ABSTRACT
Religion comforts people under stress and in transition by providing nostalgia for a lost paradise (or former country); and nostalgia, while fraught with melancholy, generates imagery of a paradise to be regained in a new and improved form. Many Balkan peoples have resorted to mass emigration and exile from the stresses of totalitarian socialism and recent wars almost mimicking the Biblical Exodus, lured by promises of a better and safer life elsewhere. The promised land can take guise of a purely spiritual realm in religious practice and devotion, but frequently it takes the guise of patriotism and desire to return to the old country, which will somehow become new. The old country as well as Biblial narrative of a paradise past and future heaven exert a powerful resurgence of religiosity among the Balkan peoples. Religion used to be suppressed under communism but now it's become a major force in the region's sociology and psychology.
