At the beginning of the 1990s an anecdote was very popular in Bulgaria: 'Someone asks radio Yerevan how many European states there will be in the year 2000. The answer is: eight, namely, the United States of Europe, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro.' We might also add the former Soviet republics. The anonymous author of this anecdote has aptly expressed the two simultaneous trends in the social-economic, political and cultural processes in Europe after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: on the one hand, the striving for, and concrete steps towards, the further development of supranational spaces and entities at different levels, such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe; and on the other hand, renationalisation and regionalisation, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, this disintegration reflects the separatist nationalistic attitudes suppressed for some decades under the cover of internationalist ideology and practice, and its extreme expressions were the bloody events in former Yugoslavia and Nagorny Karabakh, which once again reminded us of the importance of interethnic tolerance. One of the best television reports that I have seen on the war in former Yugoslavia ended with the revelation of a Russian volunteer: 'There aren't any atheists in the trenches here!' I had the opportunity to see personally the gaping wounds of the war during my trip from Rijeka to Dubrovnik in April 1994, and through conversations and discussions with people of different nationalities and denominations to feel the subtle insidious bonds between their sense of ethnic belonging and their intimate religiosity, which were so skilfully exploited by unscrupulous politicians and military men. The Orthodox and the Catholic faiths were unalterable characteristics of the Serbian and the Croatian popUlation. This gave a new sacred! dimension to the resentment and the hatred. Thus I came to the idea, more emotionally than rationally, of investigating the relations and alliances between two essential phenomena of the history of humankind religion and nationalism in their specific forms and relations in postcommunist European societies. Because of my position as a witness and participant in the hectic and often surprising events in this region, this paper is far from claiming to give cool diagnoses or to commit itself to lofty prognoses. This is not only because the specific character of these very historical processes makes the ground for such claims fairly questionable. My primary aim is to understand and explain better the world I am living in: typically behind the academic concepts and constructions concerning