But outsiders should never mistake resignation for acceptance, says Alavanja. "It's Serbian pride," she says. "We can't say, 'Sure, take Kosovo. Do whatever you want to us.' What kind of people would we be?" Srdja Popovic, a human rights lawyer who pursues accused Serbian war criminals, says the gulf between unreconstructed nationalists and Western-style Democrats, including Serbia's president, Boris Tadic, is not as wide as outsiders may think. To Popovic, all major parties to some extent cling to the ideal of uniting Serbian-inhabited lands—a catalyst for war in the 1990s. "It's charitable to say this country is divided between democrats and nationalists," he says. "In reality, the nationalist ideal rules."

So does an obsession with the past, which for Serbs is a narrative of national suffering and valor. "Small peoples are often the victims of in­jus­tice," reflects Dragoljub Micunovic, an oppo­sition figure during the Milosevic years and now a high-ranking Democrat. Micunovic cites the 1908 annexation of Bosnia (home to many Serbs) by Austria-Hungary. Though outraged, Serbia was forced to accede. But in 1914 Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip struck back, assas­sinating the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo and spark­ing World War I. Half of Serbia's military-age male population may have died in the war, but the offending empire was obliterated, and in today's Serbia, Princip is a hero.

Ground zero for Serbian martyrdom is now Kosovo. To right-wing Serbs, politicians like the Democrats who decline to battle for it tooth and nail are Judases. The slur's religious imagery is inten­tional, for many Serbs regard Kosovo as their spiritual heartland. Slobodan Milosevic exploited this sentiment in the 1980s. He rose to the presidency partly on the platform of crushing Albanian power in Kosovo and died in 2006, during his marathon trial for war crimes that included violence against Kosovo Albanian civilians. It is difficult to judge whether the lin­gering aura of his propaganda offensive or authen­tic cultural veneration is what moves some Serbs to call Kosovo their Jerusalem, and some their Golgotha.

On the hill west of Velika Hoca, below an obser­vation post manned for nearly a decade by NATO peacekeepers, is a graveyard with a panoramic view: Along with clusters of old houses and hillside vineyards that supply the town's winery, owned by the Serbian Orthodox monastery, more than a dozen tiny churches pepper the valley. Some are medieval treasures adorned with ancient frescoes of the life of Christ, icons of saints, the Last Judgment. No one, including the local priest, can explain why this unassuming agricultural place came over the centuries to be invested with such a weight of the sacred.