It is late afternoon on the “Apparition Hill” in the shrine town of Medjugorje and the Italians are going up and the Croats are coming down.
But the Croat pilgrims have a loudspeaker, so their harsh-sounding chants of “Zdravo Marijo” drown out the softer sounding murmur of “Santa Maria, prega per noi peccatori” as the two groups pass one another mid-way.
It’s hot and dangerous on these slippery, sharp rocks where, almost 30 years ago, six Bosnian children had the first vision of the Virgin Mary, the first of thousands because the visions never stopped, prompting long-lasting controversy over their authenticity.
People have stumbled and been injured on this hillside.
One priest tripped and died.
But still they come, in all weathers, older folk panting and gasping in the heat; up they go, battalions of Croats, Italians and Irish alongside smaller contingents of Spanish, French, English, Germans, Czechs and even Lebanese.
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Down below, Medjugorje, unrecognizable to anyone who hasn’t been here for years, shimmers in the haze.
Down there, huge, shiny air-conditioned coaches rumble through the streets day and night, disgorging hordes of passengers into what now must be the most international town in Bosnia - a place where everyone seems to speak some English, German and Italian as well as Croatian and where you can pay your bills in an amazing variety of currencies.
Twenty-two years ago, on my first journalistic assignment for the new Independent newspaper, I came to Medjugorje to see the visionaries and meet their bitterest critic, their own bishop, in nearby Mostar.
It was a village of one-storey cottages back in those days, off the beaten track, where pious peasants rented out rooms for nominal fee.
Chickens clucked and scratched around in the dirt lanes.
A ceaseless flow of visitors - and of money - has swept that village away.
The cottages have gone, converted into grim-looking five-storey pensions and hotels. The livestock has disappeared, too. There is not a rooster in sight on the neat lawns, kept green by hissing sprinklers.
If the village has changed drastically, so have the visionaries. They grew up, married and had families.
In my minds’ eye, I still see Vicka standing on the threshold of her parents’ home, fielding questions from a semi-circle of pilgrims gathered outside.
“What colour is purgatory?” I remember one of them asking.
“Yellow,” she answered, not missing a beat.
“Can we get souls out of hell with our prayers?” Answer: No.
“Help me, I have cancer; ask the Virgin to cure me,” shouted a woman from Mexico. “Our Lady hears everyone’s prayers,” Vicka replied, calmly.
She was a fresh-faced teenager then, with apple cheeks, sweet smile and perfect skin. The smile is still there, but I feel shaken on seeing the rest of her prematurely aged, lined and pain-ravaged face in a recent photograph.
Her visions may have helped to bring unimaginable wealth and prosperity to the dusty and obscure village in which she was born but her own health has not been spared.
The power behind the Medjugorje phenomenon is the repeat nature of the original miracle – the constant series of visions, the latest of which I see flagged up in several languages, including Arabic, on a screen outside the church.
It’s not the content of the messages, banal and almost unvarying that they are, that draws most pilgrims; more the fact that the messages just keep on coming.
“Most other shrines are totally dead compared to this place,” explains an Irish priest, Fr Terry, reeling off the names of several he had visited or worked in, including Fatima in Portugal and the Virgin of Guadeloupe in Mexico.
Fatima had been just a “big empty square”, he recalled. “There was no buzz”.
Medjugorje, on the other hand, has buzz. Wandering up to the church for a late-night service of Benediction, I’m astonished to find a huge crowd there, even at this hour. All on their knees, in the darkness, eyes fixed on the Host held aloft in a golden monstrance.
There is a 24/7 character to the place, as Fr Terry suggested: Mass in English, followed by Mass in Spanish; followed by Mass in Croatian; followed by Confession; followed by the Rosary; followed by Benediction.
One crowd leaves the church, another pours in.
No wonder Fr Terry wanted to move here permanently.
Not everyone appreciates the “Medjugorje experience”, of course. Waiting for a bus to Mostar to take me back to Dubrovnik, I meet an angry old Italian who has had enough. His Italian tour guide told him he was going to go to hell for asking stupid provocative questions and for saying he wanted to “go see how the Muslims live in Mostar”, he told me.
“It’s almost impossible to get out of this place. They don’t want us to see anything of Bosnia,” he grumbled.
He had a point. Life in Medjugorje can resemble that dark US comedy, The Truman Show - a film set from which escape is not exactly encouraged.
Visitors are invited to stay within bounds, to walk from the Apparition Hill to the Cross Mountain, go to St Jacob’s church several times a day, to buy souvenirs (grappa, cigs and rosaries) from the thousands of stalls, to eat dinner in their pensions and when not doing the above, to unwind in the countless bars and cafés.
The vast majority of visitors arrive in curtained, air-con coaches and leave in the same a few days later, having seen nothing of the country beyond the limits of Medjugorje.
My old Italian was having none of this; when his tour guide told him he’d be “beaten up and robbed by the Muslims” if he insisted on going to Mostar, it made him more determined to go.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited seal of papal approval for the visions appears to be on its way. It’s no secret that the old Polish pope looked on the phenomenon with deep sympathy and that his German successor, Benedict XVI, does likewise.
A new Vatican commission, tasked with determining the shrine’s final status, has been working under Cardinal Ruini, a close friend of the Pope’s, since March. The visit paid to Medjugorje last December by Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna, another close papal ally, was a straw in the wind.
It’s exciting stuff for Vatican observers. But whether anything that Rome said would actually stop the flow of pilgrims at this stage is more debatable.
“People come from all over the world, from Ireland, from as far as the Philippines,” Ivan Topic, member of the Vatican commission and head of Napredak in Sarajevo, told me.
“This cannot be ignored, nor the fact that so many have been converted,” he added.
“Even if the commission’s verdict was negative, people would still come.”
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