The streets of Belgrade were filled throughout the day and into the cold November night; authorities appealed for order. The French government expressed its sadness, and to the president of Belarus it was an “irreplaceable loss”. Belgrade’s chief Rabbi spoke of the “pain in his soul”; the head of Serbia’s Islamic community spoke of the need for strength in difficult times. Just what had caused this outpouring of public grief, grief that had apparently united Serbia’s highly disparate ethnic and religious communities, grief that had attracted the attention of the world? On 15 November 2009 His Holiness Patriarch Pavle, the seemingly immortal head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, had succumbed to illness at the age of 95.

His life surveyed change on an utterly incomprehensible scale. He was born in 1914 in Kućanci, a village that in his lifetime was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of Yugoslavia, and finally of an independent Croatia. In the region of his birth, he lived through the crumbling of two mighty empiresat the end of World War I—the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—and the establishing of a new Yugoslav state partly in their stead.

He lived through World War II, and the devastation it wrought upon his homeland; it was at least partly as a result of this destruction that he was in 1946 ordained as a monk in the Serbian Orthodox church, taking the name Pavle after the apostle Paul of whom he was a particular admirer. He was to spend the rest of his life in the service of this institution: his loyalty and assiduousness were rewarded with promotion, and in 1957 he was given the coveted bishopric of Ras and Prizren, a highly prestigious appointment that he was to hold for over thirty years.

His crowning glory, though, was to come in 1990 when he succeeded the seriously ill Patriarch German as Patriarch of Serbia, the sixth highest-ranking patriarchy in Eastern Orthodoxy. His appointment was to come at a time of yet more turmoil for Yugoslavia. Already tensions were brewing, and within five years Pavle’s constituency, formerly relatively unified, was to be spread across four states; within his lifetime it would splinter yet further, and ultimately Pavle saw his once-Yugoslav flock divided between Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia.

The prospect of such disunity, and the perceived need to fight it, was to prove the most contentious aspect of Pavle’s patriarchy. He was by no means a stooge of the Serbian government; his relationship with Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia was fractured at best, and by the late 1990s Pavle was clashing frequently with the government. In 1997, as Belgrade was rocked with anti-government protesters, Pavle was outspoken in his support for the protesters; when Milošević was ousted in 2000, he openly supported opposition figures.

His support of the Serb cause, though, was unwavering. Even as Bosnian Serbs massacred Bosniaks by the thousands, Pavle offered them and their Croatian brethren his full support: the image of the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Ratko Mladić, kneeling to kiss Pavle’s hand was to become a defining image of the Bosnian War, and his support of the notorious organised crime figure and paramilitary leader Arkan would haunt him for years.

He never recanted this support, however, even in the face of international condemnation. Even despite this steadfastness, he has in recent years come to be seen as a peacemaker, someone to be lauded for his role in the downfall of Milošević. To ignore the more unpalatable aspects of his patriarchy, though, is to perpetrate a whitewashing that Yugoslav history cannot stand. Pavle was witness to extraordinary change in his lifetime, almost all of it with an extraordinary human cost; we can but hope that with Pavle passes another small part of that divisive, ethnocentric ideology that has so plagued the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps the reaction to his death, and especially its diverse origins, can with cautious optimism be seen as a positive step towards that goal.