It is the Marie Celeste of monasteries: Inside the deserted walls of the 700-year-old Zociste monastery, high in the Kosovo hills, bread, cheese and tomatoes sit rotting on the wooden dining table where they were abandoned by fleeing Serb monks. Coins lie untouched in a plastic box in the tiny souvenir shop, and a black habit blows on the washing line.
The monastery has been like this since ethnic Albanian rebel troops occupied it on July 21st, claiming that the seven Serb Orthodox monks within were armed.
Whatever the truth of the claim, the capture of Zociste caused a storm among Serbs, who regard such places as sacred.
It is a sign of the growing public relations acumen of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that a commander was happy to drive us up the rocky road, close to the front line with the Serbs, to show that the monastery is unoccupied and undamaged.
"You can see for yourselves, we have touched nothing, we desecrate nothing," the commander said inside the small chapel, where, until recently, Serbs came hoping for spiritual healing.
A gold cross hangs inside the dim chapel where it was left, as do heaps of wooden picture frames in a dusty workshop. In the hills around, thousands of refugees live in the open, but the KLA has forbidden anyone from bedding down in Zociste.
"We had to capture it, there were monks sitting in the belltower with guns," said the commander, who would not be named. "So we drove up there, and said, `Throw down your arms'."
The monks, who surrendered together with a nun and 25 elderly Serbs who had been sheltering inside the monastery, deny they were armed, although nuns at another Orthodox monastery, Devic, earlier this year showed off pistols they were issued by the Serb authorities. They were held for six hours, before being released to the Red Cross.
Broken glass inside the small compound, festooned with apple trees, supports the monks' claim that they surrendered only after a hand-grenade was lobbed by guerrillas over the wall.
"We have nothing against the Orthodox religion," growls the commander, a handsome, bearded man in camouflage fatigues. "We only want our independence. This war is not about religion."
The Serbs see things differently: Although few Serbs live in Kosovo, many insist that it is not just a piece of land where they happen to live, but the "cradle" of their civilisation, which cannot break from Serbia.
Kosovo contains Pec monastery, headquarters of the Serbian Orthodox Church, as well as the bones of its most revered saint, Lazar. And Kosovo's monasteries and other religious centres have become caught up in the fighting as it spreads across the province.
KLA troops raided another monastery, Decani, earlier this summer, arresting and later releasing the monks, while a rebel sniper's bullet hit the car of the Devic nuns. In turn, Serb troops have desecrated mosques as part of their campaign to burn villages abandoned by their terrified ethnic Albanian occupants, daubing the walls with the Serb symbols.
Not far from Zociste, the aluminium-clad minaret of the mosque at Banja has been neatly decapitated, apparently by the gun of a passing Serb armoured vehicle.
Kosovo's Albanian majority - one-third of whom are Catholic - insists the war is not about religion. While Catholic and Muslim clergy keep a low profile, Kosovo's Orthodox Bishop, Dr Artemije Radosavljevic, has been fighting an uphill struggle to build bridges between the two communities.
His secretary, Father Sava Jan jic, blames the war on political leaders of both sides, and in particular the divisive policies of the Serbian leader, President Slobodan Milosevic. "Milosevic comes and does what he does and then the Kosovo Serbs have to pay the bills," he says.