Pilgrims, Profits Return To Shrine Last Year’s Dayton Peace Accord Opens Travel To Medjugorje

After four years of war scared away all but the most determined pilgrims, the miracle of religious commerce has returned to this Roman Catholic village where the Virgin Mary is said to make daily appearances.

Johnny Walker flows at the Santa Fe Bar. Kathy’s Kitchen is serving up tuna salad and Guinness beer. Charlie’s So Good So Fast is offering burgers and fries to go. The dizzying array of earthly temptations includes such keepsakes as diamond rings, Swiss watches and gold pendants.

“It wasn’t this good even before the war,” said Drazena Maric, who runs the bustling La Paloma trinket shop, one of many businesses cashing in on last year’s Dayton, Ohio, peace accord. “And everyone seems to be interested in buying.”

It was 15 years ago that six youths say they saw the Virgin Mary floating on a cloud above a rocky hilltop overlooking this tiny village, where sheep and other farm animals enjoyed a decisive majority for the better part of six centuries.

The sighting became an instant sensation, drawing Roman Catholic pilgrims from around the world. By the late 1980s, about 2 million people a year scaled the jagged slopes of Mount Podbrdo - many on bloodied knees - in search of the Blessed Mother, who is said to still appear before one visionary every night at 10:30.

But the goings-on of Medjugorje have never been purely spiritual. In the early days, authorities in Communist Yugoslavia imprisoned a local priest who vigorously promoted the apparition, insisting he was behind a ploy by Croat nationalists to undermine the regime by whipping up Catholic hysteria. The tale was captured last year in the film, “Gospa.”

It wasn’t long before the main village road, called Zagreb Street, was reborn as a thriving strip mall - a gaudy array of shops more at home in an American suburb than the mountains of western Herzegovina. The ubiquitous flocks of sheep soon gave way to processions of air-conditioned coaches, as villagers forsook work in the fields to tend to the needs - and pocketbooks - of the spiritually thirsty.

“People became lazy and got used to having easy money,” said Davor Ljubic, owner of Globtour, one of the largest travel agencies in town. “In a sense, the war came at the right time because people learned to work again and not expect life to always come so easy.”

But this year, the fields are emptying again as the simple ring of cash registers records the pilgrims’ greatest showing since 1989. With both communism and the war gone, Ljubic and other local businessmen are getting grand ideas about making Medjugorje an even better attraction.

Ljubic helped bring Spanish tenor Jose Carreras to town last month for the grandest extravaganza here in years, and some residents want to incorporate Medjugorje as an independent city, which would keep authorities down the road in Citluk from siphoning off proceeds from such events. Not surprisingly, the Citluk mayor will not hear of it.

There is also talk of a new bed tax, with proceeds going to pave and widen the village’s crumbling roads, clearing the route for even more visitors. And though it is still hush-hush, another potentially lucrative business opportunity is emerging: Crowds of religious pilgrims are becoming infiltrated by less-divine visitors interested in touring nearby war-ravaged Mostar and other battlefields rather than kneeling atop Mount Podbrdo.