“The order’s 170 monasteries worldwide practice prayer, penance, and silence, and are also noted for their beer and ale,” Brother Topic told Ecumenical News International in a telephone interview.
Cistercians of the Strict Observance, who follow the Sixth Century Rule of St Benedict, began making the “Trappist” cheese when the order returned to
Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1872 after fleeing Turkish rule. The monastery’s 200 monks produced it on a mass scale, while also running a brewery, sawmill, craft school, brick and cloth factories, until their property was seized by Yugoslavia’s communist regime after the Second World War.
Brother Topic said, however, that the recipe, traditionally known only to a single monk, had been rediscovered by another Bosnian Trappist in the 1970s
while serving as a novice at a monastery in Normandy, where the order was founded in 1664.
He noted the cheese would be made at a farm belonging to the Catholic charity Caritas at Aleksandrovac, 12 miles from Banja Luka, the seat of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska government and parliament. Roman Catholics comprised 18 percent of Bosnia’s population before the 1992-1995 war, while Muslims made up 44 per cent and Serbian Orthodox 35 per cent. However, the country’s four Catholic dioceses currently number fewer than
half the inhabitants they boasted before the three-year conflict, which cost 270,000 lives. It ended with the formation of separate Bosnian Serb and Croat-Muslim entities in a unitary state with a population of 4.6 million.
Topic said the Marija Zvijezda monastery, covering several hectares, currently has just three postulants, or prospective novices, and has been maintained by funding from the local Catholic bishop, Franjo Komarica. However, he explained that it had played a key role previously in Catholic life in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and said he hoped the community would “slowly rebuild”.
