The battle for Vukovar

VUKOVAR, CROATIA — The water tower in this Central European city took more than 600 direct hits during Croatia’s War of Independence but remained standing.

At times, Goran Kumrić wishes the people here would let it fall. 

The remains of the 165-foot Vukovar Water Tower serve as a museum and memorial for lives lost during a 1991 siege by Yugoslav and Serbian forces. The 193 steps to the top symbolize the difficult rise to independence for Croatia.

Instead, they’ve reinforced the Cold War-era water tower and turned it into a museum. Inside, video screens retell the horrors of the 1991 siege of Vukovar during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ethnic Croats, outnumbered and outgunned, held out for 87 days against the Yugoslav People’s Army and paramilitary groups of Serbs. Two Croats, Ivica Ivanika and Hrvoje Džalta, kept the Croatian flag flying over the water tower throughout the siege until Ivanika was killed and Džalta was captured.

Related: In Search of Shalom — the struggle for divine reconciliation

Kumrić, minister for the Vukovar Church of Christ, understands the need to remember Croatia’s long, bloody struggle for independence. But for Serbs, the tower also is a reminder of the ethnically charged hatred that contributed to countless deaths, even genocide, and the deep fissures that remain nearly 35 years later.

Inside the Vukovar Church of Christ’s small building, Goran Kumrić talks about his journey from Serbia to Croatia.

Kumrić grew up in Kragujevac, a city in the heart of modern-day Serbia. 

“I am very, very Serb,” he tells The Christian Chronicle as he stands near the church’s small building in downtown Vukovar. The city’s architecture is a mix of ornate, Baroque structures dating back to the 1800s and stark, angular communist-era buildings from the Yugoslav years. A few still bear bullet wounds and blackened, crumbling walls from the conflict three decades ago.

The scars of war aren’t limited to buildings. At a street corner, Kumrić spots a woman with disheveled hair wrapped in a head scarf, and he immediately rummages through his pockets. He asks her how she’s doing as he hands her a few bills and coins. 

The woman has multiple health issues, physical and mental, Kumrić says. During the war, Serbian forces took her captive and abused her.

Every time he sees her, he says, a thought resonates in his mind and tears at his soul. 

“My people did that to her.”

Fingernails of faith

From downtown, Kumrić makes his way past an abandoned, Soviet-style hotel with broken windows to the banks of the Danube River. Just across the water is the modern-day nation of Serbia.

At a table near an outdoor bar, Kumrić meets fellow church member Darko Gačiċ. An ethnic Croat, Gačiċ is tall, slender, white-haired and cleanshaven, in contrast to Kumrić, who is dark-complected with a traditional Serbian beard. 

Croatians walk and scoot past the war-damaged tower of Eltz Castle near the Danube River. Croatians restored the rest of the castle, which serves as the Vukovar City Museum.

Like most Croats, Gačiċ grew up Catholic. After he married, he began to question his faith, particularly baptism. He met missionaries who told him about non-denominational Christianity, free of patron saints and manmade creeds, and baptism by immersion. Gačiċ talked to his priest who, surprisingly, encouraged him to visit non-Catholic churches and explore his faith. 

Vlado Psenko

He doesn’t remember exactly when he was baptized, only that when he first went to worship as a new believer, he saw a rainbow. “That day, I felt like it was a sign,” he says as Kumrić translates. “I’m sure there’s a God, and I want to follow him.” 

Gačiċ became close friends with Vlado Psenko, a Croatian minister who moved to Vukovar in 2010 to plant the Church of Christ. Gačiċ became the church’s handyman, painting, repairing light fixtures and meticulously cleaning the building. When anything breaks in church members’ homes, Gačiċ is their first call.

Psenko died unexpectedly in October 2022 at age 59. Ministers for other Churches of Christ in Croatia, including Mladen Dominic, recruited Kumrić, a Serb, to take over the work. “In the first moment, I was surprised,” Gačiċ recalls, “But after that, I said, ‘God, you know what you are doing.’”

Serbian minister Goran Kumrić, left, and Croat Darko Gačiċ meet on the Danube riverbank in Vukovar.

He and Kumrić served on opposite sides of the conflict in the 1990s — the Homeland War, as Croatians call it. Gačiċ was captured and spent six months in a Serbian prison camp, where interrogators beat him regularly, once breaking his ribs. 

But that pain doesn’t come close to what Gačiċ experienced after the war, when his wife of 24 years left him for a younger man. Too depressed to eat, he lost nearly 50 pounds.

“It broke my heart,” he says. And he couldn’t fix it.

The church, especially Kumrić, has helped Gačiċ cope with the loss. That’s what matters most, he says, not nationality, ethnicity or the hostilities of the past.

“We’ve become like finger and nail,” Gačiċ says. “We are brothers in Christ.”

War and addiction

The Vukovar Church of Christ, once predominantly Croat, has a growing number of Serbs. About 30 believers attend Sunday worship, and members use the church’s small building throughout the week for Bible studies. 

Many homes across the city of Vukovar bear reminders of the 1991 siege.

On Tuesday morning, Kumrić conducts one of those studies with a visitor as Radmila Popovic sits at a table nearby, reviewing the church’s books. Popovic, 67, serves as the church’s accountant. She adored Psenko and his wife, Renata, and was devastated by the minister’s death. Some church members expressed doubts about Kumrić succeeding him, but Popovic became his advocate. 

“I’m the reason you’re here!” she tells him with a laugh.

Radmila Popovic reviews financial records for the Vukovar Church of Christ.

Like Gačiċ and the rest of her city, Popovic lives with trauma. Her first husband, a journalist, died while covering the Homeland War. Years later, her second husband left her. Her church family helps her recover, she says, and its increasing diversity shows her that believers can share burdens across lines of ethnicity.

Kumrić’s own trauma helps him relate to his brothers and sisters in Christ. The minister, who grew up Orthodox, has struggled throughout his life with gambling addiction, which contributed to the breakup of his first marriage. At rock bottom, he went to a Seventh-day Adventist revival at a friend’s invitation. A preacher prayed for him. 

“And then I felt my heart pumping — boom, boom!” he recalls. “I had no idea what God was doing in my life, but I knew he was doing something.”

‘The hatred is diminishing’

The experience convinced Kumric to study his Bible, and eventually he encountered Churches of Christ. He worked with a congregation in his hometown of Kragujevac, Serbia, for 12 years before moving to Vukovar.

Vanessa and Goran Kumrić

His second wife, Vanessa, is a Croat from Vukovar. She remembers the early postwar years, when nearly every other house was in ruins. Throughout her life, she’s felt the Holy Spirit calling to her, but repeatedly she chose drugs rather than God to cope with the pain. She had a tense relationship with her mother, who suffered from a narcissistic disorder and cancer, which eventually claimed her life. That, for Vanessa, was the breaking point.

“I was crying, and I was like, ‘Jesus, just please forgive me. I should have loved her more,’” she recalls. “And from that state of my heart breaking and me bawling my eyes out, his peace came in an instant, and he told me, ‘You loved her enough.’ So, from that broken state, I instantly calmed down.”

She met Kumrić at a Bible camp in Serbia. As they made plans to marry in 2023, they prayed about where they should live, Croatia or Serbia. Vanessa has two children from a previous marriage, so crossing the border would be difficult. More than that, she felt the need to bring the same sense of family she experienced at the camp to her home city. 

Goran and Vanessa Kumrić teach a children’s Bible class in 2023.

“I got a confirmation from the Lord! We should be here, in this place!” she excitedly told her fiancé, forgetting that she was in Serbia, not Vukovar, at the time. She corrected herself, and Kumrić’s mood shifted from elated to prayerful.

Shortly thereafter, they learned about the Church of Christ’s need for a minister. Kumrić’s first thoughts were the names of other preachers more qualified for the job. But he also felt his heart pumping, like it had years ago at the revival in Serbia. 

Once again, God was doing something. 

Leaders from Churches of Christ across Croatia and Serbia meet in Vukovar and pray for the city in 2024

The couple met with church members including Dominic, minister for the Church of Christ in Varaždin, Croatia, and president of the fellowship’s legally registered association. 

Mladen Dominic preaches in Serbia in 2014.

“It was clear that both of them were burning for Christ and that they were ready to serve people so that they could meet Jesus as their savior,” Dominic recalls. “The fact that Goran is Serb and Vanessa is Croatian is a great advantage for a city like Vukovar, where people are still divided due to war traumas that are very difficult to heal. … The search is still on for 1,744 victims (of the Homeland War), of which 332 are from Vukovar and the surrounding area.”

Kumrić accepted the job and married Vannessa. The couple began sharing their own stories of pain and recovery with the hurting. 

Recently, the Vukovar church hosted a gathering of more than 50 ministers and leaders from Churches of Christ across Croatia, including Dominic, and Serbia. The time of fellowship included a long, emotional prayer for the city.

Leaders of Churches of Christ in Croatia and Serbia visit the Memorial Cemetery of the Victims of Homeland War in Vukovar. The memorial includes 938 white crosses for victims exhumed from a mass grave following the 1991 Battle of Vukovar. “The youngest victim was 6 months old and the oldest was 104 years old,” said Croatian minister Mladen Dominic.

While bullet holes, a battered water tower and broken souls testify to the power of human brutality, “the hatred is diminishing,” Dominic says. “A sincere message of peace in Christ Jesus is the only solution to heal the wounds. That is why everyone is welcome to the Vukovar church, regardless of their nationality. 

“A heart that is reconciled with God will also be reconciled with man.”

A red heart frames a historic building in Vukovar’s square near the Danube River.

ERIK TRYGGESTAD is President and CEO of The Christian Chronicle. Contact [email protected].

Filed under: Balkans Christianity in the Balkans Croatia Former Yugoslavia Homeland War In Search of Shalom International Serbia Shalom Top Stories Vukovar