The war was ending, but police and paramilitary officers were torching buildings. Afraid of being burned alive, ethnic Albanians in this small Kosovo town fled their homes, cowering in the woods for a rainy, seemingly endless night.
Then, winding down a wooded lane, came two monks in a white van from the cloistered and ancient Serbian Orthodox monastery of Visoki Decani. "Come with us," they said. "We will keep you safe."
"Without them," said 58-year-old Albanian painter and art teacher Nimon Lokaj, "my whole family would be dead."
In the ashes of postwar Kosovo, filled with accounts of brutality and hate, the monks' story is a rare tale of courage and mercy. Ignoring their own fears in the panicked final days before the Serb retreat, they may have saved as many as 150 ethnic Albanians.
Now that some Albanian Kosovars are returning to charred ruins with vengeance in their hearts, it is frightened Serbs and Gypsies turning to the monks for refuge.
The 20 robed and bearded monks at Decani had openly criticized Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's attempts to muscle ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo long before their Church's recent call for the resignation of Milosevic.
By June 12, a peace deal had been cut, NATO troops had begun to move into Kosovo and Italian troops were soon expected in Decani.
"The Serbs were setting all the houses and our apartment building on fire," said Imer Lokaj, 60, a school principal. "They wanted to burn us alive."
By 10 pm that Saturday, at least a dozen families were crouching among the trees and bushes of their village, afraid to talk lest the Serbs detect them. But with daylight, Father Sava and Father Iguman came down from the monastery.
"They were scared, too," said Fatmire Lokaj, 46, Imer's wife. "We saw them and went to them. We all looked straight ahead, the priests and us, because we were scared to look at the Serbs."
Vanload after vanload, the hunted civilians of Decani stole up to the monastery, and sanctuary.