spiritual life at all," said the Rev. Sava Janjic, 37, the deputy abbot. "I can say it's even become more intense. In the history of Christianity, spiritual life increases under repression."
Monks take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that date to the dawn of their vocation. But modernity still leaves its mark. The typical monk today is educated and city-bred and no longer the son of peasants. Monks use computers and e-mail; they can be reached by cell phone.
They are not afraid to innovate if it serves tradition. The icon painters at Decani mix pigment with egg yoke in the old way, then blow-dry the paint with hair dryers. In a larger sense, many monks strive, through their writing and translating, to give modern expression to Orthodox traditions.
No one exemplifies the new monk better than Decani's deputy abbot. Educated in Belgrade and fluent in English, Janjic came to Decani in 1992 with four other young monks. In 1997, he set up a Decani Web site, which he and other church leaders later used to caution against violence and to criticize the policies of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. During the Kosovo war, Janjic and his fellow monks harbored ethnic Albanians fleeing Serb paramilitary gangs. Today he publishes sharp commentaries rebuking the province's United Nations and NATO overseers.
"The monastic way is no longer seen as some kind of time machine, going into the past," he says. "It's not a petrified form of spirituality. We wear strange clothes and follow strange rules, but Orthodox Christianity is able to give something spiritually to these people today."
Decani's monks protest that they are soft and weak compared to monks of old. After all, they have indoor plumbing. But their day begins at 3 a.m., when a bell rouses them to private prayer. At 4:30 they gather in the church for four more hours of prayer and liturgy. They emerge for breakfast and the day's work: washing the station wagon for one, tending the cows for another, chiseling ornate wood panels for another. Study and more prayer round out the day, until at 10 p.m. they lie down for a short night's rest.
The monastic revival has not pleased everyone. Parents who grew up under communism are dismayed when their sons and daughters renounce worldly ambition and family life. Some have accused religious leaders of deceiving or even kidnapping their children.
In the end, neither hardship nor parental disapproval stops those determined to live the monastic life. Zvezdan Stefanovic, 30, came to Decani this year after toiling for luxury hotels in Belgrade and Buenos Aires. A cheerful man with curly reddish hair, he shares a crowded cell with four other novices. He doesn't seem to mind. He seems almost to enjoy it.
"For five years I am only thinking 'monastery, monastery, monastery,'" he says, smiling. "God willing, I will stay."