Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ: a fresco of Tito, Marx and Engels burning in hell made international headlines

In Podgorica, capital of Montenegro, the cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ is the mother church of the Metropolitanate of Montenegro and the Littoral of the Serbian Orthodox Church. It rose in the district of Momišići, on the western bank of the river Morača, on land which, according to Serbian encyclopedic sources, had belonged to the Church since before the Second World War, when a first cathedral project was cut short by the conflict, and which the communist authorities are said to have confiscated, returning it only in the nineties. That account, however, is documented only by online encyclopedic sources and not by a primary one, and there is no evidence, contrary to a widespread rumour, that the building stands on the site of a Partisan cemetery of the Second World War. The first stone was blessed on 9 August 1993 by the metropolitan Amfilohije Radović, head of the metropolitanate from 1990 to 2020 and a key figure of the whole project, later buried in the crypt of the cathedral. The central dome, with its gilded cross, was completed on 18 November 1999, while the crypt was consecrated on the Sunday of All Saints in 2013 and the cathedral as a whole on 7 October 2013, on the one thousand seven hundredth anniversary of the Edict of Milan. Four Orthodox patriarchs were present: the Serbian patriarch Irinej, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, the patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilos III and the patriarch of Moscow Kirill, an event well documented by concordant sources in several languages. The architect Predrag Ristić signed the design, in a style described as Serbo-Byzantine, although architecture critics call it an eclectic hybrid drawing also on the medieval cathedral of Saint Tryphon at Kotor. The building is 41.5 metres tall and has two twin bell towers of 26.7 metres holding seventeen bells, with an interior of gilded frescoes, marble floors and a large iconostasis, whose donation in 2001 by the Church of Athens rests on a single source. In 2014 one of the frescoes inside, showing hell in the Last Judgement, portrays among the flames figures identified by the international press as Josip Broz Tito, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, drawing wide coverage from agencies such as AFP; a church spokesman defended the work as a symbol of «communist evil». During the protests of December 2019 against the contested Montenegrin law on religious freedom, seen by the Serbian Orthodox Church as a threat to its historic properties in the country, hundreds of clergy led by Amfilohije himself gathered in front of the parliament and then held a liturgy in this very cathedral, signing a declaration in defence of the Church. The wider crisis between Serbian and Montenegrin church identity remains a national dispute, not tied specifically to the cathedral building beyond that episode.