Serbian Local Government under the Rule of the Constitutionalists: 1842–58

SERBIAN STUDIES JOURNAL OF THE NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR SERBIAN STUDIES Vol. 25 2011 No. 2

Editors

Ljubica D. Popovich, Vanderbilt University, Co-Editor Lilien F. Robinson, George Washington University, Co-Editor Jelena Bogdanović, Iowa State University, Associate Editor Vasa D. Mihailovich, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Book

Review Editor

Editorial Board

Radmila Jovanović-Gorup, Columbia University Jelena Bogdanović, Iowa State University Svetlana Tomić, Alfa University, Belgrade Gojko Vučković, Los Angeles School District Gordana Pešaković, Argosy University Đorđe Jovanović, World Bank Marina Belović-Hodge, Library of Congress

North American Society for Serbian Studies

N SAS

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President: Dušan Danilović, Iowa State University Vice President: Tatjana Aleksić, University of Michigan Secretary: Danilo Tomašević Treasurer: Sonja Kotlica

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Nada Petković-Đorđević, University of Chicago Milica Bakić-Hayden, University of Pittsburgh Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Monash University, Australia Ljubica D. Popovich, Vanderbilt University Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson, George Washington University

Past Presidents

Alex N. Dragnich, Vanderbilt University 1978–80 Vasa D. Mihailovich, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 1980–82 George Vid Tomashevich, New York State University, Buffalo 1982–84 Biljana Šljivić-Šimšić, University of Illinois at Chicago 1984–86 Dimitrije Djordjevic, University of California, Santa Barbara 1986–88 Sofija Škorić, Toronto University 1988–90 Jelisaveta Stanojevich Allen, Dumbarton Oaks 1990–92 Ljubica D. Popovich, Vanderbilt University 1992–94 Thomas A. Emmert, Gustavus Adolphus College 1994–96 Radmila Jovanović-Gorup, Columbia University 1996–98 Julian Schuster, Hamline University 1998–2000 Dušan Korać, Catholic University 2000–02 Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson, George Washington University 2002–04 Ružica Popovitch-Krekić, Mount St. Mary’s College 2004–06 Ida Sinkević, Lafayette College 2006–08 Milica Bakić-Hayden, University of Pittsburgh 2008–10 Nada Petković-Đorđević, University of Chicago 2010–12

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Contents

I. History

Miroslav Svirčević, Balkan Institute Serbian Local Government under the Rule of the Constitutionalists: 1842–58 .................................................................. 119

Vladislav B. Sotirović, Mykolas Romeris University The Serbian Patriarchate of Peć in the Ottoman Empire: The First Phase (1557–94) ................................................................... 143

Dragana Lazarević, Cardiff University Inventing Balkan Identities: Finding the Founding Fathers and Myths of Origin – The Montenegrin Case ........................................... 171

Ružica Kovačević-Ristanović, M.D., University of Chicago Lela Mevorah: A Professional Jewish Woman’s Contribution to the Practice of Medicine in Serbia in the Aftermath of the Holocaust ...... 199

II. Literature

Jelena Vujić, University of Belgrade Svetislav Stefanović as a Translator of English Victorian Poetry: Early Versions of Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” in Serbian ........ 213

Žarka Svirčev, University of Belgrade Tears of the Prodigal Daughter: Homoeroticism in Leposava Mijušković’s Prose ............................................................... 241

III. Art and Music

Jelena Milojković-Djurić Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow: Revisiting Pontevedro .................... 259

Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson, George Washington University Orientalism through the Balkan Lens of Paja Jovanović ..................... 273

III. Poetry

Dušan Pajin Dobrodošlica ........................................................................................ 306 Welcome ............................................................................................... 307 Zalazak sunca ....................................................................................... 308 Sunset ................................................................................................... 309 Nema više tajne .................................................................................... 310 No More Mystery ................................................................................. 311 Vredelo je ............................................................................................. 312 It Was Worthwhile ............................................................................... 313 Okeansko osećanje ............................................................................... 314 The Oceanic Feeling ............................................................................. 315

Mirjana N. Radovanov-Matarić Dunav ................................................................................................... 318 The Danube .......................................................................................... 319 Rat i mir ................................................................................................ 320 War and Peace ...................................................................................... 321 Dunav i rat ............................................................................................ 322 The Danube and the War ...................................................................... 323 Večni Dunav ......................................................................................... 324 The Ageless Danube ............................................................................. 325 Ko sam ja? ............................................................................................ 326 Who Am I? ........................................................................................... 327 Dijaspora .............................................................................................. 328 Diaspora ............................................................................................... 329

Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 25(2): 119–37, 2011.

Serbian Local Government under the Rule of the Constitutionalists: 1842–58*

Miroslav SvirËeviÊ

Balkan Institute

1. Introduction

This paper focuses on the development of local government under the reign of the Constitutionalists in the Principality of Serbia (1842–58) in the context of the establishment of the first modern Serbian state and legal-political order, as well as the rise of modern Serbian culture. This topic is very important for Serbian legal and historical studies because it has thus far not been researched in detail by comprehensive methods; only a few legal historians have re-searched it partially. Slobodan Jovanović addressed the legal structure and work of local government in this period within his outstanding study on the constitutional history of Serbia, Ustavobranitelji i njihova vlada (The Con-stitutionalists and Their Government). Fedor Nikić wrote about the legal sta-tus and characteristics of local government in counties, districts, and munici-palities of this historical period in his book Lokalna uprava Srbije u XIX. i XX. veku (Local Government in Serbia in the 19th and 20th Centuries). Ružica Guzina elaborated the development of municipalities in her book Opština u Srbiji 1839–1918 (Municipalities in Serbia 1839–1918). However valuable these publications are as pioneer works, they are out of date. The first book was published in 1912, the second in 1927, and the third in 1976.1 Therefore, it is necessary to examine this important topic from a more recent point of view.

* This paper was inspired by a project of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts: “History of Political Ideas and Institutions in the Balkans in the 19th and 20th Centuries” (no. 177011), funded by the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Serbia. 1 See Slobodan Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji i njihova vlada: Druga vlada Miloša i Mihaila, vol. 3 of Sabrana dela Slobodana Jovanovića (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1991); Fedor Nikić, Lokalna uprava Srbije u XIX. i XX. veku (Belgrade: Geca Kon, 1927); and Ružica Guzina, Opština u Srbiji 1839–1918 (Belgrade: Rad, 1976).

120 Miroslav SvirËeviÊ

The development of local government during the reign of the Constitu-tionalists can be elaborated through an analysis of the most important legal acts concerning local authorities that were passed in the Council (Sovjet) by the most prominent officials of the regime (domestic tribunes and Serbs from Austria): the Law on the Organization of County Offices and the Main Duties of the District Prefects of 12 May 1839 and the Law on the Organization of Municipalities of 13 July 1839. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to explain the process of strict centralization of the government structure observing the following hierarchy: the Ministry of the Interior > the County Prefecture > the District Prefecture > the Municipality, according to the spirit of the oligarchic regime established by the Turkish Constitution of 1838. The implementation of these laws was carried out as part of the process of establishing the first stable legal-political order, burdened by many relics of the Ottoman legal-political heritage. This process included the establishment of legal certainty, state institutions (central and local), and officials whose status and duties were defined by law.

The first law is of particular importance because it survived the longest in the constitutional history of modern Serbia (1839–88, 1891–1903); therefore, it deserves to be the subject of a specific analysis. In addition, the second law was the first legal act on municipalities in Serbia, and it also deserves exami-nation. A historical analysis of the legal development of these laws is not enough, so it will be accompanied by the application of political theory in or-der to understand not only the content of the laws but also how the institutions established functioned in real life.

2. The General Political Situation in Serbia during the Reign of the Constitutionalists

Due to Prince Miloš Obrenović (1780–1860) having concentrated the legisla-tive, executive, and judicial powers in his own person in the 1815–30 period, the sultan’s Hatti-Sherif of 18302 accorded autonomous status to the Pashalik of Belgrade, which lent a new quality to the domestic legal system and pro-vided a basis for the further struggle against Ottoman rule and for establishing a constitutional system. Prince Miloš, on the other hand, was granted the

2 For the whole text of the Hatti-Sherif of 1830, see Mihailo Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, vol. 3, 1827–1835 (Belgrade: Zadužbina Ilije Milosavljevića Kolarca, 1912), 559–84; and Radoš Ljušić, Kneževina Srbija, 1830–1839 (Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 2004), 119–24.

Serbian Local Government under the Constitutionalists 121

hereditary title of knez (prince). In 1833 the sultan issued a new hatti-sherif3 that stipulated all of the main obligations of the Principality of Serbia to the Ottoman suzerain: notably, the annual tribute was strictly determined, the Ottoman agrarian system was abolished, and the principality incorporated the areas liberated during the First Insurrection (known as “six nahiyas,” which had not been part of the Pashalik of Belgrade).4

At the same time, however, the legal situation was strengthening the struggle of the prince’s opponents to establish the legality principle, especially the legal protection of private property. The last large-scale revolt against Prince Miloš’s absolutist rule, Knez Mileta’s rebellion of 1835,5 forced the prince to acquiesce to the promulgation of the first Serbian constitution, known as the Constitution of Sretenje (Sretenjski ustav).6 The author of the constitution was Austrian-born Serb Dimitrije Davidović, who served as the prince’s secretary and diplomat. He was a supporter of French constitutional-ism and devised the first Serbian constitution under strong influence from the French revolution and the philosophy of Benjamin Constant.7 The constitution was accepted by the prince and the summoned People’s Assembly in Kragujevac on 15 February 1835 (the Orthodox holiday of Candlemas). First, it proclaimed Serbia a vassal, tributary, and hereditary principality headed by the Obrenović dynasty. It also established the principle of division of power and stipulated three branches of power in the Principality of Serbia: the legis-lative with the prince (Knjaz) and Council (Sovjet); the executive, which be-longed to the Council and ministers (Popečitelji); and finally the judicial, 3 For a discussion of the Hatti-Sherif of 1833, see Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, 559–84; and Ljušić, Kneževina Srbija, 203–04. 4 These were the following nahiyas: Ključ, Negotinska Krajina, Crna Reka, Gurgusovac, Banja, Svrljig, Aleksinac, Ražanj, Paraćin, Kruševac, a portion of the Nahiya of Novi Pazar, and a portion of Stari Vlah, Jadar, and Rađevina. See Fig. 1 following p. 137 for a map of the Principality of Serbia in 1833. 5 Knez Mileta Radojković was a participant in the First and Second Serbian Insurrections and the most prominent chief (knez) of the Nahiya of Jagodina and governor (serdar) of а short-time military-administrative area (serdarstvo) of Rasina. Radojković raised the biggest revolt against Prince Miloš Obrenović, known as Mileta’s Rebellion. The rebels rose up with the intention of limiting the prince’s power by the constitution. 6 The Constitution of Sretenje was published in a special publication in Kragujevac in 1835. See also Miodrag Jovičić, ed., Ustavi Kneževine i Kraljevine Srbije 1835–1903 (Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti [SANU], 1988), 45–59. 7 For details, see Miroslav Svirčević, “Le constitutionnalisme en Serbie (1835–1903): L’influence de Benjamin Constant,” in La Serbie et la France: Une alliance atypique. Les relations politiques, économiques et culturelles 1870–1940, ed. Dušan T. Bataković, Institute for Balkan Studies/Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, vol. 104 (Belgrade: Institute for Balkan Studies/SASA, 2010), 101–10.


accorded to the courts. Prince Miloš made a political concession to the people’s tribunes by establishing a collegial council.

However, the Constitution of Sretenje was short-lived. Due to its being labeled as “republican,” “liberal,” and “contagious for other nations,” as well as to regulations inconsistent with the vassal status of Serbia (e.g., regulations on the coat of arms and flag), the constitution was rejected by Ottoman Turkey, Russia, and Austria.8

The next constitution was drawn up in Istanbul, with the participation of Russian representatives. It had the form of a sultan’s hatti-sherif granted to the inhabitants of the “Province of Serbia” in 1838 and thus became popularly known as the Turkish Constitution.9 This constitution provided for power-sharing between the prince and the Council. The Council was granted “abso-lute veto power” over any bill proposed by the prince, which ensured it great political authority among the people. The notables who composed the Council were prepared to strip the prince of as much power as possible, and in April 1839 Prince Miloš was forced to promulgate the law about the Council, which additionally limited his legislative and executive powers. Prince Miloš’s abdi-cation in June 1839, resulting from these developments, ushered in a new phase in the political and constitutional development of the Principality of Serbia.

3. The Program of the Constitutionalists and Local Government

The eminent leaders of the Council opposition, who kept demanding the adoption of the Constitution of 1838 in order to limit Prince Miloš Obreno-vić’s absolute rule (1815–39), to establish a legal system, and particularly to protect personal security and private property, were most responsible for his abdication (1 June 1839) and that of his son-successor, Prince Mihailo10 (26

8 For details, see Dušan T. Bataković, “Le chemin vers la démocratie: Le développement constitutionnel de la Serbie 1869–1903,” Balcanica (Belgrade) 38 (2007): 134. 9 The constitution was proclaimed by the sultan in the form of a special hatti-sherif in Belgrade in 1839. It is known in constitutional history as the Turkish Constitution. See “Ustav Knjažestva Serbije, tj. Sultanski hatišerif,” in Jovičić, ed., Ustavi Kneževine i Kraljevine Srbije, 69–79; Abdolonyme Ubicini, Les Serbes de Turque: Études historiques sur la Principuaté de Serbie, la Monténégro et les pays adjacents serbes (Paris: Dentu, 1865), 227. 10 Knez Mihailo Obrenović (1823–68) was Serbian prince twice: 1839–42 and 1860–68. Prince Mihailo was ousted from the throne after the Vučić Rebellion (a rebellion against his regime led by Toma Vučić-Perišić, one of the most prominent personalities of the Constitutionalists’ regime). He ruled according to the enlightened absolutism model in order to prepare the whole state for an ambitious foreign policy: the Serbian-led liberation of all Balkan peoples


August 1842). This political group, led by Toma Vučić-Perišić (Fig. 2), Avram Petronijević, Stojan and Aleksa Simić, and Hadji-Milutin Garašanin and his son Ilija (Fig. 3), was responsible for the fact that Serbia adopted the constitution in 1838. They also brought Aleksandar Karađorđević11 to the princely throne (2 September 1842). Therefore, this group was denoted as “the Constitutionalists,”12 and the period (1842–58) in the constitutional his-tory of Serbia is known as the rule of the Constitutionalists because it was typified by an elective monarchy. The Constitutionalists thought it easier to accomplish their main program with a weak elective prince. The regime of the Constitutionalists lasted only 16 years. After the dynastic change in power of 1858, a new constitutional era arrived, bringing with it essentially different features.

According to Alex Dragnich, the Constitutionalists’ leaders were not good reformers in their reasoning and upbringing.13 They were mainly rude and uneducated tribunes who exercised their political power by organizing and crushing rebellions under the rule of Prince Miloš. But the benches behind them were stacked with a new generation that demanded the abandonment of the Ottoman way of governance through political reforms. They demanded novelties of West European liberal experience: the establishment of a legal system that offered personal and property security and the limitation of the ruler’s power. The common people did not have a good idea of how to attain

subjugated by the Ottoman Empire. In 1868, Prince Mihailo was tragically assassinated in a conspiracy of ordinary citizens (the Radovanović brothers). 11 Aleksandar Karađorđević (1806–85) was the son of Karađorđe Petrović (1760–1817), who headed the First Serbian Insurrection. He did not possess any particular feature of statesmanship. He was a very weak ruler and subject to influence from powerful political coteries. One of them was led by his wife, Princess Persida (Nenadović) Karađorđević (1813–73). 12 Apart from these main leaders, other prominent figures were among the archenemies of Prince Miloš who were affected by his self-will and commercial monopoly: Prota (vicar) Mateja Nenadović, Jevrem Nenadović, Lazar Teodorović, Paun Janković, Belgrade metropoli-tan Petar Jovanović, and Užice (Bishop) Nićifor Maksimović, in addition to members of the Council: Milisav Zdravković Resavac, Stevan Stojanović Ćosa, Milutin Petrović Era (brother of Hajduk Veljko), and Minister Pavle Stanišić. Aleksa Ivić, Iz doba Karađorđa i sina mu kneza Aleksandra (Belgrade: Geca Kon, 1926), 76–77. Dragoslav Stranjaković painted the portraits of many of the aforementioned Constitu-tionalists very successfully. Dragoslav Stranjaković, Vlada ustavobranitelja, 1842–1853: Unutrašnja i spoljašnja politika (Belgrade: Narodna štamparija, 1932), 83–88; Dušan T. Bataković, Les sources françaises de la démocratie serbe (1804–1914) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2013), 99. 13 Alex N. Dragnich, The Development of Parliamentary Government in Serbia, East European Monographs, vol. 44 (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1978), 23.


and enact this, but they were ready to accept the recommendations of their existing but small intelligentsia in order to solve this issue.

Serbs from Austria, the so-called Švabe or Nemačkari (the Germans),14 comprised the intelligentsia under Prince Miloš.15 Because Serbia had been a primitive peasant country without an organized educational system, the intel-ligentsia could be drawn only from the centuries-old Serb diaspora (in Austria and Russia). When the leaders of the opposition managed to overthrow Prince Miloš, they could only turn to “the Germans” for help in establishing a new governmental administration in order to prevent Prince Miloš’s personal regime from coming back.

There had never been a break in relations between the Serbs of Serbia and those “across the border.” On the contrary, after Serbia achieved autonomy within the Ottoman Empire (1830), the intelligentsia grew in intensity and diversity as a result of the country’s pressing need for internal structuring and development. Although the Principality of Serbia became the political focus of the Serbian people in the Balkans, the Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy remained the pivotal cultural, educational, economic, and social force during the next half-century. Serbia needed to provide for a constitutional govern-ment and civil rights (especially property rights), to abolish unpaid forced la-bor (kuluk), to encourage the development of trade and commerce, and to carry out reforms in education in order to increase literacy and improve the general educational level of the population.16

Under the circumstances, it was quite natural that the Serbian government should rely on educated Serbs from Austria. It therefore made requests to the Austrian government to facilitate the issuance of the necessary permits to its citizens of Serbian origin who were willing to accept employment in Serbia.17

14 This term was an insulting name for the Austrian Serbs that satirized the administration in Serbia. As the only intelligentsia in a primitive peasant society, they particularly set an example of hostile behavior towards ordinary people. Looking down on ordinary people and treating them with disdain, the Serbs living across the Sava and Danube made the citizens angry and indignant. Therefore, envious of their positions and qualifications, native people started to call them by an insulting name, Nemačkari (the Germans). See Slobodan Jovanović, “Nemačkari,” in Sabrana dela Slobodana Jovanovića, vol. 11, Iz istorije i književnosti, ed. Živorad Stojković (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1991), 513–15; Miloš Luković, Razvoj srpskog pravnog stila (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 1994), 36; Petar V. Krestić, “Political and Social Rivalries in Nineteenth-Century Serbia: Švabe or Nemačkari,” Balcanica 41 (2010): 73–74; and Bataković, Les sources françaises de la démocratie serbe, 99. 15 Dragnich, The Development of Parliamentary Government, 23–24. 16 Krestić, “Political and Social Rivalries,” 74–75. 17 Since educated Serbs from Hungary were in great demand in Serbia, the incoming intelligentsia were not required to renounce Austrian citizenship and take up Serbian instead.


In most cases, the Habsburg government granted such requests, assuming it would be able to influence Serbia’s policies through its Serb subjects, at least indirectly, swaying them towards a position favorable to its own interests. This would certainly eliminate or at least reduce Russia’s influence on Serbia, reasoned the Habsburg Court.18

Austrian-born Serbs “from across the border” (that is, the Sava and Dan-ube) held almost all of the important positions in the Principality of Serbia.19 They served as the prince’s diplomatic representatives, councilors, first min-isters of the prince’s office, first secretaries of the princely chancery and senior secretaries of the State Council, head ministers in the Council, heads of ministry departments, and servants, and also as headmasters, professors, teachers, priests, engineers, physicians, and state administration employees.20 They devised the reforms needed for the time. Following the fall of a strong ruler and the triumph of a Council opposition that lacked a program, their ideas were more than valuable. They had a crucial influence on the develop-ment of Serbian policy in the 19th century. Institutions had to be built in order to create an internal government. A primary characteristic of the Constitution-alists’ government was the establishment of the first modern state institutions and the first administrative class. The establishment of judicial power (the creation of a modern judiciary with a court of original jurisdiction, an Appel-late Court, the Supreme Court, and a Court of Cassation, and the passing of the Civil Code of 1844 and the Criminal Code of 1850 with proceedings), advancement of the school system (especially with Platon Simonović’s re-form),21 treatment of the budget as an account-legal act,22 the development of Serbian citizenship was required only for “political service” posts. Rešenje Saveta [Council decision] (1 August 1838), Archive of Serbia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs [Ministarstvo inostranih dela (MID)], f. V, 1939, vol. II, no. 1202, p. 28. 18 Krestić, “Political and Social Rivalries,” 75. 19 “Serbs born outside Serbia are among the members of the State Council, the ministers and the judges of the Court of Appeals; lesser officials are countless and their number is growing daily.” Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Sabrana dela Vuka Karadžića, vol. 25, Prepiska [Vuk to Struve], bk. 6, 1837–1842 (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1993), 840. 20 According to the statements of the official register from July 1836, Serbia had a total of 68 teachers, of whom 25 were from Srem, 12 from Banat, 7 from Bačka, 3 from Slavonija, 2 from Croatia, and 2 from the empire in general, while the rest (17 in total) were from Serbia. Petar V. Krestić, “Švabe ili Nemačkari u Serbskim narodnim novinama Teodora Pavlovića,” in Zbornik Matice srpske za istoriju, vol. 49 (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1994), 34. 21 Platon Simonović was an Austrian-born Serb. He worked as a professor in Russia and came to Serbia as a retiree. He reformed the Serbian educational system. He abolished mythology as a school discipline. Instead, Simonović introduced the Old Slavic, Ancient Greek, and French languages, which were taught parallel with the Latin and German languages (Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji i njihova vlada, 70).


trade and market relations, and the establishment of a bureaucracy are only some of the achievements of the Constitutionalists’ government.23 Subsequent regimes built upon their legal and political achievements, which took ever greater root.

Although the Turkish Constitution replaced Prince Miloš’s despotism with a collective oligarchic government of the most prominent people in Serbia at the time, the new constitution did not change the essence of the state and political system.24 Absolutism and centralism as fundamental organiza-tional and functional principles remained untouched. The difference was that the absolutism and centralism of one man were replaced by those of several very educated leaders. The power of the almighty prince passed to the Council, which consisted of 17 members. The Law on the Organization of the Council,25 which additionally weakened the prince’s position, contributed to the transfer of his authority and power.

As far as the Constitutionalists’ attitude towards local government was concerned, it appears that their attitude was not the same before and after coming to power. While they were in opposition to Prince Miloš, they fought for the decentralization of power and for more independent local government. However, as soon as they acquired the supreme power of the central govern-ment through the Council, they immediately changed their previous political attitude about the organization of local government. They no longer wanted the decentralization of power; moreover, they made the central government stronger and more stable, giving it necessary legal form.26 The Constitutional-ists regarded the state and the legal order as an institution and source of power 22 As an account-legal act, the budget appeared during the rule of Prince Mihailo. Mita Petrović, Finansije i ustanove obnovljene Srbije do 1842. godine (Belgrade: Ministarstvo finansija/Državna štamparija Kraljevine Srbije, 1901), 933–42. However, it was officially formed during the rule of Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević (Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji i njihova vlada, 106–18). 23 Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 1, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Joint Committee on Eastern Europe Publication Series, bk. 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 244; Dragnich, The Development of Parliamentary Government, 25. 24 The Turkish Constitution assigned full legislative and executive power to the Council and its ministers (popečitelji). On the other hand, the prince lost his supreme power, becoming a very weak entity with reduced powers. During the regime of the Constitutionalists, the constant struggle between the prince and the Council was fierce, because the latter’s powers were not clearly stipulated by the constitution. This conflict between the constitutional factions ended in 1858 with the fall of the entire Constitutionalists’ regime, prince, and Council. 25 “Ustrojenije Sovjeta Knjažestva Srbskog,” in Sbornik zakona i uredba, i uredbeny ukaza, izdany u Knjažestvu srbskom, vol. 1, Od vremena obnarodovanog ustava zemaljskog (Belgrade: Knjigopečatnja Knjažestva srbskog [Državna štamparija], 1840), 16–28. 26 Nikić, Lokalna uprava i samouprava, 74–75.


and, thus, as something real. According to this attitude, they had their own substantial manner of establishing the state administration: first the govern-ment (central and local) had to be organized, and only after that the legal or-der itself. Power was a force that carried out the law and protected personal and property security, and it had to be strong, i.e., unique and centralized, in order to play this role. Without such a power, there could be no legal order—this was the ideological reasoning of the Constitutionalists. All legislation by their government, including the laws on local government, was based on this concept.

4. The Constitutionalists’ Laws on Local Government

The Turkish Constitution enabled the Constitutionalists to fulfill their aspira-tions to realize the principles of the law, the stability of clerks, and the cen-tralization of the state administration from the very beginning of their rule.27 The laws on local government were passed on the basis of Articles 61, 62, 63, 64, and 65 of the constitution. Article 61 provided for the main principle of organization of the state administration: Serbia was divided into 17 counties, counties were split into districts, and districts into villages. Article 62 defined the legal position and the area of competence of the county prefect in the sys-tem of authority: he was obliged to carry out the orders and commands of the central government and court verdicts. Articles 63, 64, and 65 defined the area of competence of the district prefect: to protect property and land in the vil-lages against every attack, to protect people from tramps and from malicious and corrupt people, to check passports, and to supervise the municipal courts.

These basic regulations of the constitution concerning local government showed clearly that two guiding ideas had been implemented in its structure: (1) the submission of local authorities to the central government (i.e., the principle of the centralization of government, which turned the local authori-ties into non-central centralized state authorities); and (2) a limited area of competence for the county and district prefects. Therefore, according to the Turkish Constitution, the role of local government was reduced to following orders and commands from the central government and executing court sen-tences. Whether formerly viewed as wide or narrow independence of the local units and state authorities, the principle of centralization had the same weight as the constitutional principle that was carried out in its rigid form.

In compliance with this principle, the constitution had defined the legal character of the counties and districts, as well as of their most important servants. Counties and districts were treated exclusively as lower police and 27 Bataković, Les sources françaises de la démocratie serbe, 92–95.


administrative territorial units, without additional attributes. Therefore, the area of competence of the county and district prefects was very limited. Their role was reduced to that of ordinary police agents. In other words, Articles 62 through 65 regarded the administrative function of the county and district pre-fects and the repressive machinery of government as identical. Based on these principles, the Constitutionalists passed laws further developing these ideas.

5. The Law on the Organization of County Offices and the Main Duties of the District Prefects of 12 May 1839

This was one of the most important laws created by the Constitutionalists.28 It was also the most important law in 19th-century constitutional Serbian history because it was in effect for the longest time, 1839–88 and 1894–1903.29 It was suspended only during the period of the Constitution of 1888, when a differ-ent law on the organization of counties and districts was passed. This law defined the area of competence and the activities of the county and district prefects, their mutual relationships, and their relationships with the central government in greater detail.30

Pursuant to Article 2 of this law, such county offices had their own pre-fect and adjunct personnel: one assistant, one servant, and one cashier. The prefect held the position of a county president, and the remaining staff held the position of members. The district authority was defined in Article 4: They would be occupied with following the orders that were issued by the central government of the principality. This meant that all the ministries (Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Justice, and Ministry of Educa-tion) had the right to issue commands and orders to the county prefects. The county offices were completely dependent on the Council and ministers, and all commands had to be obeyed. The county offices had a duty to follow the orders of the central government. They were primarily subjugated to the Ministry of the Interior, which was, pursuant to Article 9 of the law, author-ized to appoint and dismiss county prefects and other servants in the state hi-erarchy. The direct subjugation of the county prefects to the Minister of the Interior and their direct dependence on him were also enunciated in Article 5, which defined the duty of the county prefects, who had to send regular reports

28 See “Ustrojenije Okružny Načalničestva, i glavne dužnosti Srezski Načalnika,” in Sbornik zakona i uredba, 78–83. 29 Essentially, this law was in effect until 1905, when the new law on counties and districts was passed by the National Assembly. 30 In Serbia, counties (okrug) were the largest units of local self-government, followed by districts (srez) as medium-sized, and municipalities (opština) as the smallest.


on their activities and the state of the county to the minister. As a territorial police authority subjugated to the Ministry of the Interior, the county prefect was to maintain law and order first of all and ensure that decrees, regulations, and laws were carried out, and attend to post offices, roads, bridges, and buildings secondly. The county prefect carried out these duties in person or through district prefects.

Therefore, the area of competence of the county prefect was not the same when he acted as a centralized authority of the central government and when he acted as a police authority subordinated to only one minister—the Minister of the Interior in the government of the Principality of Serbia. In the first case, the county prefect was under the Council and central administration of the government, and in the second case, only under the Minister of the Interior. We can clearly recognize the twofold legal identity of the district prefect according to the law of the Constitutionalists.

Matters differed slightly regarding the district offices and their prefects. The district offices were minor police units of the county, and, in addition to the president, they also included a servant and several policemen, who could vary in number if necessary. The district prefect was neither directly under the central government nor under the Minister of the Interior, but only under the county prefect.

Everything connected with the maintenance of law and order in the dis-trict fell under the duty of the district prefect. The legislature introduced one more very important duty to the district prefect, defined by Paragraph G of Article 14 of the law: the district prefect was obliged to catch lawbreakers and send them to the county prefect for further proceedings. These duties were carried out by the district prefect himself or through mayors of the villages that were part of his district.

In addition to these direct duties, the district prefect was also obliged to carry out all those duties that fell into the area of competence of the county prefect, whose duties indirectly fell into the area of his state authority. In this case, the district prefect acted as a transmitted county prefect in his adminis-trative areas. As a civil servant subjugated to the county prefect, the district prefect did not communicate directly with the ministers. He followed solely the commands of the county prefect and was obliged to send him reports on law and order in his district as well as on all of his activities.

Thus, the Constitutionalists’ laws created a pyramidal hierarchy with rigid bureaucratic subordination of the state authorities in the legal system of the state administration. The central government (represented by the Council and ministers) was at the top of this pyramid, exercising the supreme power ac-quired by subjugating and stripping the prince of his powers. The lower


portion of the pyramid included county prefects as county chiefs, and below them were the district prefects as district chiefs, and finally the mayors, as the heads of villages, were at the very bottom. It is important to mention that offi-cial communication occurred solely between immediate superior and immediate subordinate authorities—between the Council (i.e., the govern-ment) and the county prefects, between the county and district prefects, and between the district prefects and the village mayors.

In this way a rigid bureaucratic structure was created (reminiscent, to some extent, of a medieval system with a senior-vassal relationship estab-lished on the basis of the notion that “the vassal of my vassal is not my vas-sal”), with a clear hierarchic organization and an administrative system of is-suing orders: commands and orders were issued from the central government, which had to be followed by county and district prefects and then also by vil-lage mayors. Thus, the Constitutionalists, like their predecessor Prince Miloš, deprived these civil servants of any autonomy, allowing them only a bare police function.

The Constitutionalists were convinced that they were going to create, with the help of this local government organization, a strong central government and a stable state legal system. However, it was more than obvious that they had made a mistake, because not everything went as smoothly as planned. The counties and districts encountered many problems: bad communication between the government and the county and between the county and the dis-trict, unskilled county and district prefects, and the sloppiness and arrogance of the servants. In addition, highway robbery, theft, devastation, and disturb-ance were regular events. Brigands raged insolently through local areas, rob-bing everything, while the government was totally helpless. Experience showed that the Law on the Organization of the County Prefect Offices and the Main Duties of the District Prefects had numerous disadvantages and gaps, which prevented its efficient application. The Constitutionalists were disappointed and dissatisfied with this state, so they quickly issued a new act on 8 July, the Directions for the Application of the Law (Sledujuća Nas–tavlenija), which provided some instructions for county and district prefects.31

6. The Law on the Organization of Municipalities of 13 July 1839

This was the first law on municipalities in Serbia.32 It divided all the Serbian municipalities into three classes according to the differences in their internal structure. The legislature used surface area and socioeconomic and demo- 31 See “Sledujuća Nastavlenija,” in Sbornik zakona i uredba, 84–86. 32 See “Ustrojenije obština,” in Sbornik zakona i uredba, 94–100.


graphic structures as criteria for classifying municipalities. Only the town of Belgrade fell into the first class, for the time being. The county and other municipalities fell into the second class, and all the village municipalities fell into the third. The following authorities were present in all communities: a municipal court, township council members, and a board.

The municipality of Belgrade, like the others, had its own municipal court. The municipal court performed two functions: legal and police-admin-istrative. Therefore, this authority had a twofold legal identity. The municipal court, in its legal function and with its president as head, resolved legal proce-dures between citizens of Belgrade amounting to 100 grades (a coin equal to 20 paras). In exceptional cases, if the legal parties agreed, the municipal court could pass judgment in civil suits surpassing this sum. Similarly, this court passed judgment in criminal proceedings for minor offences with a prison sentence of three days or corporal punishment up to 10 strokes with a stick. The president of the municipal court, as a police and administrative function-ary, carried the official title of “town governor” and was accorded skilled per-sonnel for carrying out duties. The combined legal and police-administrative offices in a local institution carried the official name, e.g., Government of the Town of Belgrade.

Thus, this law accorded the municipality of Belgrade a wide range of au-thority, so its legal and political significance grew. With respect to law, the legislature equalized the municipality and the district, and the president of the municipal court, as the police and state authority, had the status of a district prefect and was obliged to work with his superior county prefect. In other words, he had to take and execute commands and orders from the competent county prefect.

Article 10 was very interesting. This act regulated the appointment of 32 township council members, who had to be reasonable and fair people, by the Town of Belgrade from its environs. Articles 11 and 12 supplemented the previous article: pursuant to Article 11, the township council members carried out the will of the Town of Belgrade without compensation, in contrast to other servants and attendants who received their salaries from the municipal treasury. The law was not clear regarding the interpretation of the regulation according to which Belgrade had to appoint the township council members from its environs. There was no explanation of the meaning of the term “envi-rons.” Obviously, an additional legal gap existed which left plenty of room for extensive interpretation and for unfounded application of the law.

The township council members decided all the more important issues that influenced the life of the municipality and its inhabitants. They determined the positions of municipal servants (choice, salary, etc.), the erection of new


buildings, and the rental of municipal properties, and checked taxes, surtaxes, and similar issues.

Finally, Article 14, the last act regulating the municipality of Belgrade and its structure, introduced the board as an institution. The township council members gathered as a board to solve tasks of importance to the entire mu-nicipality. If a task of lesser importance was at stake, then only a fourth of the township council members had to be present in order to solve it. The decisions were made by absolute majority vote.

A legal gap in this act is immediately apparent. First, the legislature did not define precisely which institution was authorized to convene the board of township council members or the procedure for carrying that out. Second, there was no clear division between tasks important for the whole municipal-ity and tasks of lesser importance for the municipality. This gap also created the opportunity for a wide interpretation of norms and for arbitration in legal actions, which was a regular event.

The county towns and other towns that fell into the second class also had their own municipal court. The court was composed of one village head mayor as presiding judge, two assistants, who also performed the duties of police agents, one servant, and two policemen. The area of competence of this court covered all legal, police, and administrative cases that were of greater importance to the administrators of the Town of Belgrade.

The head mayor of the municipalities of the second class, like the admin-istrator of Belgrade, was also at the same time a legal and a police and state authority. As a legal authority, the head mayor, with his personnel, was sub-jugated to the county court, and as a police authority of the county perfect, more precisely, to the district prefect.

Every municipality of the second class had its own township council members. They varied in number from 8 to 16, depending on size and total structure. The township council members had to be the fairest and most rea-sonable people, who would gather in order to carry out tasks of great im-portance to the municipality. They performed their function without compen-sation, whereas the professional personnel (village mayors, assistants, teachers, and midwives) received their salary from the municipality treasury.

Here as well, a serious defect can be seen in the form of a legal gap, sim-ilar to the case of the government of the Town of Belgrade. Once more, the law did not precisely define the meaning of “environs” from which the 8 to 16 township council members had to be appointed. Furthermore, no details were included about their appointment, the length of their mandate, or their recall. These omissions created a lot of difficulties in the application of the law and the functioning of the institutions.


Municipalities of the third class (all the village municipalities) also had a municipal court, composed of the village head mayor, two assistants, and one janitor. The municipal court of the village municipality had a twofold nature: as a legal authority it was subjugated to the county court, and as a police and administrative authority to the district prefect. Article 24 defined precisely the competence of the municipal court in the village municipalities. Tasks con-cerning the whole municipality (e.g., apportioning taxes and surtaxes) were carried out as usual; i.e., the head mayor convened the most eminent people in the municipality and together with them made all the necessary decisions.

Thus, it can be concluded that the Law on the Organization of Municipal-ities only enlarged the organizational structure of local government, which was created by the Law on the Organization of County Offices and the Main Duties of the District Prefects. The former law constituted municipalities, just as the latter law had constituted counties and districts. In this way, the Con-stitutionalists’ public administration organization was completed. Both laws were based on the same ideas and principles. The same political tendency of the Constitutionalists’ government prevailed throughout both laws—striving for stronger centralization and bureaucratization of public administration, from the central government to the village mayors as heads of municipalities of the third class.

The Law on the Organization of Municipalities tried to make municipali-ties purely administrative-territorial units. Therefore, all the authorities in the municipalities (regardless of class) functioned as state authorities. Among them, the municipal court was certainly the most important body because it functioned simultaneously as both a judicial and police-administrative au-thority. This emphasized the importance of the superiors in the public admin-istration hierarchy—the Belgrade town governor in the municipality of the first class, and village mayors in municipalities of the second and third clas-ses. Although the legislature tried to make a clear separation between the ju-diciary and the police-administrative jurisdiction of the court, this process could not be carried out in the end. The combination of both functions in one person prevented it.

Like many other laws, this one also had a number of shortcomings. Analysis of the legal status and scope of the most important municipal author-ities (municipal courts, township council members, and assemblies) demon-strates two principal shortcomings: the inaccuracy of the constitution of the municipal administration and the unclear boundaries of division between the total court and police-administrative jurisdiction. These shortcomings were only partly remedied by the direct application of the Turkish Constitution and


the applicable laws and decrees.33 Ružica Guzina has very convincingly stated another argument of great importance—the imprecision of the Law on the Creation of Funds for the Compensation of Municipal Expenditures.34 These shortcomings in the law on the organization of municipalities were more than clear evidence that the Serbian government, in its Constitution-era legislation, underwent considerable friction in building a modern state and legal-political order.

7. The Town of Belgrade Government Chiefs

The Town of Belgrade government had a special importance within the legal-political order of the Principality of Serbia. The first head of the Town of Bel-grade government appointed according to the law on municipalities was Lieutenant Colonel Jovan German, an experienced officer who successfully managed the Directorate of the Belgrade Police on two occasions (1838–39). His task was to lay the foundation for the organization and functioning of new Belgrade local government authorities.35 Politically reliable candidates were appointed heads of the Town of Belgrade. The central government had a lot of confidence in these people. Between 1839 and 1842, the heads of the Town of Belgrade government were Ilija Čarapić, Miloš Bogićević, and Mladen Žujović; temporary acting directors were Mihailo Ljotić, Stefan Stefanović Tenka, and Radovan Damjanović. In the period from 1844 to 1848, the head of the Belgrade government was Jovan Vučković, while Gavrilo-Gaja Jeremić held the position during the period from 1848 to 1852. In the 1852–58 period, the following persons were appointed to this position: Konstantin-Kosta Magazinović, Milivoje Petrović Blaznavac, Nikola Hristić, and Jovan Belimarković.36 The good reputation and influence of the people who served as heads of the Town of Belgrade government demonstrated the political importance of this function during the rule of the Constitutionalists.

8. The Goals of the Constitutionalists’ Laws on Local Government

The goal that the Constitutionalists wanted to achieve by passing their laws, decrees, and regulations on local government (especially in municipalities) was the establishment, strengthening, and preservation of legal-political order 33 Guzina, Opština u Srbiji 1839–1918, 51–53. 34 Ibid., 81–87. 35 Branislav Božović, Uprava i upravnici grada Beograda (1839–1944) (Belgrade: Prosveta, 2010), 44. 36 Ibid., 50–54.


in the countryside. However, the city and village municipalities did not come to enjoy the expected idyllic peace, order, and organization. Negligence and riots were a constant occurrence. Undisciplined village mayors committed numerous abuses in governing over the municipal courts. Municipal govern-ment performed weakly due to poor selection of candidates for leadership po-sitions (the most qualified people were not often appointed to head admin-istration). Thus, complaints and claims against municipal authorities were numerous.37

Local power was still weak, and local officials acting as police authorities had not yet gained legitimacy among the ordinary people. Individuals did not even want to respond to calls by the authorities, and administrative decisions were carried out with great difficulty. It seemed that the police could not en-sure legal-political order in the country, even if they were granted the right to punish offenders by a code or law. This weakness of the police was the reason that Garašanin—certainly the most capable and authoritative member of the Constitutionalist oligarchy besides Toma Vučić-Perišić—issued the Criminal Code for Police Offenders (Kaznitelni Zakonik za policajne prestupe)38 on 27 May 1850 in order to strengthen the authority of the police. To achieve this, Garašanin had to do two things: (1) expand the function of the district prefect, and (2) grant the police the right to punish offenders.

Punishments were generally carried out with sticks in order to be more ef-ficient and effective: spanking involved hitting on all sides. The police be-lieved it would strengthen their authority with the people, and Garašanin rea-soned thus. However, Garašanin’s code failed. The police began beating the populace like “their contemporary White American lords beat their Black slaves”; they also demanded abundant banquets from peasants during their inspection visits.39 This reminded the peasants of receptions for Ottoman spahis and musselims not so far in the past.40

37 For details see Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji i njihova vlada, 49–63. 38 “Kaznitelni Zakonik za policajne prestupe,” in Sbornik zakona i uredba, i uredbeny ukaza, izdany u Knjažestvu Srbiji, vol. 5, Od početka 1849. do konca 1850. godine (Belgrade: Pravitelstvena knjigopečatnja [Državna štamparija], 1853), 129–86. 39 The village mayors and county and district prefects often went to village feasts. For instance, there was testimony that one county prefect took home everything prepared for a feast—lambs, chicken, oats, etc. In another instance, a district prefect had all the cattle slaughtered, took the skins, and sent them home (Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji i njihova vlada, 61). 40 Spahis were the Ottoman landlords. They received land (timars and zeamets) from the sultan, but in turn they always had to respond to his military appeal. Spahis could collect taxes from the peasant tenants who worked and lived on their land. They had the right to charge a natural tax “tenth” (1/10). This tax included a tenth of all peasant products in the land. In addition,


In general, such arrogant behavior and the numerous abuses made the bu-reaucracy intolerable to the people. The unpopularity of government servants gradually grew, becoming general dissatisfaction, which affected almost the entire country. There was public dissatisfaction all around with the abuses by servants, village mayors, and priests. Ordinary people asked the government to put an end to this situation. The Constitutionalists were therefore forced to pass the Law on the Formation of Special, Extraordinary Commissions on 8 and 9 December 1858. These commissions were to tour the country in order to check on the behavior of government servants and to examine possible faults and abuses.41 Most complaints were against the illegal actions of village mayors in the municipalities and the arrogance of the district and county pre-fects. Village mayors and district prefects were often accused of arbitrarily taking municipal money in order to lend it for interest.42

9. Conclusion

In the end, we can conclude that the Law on Organization of Municipalities finalized the organizational structure of the local government that had been created by the Law on the Organization of the County Offices and the Main Duties of District Prefects. As the latter constituted counties and districts, the former constituted municipalities. In this sense, the Constitutionalists’ organi-zation of state administration came to an end. Both laws were based on the same ideas and principles. Both laws were pervaded by the same political as-piration of the Constitutionalists’ government—an aspiration for stronger centralization and more bureaucratic state administration, from the central government to the village mayors. The Law on Organization of Municipalities tried to transform the municipality into a state, administrative, and territorial unit. Therefore, all the authorities in the municipalities became state authori-ties. Very little of the former municipality’s independence and self-government remained.

Through these local government laws, the goal of the Constitutionalists was the establishment, strengthening, and protection of law and order in the country, but very little of the expected law and order and organization took place in the villages. Police maintained the legal-political order by force

spahis could also charge a money tax. Musselims were the Ottoman officials in nahiyas (the smallest state territorial-administrative unit in the Ottoman Empire). 41 Nikić, Lokalna uprava, 80. 42 The Council passed a decree in September 1859 prohibiting such activities. See details in Sbornik zakona i uredba, i uredbeny ukaza, izdany u Knjažestvu Srbiji, vol. 12, Od početka do konca 1859. godine (Belgrade: Pravitelstvena knjigopečatnja [Državna štamparija], 1859), 116.


(“stick”), contrary to what the Constitutionalists wanted to achieve. While they intended to create a powerful and authoritative government that would maintain law and order, the situation was quite different. What the Consti-tutionalists managed to create was a rigid, centralized, and bureaucratic public administration with district and county prefectures (predominantly in the role of police authorities) and village mayors as their branches in village municipalities.

The present study reinforces the existing research in the classical historiographical and legal-political sciences. The conclusions are in harmony with research by classical Serbian authors such as Slobodan Jovanović and Fedor Nikić, although theirs are more detailed. Their work is supplemented here by analysis and interpretation of decrees that served to implement the laws. This gives a more realistic notion of the actual role and functioning of local government in practice. On the other hand, the conclusions presented here cannot complement the position of socialist historiography (e.g., Ružica Guzina), which takes one-sided and narrow positions constructed from a Marxist point of view. The reliability of this socialist perspective is very low because of its insistence on the “bourgeois characteristics” of local government during all of 19th-century constitutional history, not just the Constitutionalist period.

Figure 1. The Principality of Serbia in 1833

Figure 2. Jovan Popović, Toma Vučić Perišić, ca. mid-19th century [Source: Belgrade City Museum]

Figure 3. Anastas Nikolov Stojanović (Karastoyanov), Ilija Garašanin, 1860–65 [Source: Museum of Applied Arts, Belgrade, no. 10469]


The Serbian Patriarchate of PeÊ in the Ottoman Empire: The First Phase (1557–94)

Vladislav B. SotiroviÊ

Mykolas Romeris University

Introduction

The goal of this article is to investigate the role of the revived (“second”) Patriarchate of Peć in Serbian and Balkan history, particularly with respect to (a) the Serbian Church’s influence in the creation of a Serbian national identity during the first decades of the Ottoman occupation of Serbian lands; (b) Serbian-Turkish relations in the second half of the 16th century; and (c) the reasons for Serbian disloyalty towards the Ottoman government at the turn of the 17th century.

This article addresses the causes of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, once among the most powerful European states in the New Age of European history. The decline of the Ottoman Empire was a prelude to the “Eastern Question” in the Balkans, i.e., the question of the survival of the Ottoman Empire in Europe.1 This was one of the crucial questions in the history of Europe from the time of the Reformation to the beginning of the First World War. The methodology employed in this paper consists of analysis of availa-ble documents and comparison of different historical sources and literature on the subject.

The Patriarchate of Peć is a subject of major significance as it was the only Serbian national institution within the Ottoman Empire and was crucial in influencing the Serbian people to remain loyal to the Orthodox faith rather than convert to Islam. The patriarchate was responsible as well for preserving Serbia’s medieval heritage and the idea of an independent national state. Under the influence of the patriarchate, Orthodox Christianity became the

1 For a discussion of the “Eastern Question,” see Vasilj Popović, Istočno pitanje (Belgrade: Geca Kon, 1928).

144 Vladislav B. SotiroviÊ

cornerstone of Serbian national identity, a role that has continued to the present day.2

The Patriarchate of Peć was founded in 1346, during the reign of the most significant Serbian ruler—Emperor Stefan Dušan, “the Mighty” (1331–55) (Fig. 1 following p. 167).3 The foundation of the national Serbian Patriarchate of Peć was the consequence of a new political situation on the Balkan Peninsula, the emergence of Serbia as the most powerful country in the region positioned to replace the Byzantine Empire. In the same year as the founding of the patriarchate, Dušan the Mighty was crowned the emperor of Serbs and Greeks (i.e., the Byzantines) by the patriarch of Peć. The period that followed was one of full independence of the Serbian medieval church from the Greek one, named the Ecumenical Church in Constantinople.

The history of the Patriarchate of Peć can be divided into two periods, with a long interruption between them lasting approximately one century: from 1346 to 1459 and from 1557 to 1766. In the first period the Patriarchate of Peć was the state church of the independent medieval Serbia.4 When the Ottoman Turks conquered Serbia in 1459 the patriarchate, as the Serbian na-tional church, was soon abolished (most likely in 1463), and it did not exist for a century, until its revival in 1557. However, the revived patriarchate found itself in a new political situation. Now, from 1557 to 1766, the new Patriarchate of Peć was under the total control of the authorities of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, the territory under the jurisdiction of the “second” patriarchate was greater than that of the “first” patriarchate (Fig. 2).

The “second” Patriarchate of Peć had jurisdiction over all Serbs in the Ottoman Empire. It is important to stress that only two (Orthodox) patriar-chates, the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Serbian Patriarchate 2 Today almost all former Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Raška (Sandžak) who converted to Islam are known as “Bosniaks,” former Orthodox Serbs who converted to Roman Catholicism in Croatia, Dalmatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are “Croats,” and former Orthodox Serbs who converted to Islam in Kosovo-Metohija became “Albanians” (Arbanasi). In Kosovo-Metohija there were also “Arnauts” (Arnautaši)—former Orthodox Serbs who converted to Islam but retained their ethnic identity before finally becoming Albanians. It is estimated that c. 30 percent of present-day Albanians in Kosovo-Metohija are of Serbian origin. Dušan T. Bataković, Kosovo i Metohija u srpsko-arbanaškim odnosima (Belgrade: Čigoja štampa, 2006), 33−36. 3 On Emperor Stefan Dušan and his empire, see Miladin Stevanović, Dušanovo carstvo (Belgrade: Knjiga-komerc, 2001). 4 The creation of an independent (autocephalous) Serbian (Orthodox) medieval church in 1219 was possible due to the work of St. Sava (c. 1174−1236). Stanoje Stanojević, Istorija srpskoga naroda, reprint of corrected 3rd edition (Belgrade: Napredak, 1926), 124−25. St. Sava, however, was one of the most important Serbian medieval secular national workers. About his secular activities, see Miloš Crnjanski, Sveti Sava (Šabac: “Glas Crkve,” 1988).

The Serbian Patriarchate of PeÊ in the Ottoman Empire 145

of Peć, were permitted to exist in the Turkish state after the Ottoman conquest of the largest part of the Balkans. After the fall of the independent Serbian state, the Patriarchate of Peć was the only institution that could unite all Serbs in the Ottoman Empire. The patriarchate actually became a representative in-stitution of the Serbs before the Ottoman government. Essentially, in the eyes of the Serbs, the “second” Patriarchate of Peć was a substitute for the lost national Serbian state.

The main functions of the “second” patriarchate during the two centuries of its existence were to prevent the Serbs from converting to the Islamic faith, to serve as the political representative of the Serbs in Sublime Porta (the Ottoman government), and to preserve the medieval cultural inheritance of the Serbian state and people.

This article deals with the history of the new Patriarchate of Peć during the first 38 years of its existence (1557−94), from the revival of the patriar-chate up to the incineration of St. Sava’s relics on Vračar Hill near Belgrade.

The main issues discussed in this article are (1) the motivations for the revival of the patriarchate, (2) the reasons for the Serbian insurrection of 1594−95 against Ottoman rule, (3) the tolerance and intolerance in the Otto-man Empire regarding the relationship between Islam and Christian Orthodoxy in the areas under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Peć, (4) the reasons for the incineration of the relics of St. Sava and the consequences of this action with respect to the relationship between the Serbs and Turks, and (5) consideration of whether the “second” patriarchate was a new patriar-chate, only with an old name, or a real resumption of the medieval (“first”) Serbian patriarchate.

The Serbian People under Ottoman Rule in the 16th Century

The making of the Ottoman state into a world power was the work of Sultan Mehmed II al-Fatih, “the Conqueror” (1451−81), whose conquest of Constantinople in 1453 removed the last major barrier to expansion into northern Anatolia and enabled the Ottomans to dominate the Straits and the southern shore of the Black Sea.5 After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II, in four military campaigns, succeeded in occupying Serbia and finally annexing it in 1459 after the fall of Smederevo—Serbia’s capital at the

5 For information on Mehmed the Conqueror, see Joseph von Hammer, Historija Turskog (Osmanskog) carstva [Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches], vol. 1, trans. Nerkez Smailagić (Zagreb: “Ognjen Prica,” 1979), 151–252.


time.6 Mehmed the Conqueror soon occupied Bosnia in 1463, Albania in 1479, and Herzegovina in 1482. He also made the preparations for the Ottoman conquest of Negro Monte, or Montenegro (medieval Doclea or Zeta), in 1499. As a consequence, ultimately all of the Serbian medieval states and Serb-populated territories came under the Ottoman sultan as part of the Ottoman Empire. Actually, the Serbian people and regions were being conquered by the Turks from 1371 (Macedonia) to 1499 (Montenegro). During the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, the smaller Ottoman provinces—sanjaks, which were located at the Turkish borders with Christian states—became the most important for the Ottoman administration, primarily from a military point of view. Strong military fortresses and a special system of military stations were built along the borderland sanjaks. A typical example was the sanjak of Smederevo (northern medieval Serbia), which existed from the fall of the city of Smederevo until the conquest of the province of Banat (1459–1552).

During the 16th and 17th centuries the Serbian people lived in five larger Ottoman provinces—pashaliks (paşalik, pašaluk). The most important of these were the Pashalik of Rumelia with its sanjaks—Skoplje, Kjustendil, Sofia, Prizren, Vučitrn, Scodra, Kruševac, Vidin, and Smederevo—and the Pashalik of Bosnia, divided into the following sanjaks: Bosnia, Herzegovina, Klis, Zvornik, Bihać, and Lika. The other pashaliks in which the Serbs lived were the Pashalik of Timişoara (in the sanjaks of Čanad and Timişoara), the Pashalik of Jeger (in the sanjaks of Seged and Srem), and the Pashalik of Kanjiža (in the sanjaks of Mohacs and Požega).7

The Ottoman administrative system was organized with the most important goal of securing military success and thus primacy.8 A fundamental principle of interethnic relations within the Ottoman Empire was the legal and practical superiority of the Mohammedan creed (Islam) over all other creeds. The most remarkable demonstration of the superiority and privileged position of Muslims in Ottoman society was the requirement that Christian subjects pay extra taxes in money (haraç) and taxes in blood (devşirme; in Serbo-Croatian, danak u krvi).9 The latter tax—devşirme (collection of boys)—was especially harsh for the Christians as it was the practice in which Ottoman

6 Halil Inalçik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), 27. 7 Ivan Božić, Sima Ćirković, Milorad Ekmečić, and Vladimir Dedijer, Istorija Jugoslavije (Beograd: Prosveta, 1973), see the map on p. 136. 8 H. W. V. Temperley, History of Serbia (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), 106. 9 However, the Armenians and the Jews were exempted from devşirme taxation. Vladimir Ćorović, Istorija Srba (Belgrade: Beogradski izdavačko-grafički zavod, 1993), 373.


authorities forcibly collected boys from Christian families to be trained and later enrolled in the empire’s military or civil service.10 In general, in the Ottoman Empire there was a legal declaration of religious tolerance (for instance, by the sultan’s firman in 1566) and a fairly complete political and social intolerance. The Christians were clearly second-class citizens. While formally proclaimed, religious tolerance in the majority of cases was not respected on the ground level in the provinces by local Ottoman governors.

It is assumed by historians that approximately 90 to 95 percent of the Serbs in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century lived in the rural areas.11 Theoretically, the sultan owned all Ottoman lands, and he was the absolute master of all inhabitants, Muslims and non-Muslims. In this way, the Christian Serbs were the sultan’s flock or subjects (reaya)—members of the tax-paying lower class in Ottoman society. However, in the 16th century there were Christian Serbs who were timar owners.12 A majority of them had been small and middle-level feudal lords at the time of the independent Christian states. It was very rare to have more Serb Christian than Ottoman Muslim sipahis (Ottoman feudal lords) as in the majority of cases the Serb Christian sipahis were a minority.13

In the Serbian ethnolinguistic territories, the farmers, who were mostly Serbian reaya, had subordinated small-land properties (čiftluks) and tax-paying obligations to both the sultan and the Muslim feudal aristocracy. In addition to ordinary taxes required of all members of the reaya social strata (whether Muslim or not), Christian Serbs, as non-Muslim members of the reaya, while having to pay to the sultan, had extra tax obligations: monetary, natural, and labor ones. The most important was the haraç or džizija, which was paid by all labor-able men per capita. During the second half of the 16th century, meritorious Serbs were granted abandoned lands as čiftluks by the sultan along with peasants as their serfs.14 Generally speaking, during the first hundred years of Ottoman rule, the status of peasants was better than it had been in the Christian medieval feudal states. This was the main reason that, until the end of the 16th century, there were no rebellions among the Christian Serbs against the new Ottoman rule. There were also some privileged territo-

10 About devşirme, see more in LookLex Encyclopaedia, http://i-cias.com/e.o/devsirme.htm. 11 Fred Singleton, A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38. 12 A timar was an inheritable small land-property granted for military service. 13 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 137. 14 On the Ottoman feudal, state, and military systems, see Bogo Grafenauer, Jorjo Tadić, and Branislav Ćurčić, eds., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, vol. 2, Od početka XVI do kraja XVIII veka (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1960), 9−38.


ries, as for instance Montenegro, where the feudal system was abolished by the Ottomans and all inhabitants were proclaimed free peasants (not feudal serfs). In Montenegro even the Ottoman administrative system was not established on the local level. Local administration was thus left to the domestic (Christian) aristocracy.15

A large part of the northern territory of the formerly independent medie-val Serbia was transformed into a borderland Ottoman military province, which was ruled by a pasha (paşa, paša) whose administrative seat after 1521 was in Belgrade (before 1521 it was in Smederevo). The pasha determined the amount of tribute and taxation. He was also head of the justice system and of the Ottoman administration in his province—pashalik. The Christians, in contrast to the Muslims, had no rights to complain against the pasha, but they could appeal to him for his protection against the local Ottoman feudal aristocracy—the sipahis. The Ottoman pashaliks were territorially subdivided into several sanjaks governed by sanjak-begs. The sanjaks were subdivided into vilayets or subaşiluks administered by a subaşa, and finally, the subaşiluks were composed of several nahiyes, or local districts, administered by mudirs. The administration of justice was given to the kadi, whose administrative territory was the kadiluk.16

Almost until the end of the 17th century there were large districts in the Serbian ethnolinguistic territory administered by the local Christian başi-knezes. These persons were usually descendants of Serbian nobles or princes who had become dependent on the Turks but managed, by their services, to win the latter’s goodwill and retain their lands relatively intact. Başi-knezes were accountable only to the pasha in Belgrade as the administrator of the entire province of the Belgrade pashalik. The Ottoman Muslim kadis had no jurisdiction in the territories administered by başi-knezes, and the Turks did not have the right to live in these districts. Thus, a large part of Serb-populated land was not under the Ottoman administrative jurisdiction in the 15th and 16th centuries. In many cases the nahiyes were administered by local Serb Christian obor-knezes. These individuals were elected by their compatriots, but their election was subject to the pasha’s approval. The obor-knezes were mainly responsible for order in the nahiyes. Thus, some type of local national-territorial autonomy existed among the Serbs during the first century and a half of Ottoman rule.

15 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 143. 16 Grafenauer et al., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, 19−21.


A Revival of the Patriarchate of PeÊ in 1557

The status of the Serbian (Orthodox) Church in the East Christian world was singular. In 1352 the Serbian Church was excommunicated by the Greek pa-triarch in Constantinople, but in 1374 the ban was removed at the request of the Serbian prince Lazar (the most powerful Serbian feudal lord at the time), and the independent and autocephalous character of the Serbian Church was again acknowledged by the Byzantine (Ecumenical Orthodox) church authori-ties. However, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the authority of the Greek Church of the Archbishopric of Ohrid in Macedonia was extended over the autocephalous Serbian Church (Patriarchate of Peć)17 by permission of the Ottoman authorities.

For the Serbs, the danger of their national church being denationalized, as it was put under the jurisdiction of the Greek Church, became much higher after 1459, especially when the Greek Phanariot system of administration was established in the Balkans.18 The Phanariot system of administration was a mixed framework of Ottoman Islamic and Greek Orthodox governance, the latter headed by the Greek patriarch of Constantinople. Although historians have not determined the exact date of the abolishment of the Serbian patriar-chate by the Ottoman government, it was most likely the case that during the next several years after the fall of the Serbian capital of Smederevo the Patriarchate of Peć functioned in some form under the Ottoman occupation. The Serbian patriarchate was, according to some historians, abolished in 1463 and was subject to the jurisdiction of the Greek-governed Archbishopric of Ohrid, which was established in 1018.19 The archbishop of Ohrid was of Greek nationality, but his archbishopric was independent from the Greek patriarch of Constantinople and not subject to the Greek Phanariot system. The archbishop succeeded, in the course of time, in enlarging his own area of jurisdiction, and consequently, a significant part of the Serbian population in the Balkan Peninsula was put under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Ohrid. This may have been the result of a lack of Serbian loyalty to the Ottoman sultan on the eve of an extremely important battle

17 Temperley, History of Serbia, 123. 18 The so-called Phanariots were the Greeks who lived in the Phanar—a suburb of Constantinople. This part of the city was mainly poplulated by Greeks. In this “Greek quarter” was located the “Ecumenical Church” (i.e., the Greek Orthodox Church), which enjoyed a large range of privileges within the Ottoman Empire until 1821. 19 It has to be stressed that the authority of the Archbishopric of Ohrid was gradually taking over the dioceses of the Serbian patriarchate and extending its own territory of jurisdiction up to the town of Peć in Metohija and monastery of Žiča in central Serbia.


against the Hungarians at Mohacs in 1526 as well as the personal position of the second person in command in the Ottoman Empire, Ibrahim pasha, who was a grand vizier and Greek by ethnic origin. The Serbian clergy, led by Bishop Pavle of Smederevo, rose in 1528 against this decision by the Ottoman authorities and succeeded in, de facto, separating the Serbian Church from the authority of the archbishop of Ohrid. Such limited autonomy of the Serbian Church within the Ottoman Empire ended in 1541, when the Ottoman army conquered the city of Buda, at a council of Orthodox churches which was convened by order of the sultan. It was the first planned and executed action by the Serbs as a nation after the loss of their national state in 1459—an event which, together with other favorable developments at the time, including, first of all, the constructive and crucial role of Mehmed paša Sokolović (a Serb from the eastern Bosnian village of Sokolovići who was converted to Islam),20 paved the way for the re-establishment of the Patriarchate of Peć by the sultan’s firman in 1557.

During Ottoman rule in southeast Europe, Christians were bound solely by their church organizations. Catholics were in a more difficult position than Orthodox believers because the Ottoman authorities were more suspicious of Catholics given that the greatest Ottoman enemies were the Catholic states of Spain, Austria, and Venice. Conversely, the Orthodox churches did not pose a great danger to the Ottoman government until the emergence of a strong Orthodox Russia as a great and important European military power in the time of Peter the Great (1689−1725). Ottoman tolerance toward Orthodox believers in the Balkans can also be explained by the fact that all the centers of the national churches of the Balkan Orthodox nations were located in the Ottoman Empire and thus controlled by Ottoman authorities. The Ottoman government was particularly tolerant toward inhabitants of the Ottoman borderland provinces since Ottoman authorities wanted to prevent any political cooperation between Christian believers from the Ottoman Empire and the hostile Catholic border states—Venice and Austria. Specifically, Orthodox believers and church institutions were protected by the Ottoman authorities and enjoyed certain privileges during the Ottoman wars of conquest in the southern part of Central Europe (that is, Hungary and Transylvania) from 1521 to 1541.

Until the end of the 16th century Serbs in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed full religious tolerance from the Ottoman authorities. In the Ottoman Empire Christians were regarded as zimias—peoples who had the “divine books.” For 20 On the life of Mehmed paša Sokolović, see Radovan Samardžić, Mehmed Sokolović (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1975). It was this grand vizier who built the famous bridge over the Drina River in 1567.


that reason, Christian believers enjoyed the rights of Ottoman citizens though not on the same level as Muslim believers.21 As part of the Ottoman system of religious tolerance (millet system), the rights of the Christian churches and monasteries to own real estate were recognized.22 Serbian historian Milenko Vukićević has noted that just before the revival of the Patriarchate of Peć the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520−66) issued a firman ordering the free profession of all religions in his state.23

There is no question that the re-establishment of the Patriarchate of Peć occurred in 1557 and that it was the result of the sultan’s personal decision and decree. It is also evident that the role of the second-ranked man in the Ottoman Empire—Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokolović, who played a very influential political role at the court of the sultan and in the Ottoman government—was of significant importance in the sultan’s decision to issue the decree.24 Additionally, Mehmed Sokolović was strongly influenced by his brother Makarije, a Serbian monk who became the first patriarch of the restored Serbian Church in 1557. However, it would be incorrect to conclude that the influence of the grand vizier on the sultan’s decision to re-establish the Patriarchate of Peć was a determining one since the revival of the Serbian patriarchate was the sultan’s reward to the Serbs for their assistance in the Ottoman wars against the borderland Catholic countries in the southern part of Central Europe. Indeed, the Serbs had a very important military role in the Ottoman army during the wars against Catholic Hungary and Austria, and with the re-establishment of the Serbian patriarchate the sultan was attempting to ensure future Serbian political loyalty and further Serb participation in the forthcoming decisive wars against the Austrian Empire and its capital Vienna—the main military target of Ottoman foreign policy at that time. However, Serb loyalty to the sultan was sustained only until 1594, that is, until the outbreak of the first Serbian uprising against the central authorities in Istanbul.

The Serbian national church was restored in 1557 under its own historic medieval name. The Ottoman administration was effectuating an illusion that 21 Đoko Slijepčević, Istorija Srpske pravoslavne crkve, vol. 1, Od pokrštavanja Srba do kraja XVIII veka (Belgrade: Beogradski izdavačko-grafički zavod, 1991), 303–04. 22 On the relations between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans during the Ottoman domination, see Georges Castellan, History of the Balkans: From Mohammed the Conqueror to Stalin, trans. Nicholas Bradley, East European Monographs, no. 325 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1992), 109−16. 23 Мilenko М. Vukićević, Znameniti Srbi muslomani (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1906; repr., Belgrade: NNK, 1998), 43. 24 Momir Jović and Kosta Radić, Srpske zemlje i vladari (Kruševac: Društvo za negovanje istorijskih i umetničkih vrednosti, 1990), 127.


the (“first”) medieval Patriarchate of Peć had continued its existence and function as an institution. However, in the history of the Serbian Church there was, in fact, an interruption of a real institutional existence for at least 30 to 50 years. It is important to note that the medieval Serbian Church existed as an independent national institution from 1219, and it was an integral part of the Serbian national state. However, the revived patriarchate in 1557 was under the total control of the Ottoman administration, but with significant autonomous rights. The city of Peć (Ipek in Turkish) in Kosovo-Metohija once again became the seat of the Serbian patriarch, who was autocephalous, of Serbian nationality, and supported Serbian national interests in the Ottoman Empire.

Moreover, with the permission of the sultan, the grand vizier Mehmed paša Sokolović provided for the continuation of the Patriarchate of Peć and inheritance of the patriarchal throne by members of the Sokolović family. The first patriarch was the grand vizier’s brother, Makarije (1557−71). After his death, the next two heads of the Serbian Church were Antonije (1571−75) and Gerasim (1575−86), both of whom were nephews of Mehmed Sokolović.25 In reality, the influence of the Serbian patriarch on Serbian society in the Ottoman Empire was critical, as he became the person with the most influence on the political behavior of the Serbs in their relations with the Ottoman administration. In other words, the patriarchs in Peć in the new political and historical climate assumed the role previously held by the medieval Serbian monarchs as heads of the nation—ethnarch.26 Concurrently, they were the political representatives of all Serbs as a nation at the court of the sultan.

The Territory and Organization of the Patriarchate of PeÊ

The sultan’s most important aim with regard to the revival of the patriarchate was to gather the whole Serbian population of the Ottoman Empire under its own national church organization. There were two crucial political motiva-tions for this decision by Suleyman the Magnificent: (1) it was a reward for Serbian loyalty and service to the Ottoman civil and military authorities; and (2) the sultan could more easily control all Serbian citizens because the

25 Ibid., 129. 26 The Serbian patriarchs signed themselves in some documents as the patriarchs of “All Illyricum,” i.e., of the main part of the Balkan Peninsula (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Dalmatia, the Vardar Macedonia, and part of Bulgaria) according to the old tradition that the Balkan lands were called according to their ancient names and that Serbia was the synonym for the Roman province of Illyricum. Dušan T. Bataković, Kosovo i Metohija: Istorija i ideologija (Belgrade: Čigoja štampa, 2007), 17.


Patriarchate of Peć was under total Ottoman administrative control and strong political influence, and thus basically an instrument of Ottoman policy among the Serbs.

One of the crucial points of difference between the old (“first”) and revived (“second”) Serbian patriarchate was with respect to the territory under their administrative and spiritual jurisdiction. The former medieval Serbian patriarchate controlled a significantly smaller territory under its jurisdiction, in contrast to the re-established Patriarchate of Peć.

The seat of the renewed patriarchate was the ancient Serbian medieval religious and cultural center—the city of Peć, located in the region of Kosovo-Metohija, or Serbia proper. The southern border of the new patriarchate included the cities of Tetovo, Skopje, and Štip in Macedonia and in northern Albania the city of Scodra (Shkodër, Skadar). The eastern border included the city of Samokov in Bulgaria and the Serbian city of Niš. However, Bulgaria’s city of Sofia and Serbia’s city of Pirot were left under the control of the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The city of Severin, which is located on the left bank of the Danube River, was also not included in the Serbian patriarchate.

The northeastern border of the patriarchate embraced the main part of the area of the Moriş River in Romania. Thus, Romania’s cities of Timişoara and Arad were located within the patriarchate’s borders. The northern border of the patriarchate extended far from the Hungarian town of Sent Andrea, which is only 25 kilometers north of Buda and Pest. The northwestern border passed between Balaton Lake and the Raba River in Hungary and even included Slovenia’s city of Ptuj and the Dalmatian cities of Nin and Zadar. Consequently, Croatia’s capital Zagreb and the cities of Karlovac and Sisak were put under the jurisdiction of the Serbian patriarchate, regardless of the fact that these cities were not part of the Ottoman Empire. The southwestern border incorporated the Adriatic littoral from Nin on the north to the Bojana River on the south.27

It is important to note one additional significant difference between the medieval and the revived Patriarchate of Peć: the central territories of the first one were located in the southeastern parts of the Balkans, while the central territories of the renewed patriarchate were located in the northern and northwestern parts of the Balkans, including some territories which had never been a part of the Ottoman Empire. The reason for this difference was the fact that the borders of the new patriarchate followed the ethnographic boundaries of the Serbs at that time, which were different from those prior to the Ottoman 27 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 146 (see map No. 23 of the borders of the Patriarchate of Peć in the mid-17th century).


occupation of the Balkans (more precisely, before the Battle of Maritza in 1371). In other words, during the time of the Ottoman conquest of southeast-ern Europe a great number of Serbs migrated from the southeast towards the northwest. Undoubtedly, the migrations were the most significant conse-quence of the Ottoman presence in the Balkans from 1354 to 1912.28

The territory of the re-established (“second”) Patriarchate of Peć was divided into approximately 40 metropolitanates or archbishoprics. Those located south of the Danube River were part of the medieval Serbian church organization. On the other hand, the archbishoprics located north of the Danube and Sava rivers and westward of the Drina (i.e., located in southern and central Hungary, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia) were established by the authorities of the new Patriarchate of Peć after 1557.29

A new phase in the development of the Serbian church organization began when, after 1557, the Serbian churches in the Ottoman-occupied part of Hungary were included in the administrative system of the Patriarchate of Peć. However, the Orthodox church in Transylvania—a province mainly settled by Orthodox Romanians—was placed under the spiritual and adminis-trative jurisdiction of the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople.30 Accordingly, the southeastern borders of the Patriarchate of Peć shared common boundaries with the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantino-ple. A southern neighbor of the Serbian patriarchate was the Greek Archbishopric of Ohrid in Macedonia. Finally, in the north and west the administrative and spiritual territory of the Patriarchate of Peć had common borders with the Roman Catholic Church in the Habsburg Monarchy and in the Republic of Venice.

It is not possible to specify the exact date of the administrative reorganization of the Patriarchate of Peć. It most probably began within the first ten years of the revived patriarchate.31 Nevertheless, it is known that the entire Serbian church organization in Ottoman Hungary was restructured during the second half of the 16th century into five eparchies (dioceses): 28 On these migrations, see Jovan Cvijić, Balkansko poluostrvo i južnoslavenske zemlje: Osnove antropogeografije (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1922), 60−139. 29 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 146 (see map No. 23 of the borders of the Patriarchate of Peć in the mid-17th century). 30 It is worth mentioning that in Transylvania at that time, “lacking political power, the Ortho-dox faith, the religion of the majority of the Romanian population, was not admitted among the official religions of the country, having only a ‘tolerated’ status.” Kurt Treptow, ed., A History of Romania (Iaşi: The Center for Romanian Studies/The Romanian Cultural Foundation, 1996), 133. 31 Dušan J. Popović, Vojvodina, vol. 1, Od najstarijih vremena do Velike Seobe (Novi Sad: Istorijsko društvo u Novom Sadu, 1939), 389.


Belgrade-Srem, Bačka, Slavonia, Lipova, and Vršac. However, the eparchy of Budim was not established at that time.32 It was a fact that all of the lands of the Kingdom of Hungary (north of the Danube and Sava) settled by the Orthodox Serbs immediately after the Ottoman conquest (from 1521 to 1541) were incorporated into the administrative-spiritual territory of the Greek Archbishopric of Ohrid, but when the Patriarchate of Peć was re-established in 1557 they were included into the administrative-spiritual territory of this Serbian national church organization and institution. The residences of the metropolitan of Belgrade-Srem were in Belgrade and in the Hopovo monastery in Fruška Gora (in present-day Vojvodina, a province in northern Serbia).33

The province of Banat, at that time in the southern part of the Kingdom of Hungary but after 1918 in present-day Romania and Serbia, was already settled by the Serbs in the late Middle Ages. Banat had, in the 16th century, two eparchies, Lipova and Vršac, and in the next century two additional ones, Timişoara and Bečkerek. The first known metropolitan (archbishop) of Vršac was Teodor, who was one of the most important spiritual leaders of the Serbs in the uprising against the Ottoman government in 1594.34

Interconfessional Relations, Rights, and Privileges

One of the critical research problems in dealing with the history of the revived Patriarchate of Peć is the question of interconfessional relations in the southern part of the former Kingdom of Hungary while under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Peć. This is a question of interconfessional tolerance and intolerance between Orthodox and Roman Catholic believers living within the borders of the Serbian patriarchate. Catholicism, which was dominant in Hungary before the Protestant Reformation and the Ottoman influence in the Balkans and southern parts of Central Europe, had simply disappeared in many regions of southern Hungary (present-day Vojvodina), which had become heavily populated by Orthodox Serbs. The Catholic clergy, together with the Hungarian feudal aristocracy, fled from many parts of Hungary and Transylvania during the Ottoman wars against the Hungarians (1521−41).35

32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 392. 34 Jovan N. Tomić, O ustanku Srba u Banatu 1594 godine: S naročitim pogledom na savremene prilike u susednim zemljama (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1899), 28. 35 About Hungarian history from the Battle of Mohács to the fall of Buda, Hungarian relations with the Ottomans, and the question of cohabitation of Protestants and Catholics in Hungary in


Several Catholic dioceses from Hungary, such as Srem, Pecs, Kalocsa, and Csanad, were even devoid of Catholic archbishops. Consequently, all Catholic believers in Srem, Bačka, and Banat (these three provinces constitute the region of Vojvodina in present-day Serbia) were put under the jurisdiction of the Serbian Orthodox archbishop of Belgrade-Srem. The Orthodox archbish-ops (metropolitans) received permission from the Ottoman sultan to collect ordinary taxes from Catholic believers (such as dimnica and milostinja), and extraordinary taxes (such as those for weddings).

The introduction of the new Gregorian calendar in 1582 by the Roman Catholic Church caused some problems with respect to the relations between Catholic and Orthodox believers within the Patriarchate of Peć. According to some sources, in the province of Srem Orthodox-Catholic relations were negatively impacted after 1582, when Orthodox believers became aware of the Catholics’ intention to force them to adopt the Gregorian calendar. However, according to documentation provided by one Catholic believer, in the event of a Christian war against Muslim Turks the Catholics from southern Hungary would have joined the Orthodox Serbs and Romanians from Transylvania.36

It is important to note that the tendency of Catholics to convert to the Orthodox faith increased when the pope issued the bull “Inter gravissimas” on 24 February 1582. There were some areas in southern Hungary where Catholic and Orthodox believers celebrated holidays together according to the old Julian calendar until the expulsion of the Ottoman authorities and Muslims from Hungary during the Great Vienna War (1683−99).37 This fact can be explained only by the strong influence of the Orthodox Church on Roman Catholics in southern Hungary, where the Catholics had become a minority without the protection of their own church organization.

Among other privileges, the Patriarchate of Peć was granted land properties, the right to collect one ducat (gold currency) for each priest, and the right to collect the so-called bir—12 akçes (Ottoman currency) per house. The Serbian Church had the autonomy to elect its own patriarch and archbishops. However, the elected patriarch had to be recognized by the Ottoman government. One of the most important privileges given to the patriarchate was the right to adjudicate marital disputes among its believers.

the 16th century, see Laszlo Kontler, Millennium in Central Europe: A History of Hungary (Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House, 1999), 139−58. 36 Popović, Vojvodina, 407. 37 Krunoslav Draganović, “Massenubertritte von Katholikenzur ‘Ortodoxie’ im Kroatischen Sprachgebiet zur Zeit der Turken hershaft,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica (Roma) 3, no. 3–4 (1937): 587–92.


The organization of the Serbian Church consisted of not only high officers such as the patriarch, archbishops, and bishops, but also lower-rank servants—the priests. Rural priests lived and worked basically like peasants, while urban priests lived as did the rest of the urban population.38 According to Serbian philologist Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787−1864), every priest in Serbia was bearded while in Montenegro it was not the case. Montenegrin Orthodox clergy did not wear the religious caps of the clergy as was done in Serbia. In Serbia priests served in several villages, and when they were at home they worked at the typical rural jobs of the peasantry. In Montenegro priests carried arms like ordinary people, thus eliminating differences between the priests and their congregations. Furthermore, the priests in Montenegro participated in the battles against the Turks along with the rest of the population.39

The Serbian Church was a great landowner on the borderlands of the Patriarchate of Peć. The residences of the church were located in the monasteries, and one part of the church’s support was provided through the income generated by the real-estate holdings of these monasteries. The church’s income was guaranteed by the sultan’s berats. In turn, the patriarchate was required to pay special taxes for the election of a new patriarch, archbishops, and bishops.40 However, this regulation and practice was in many cases used by the highest church authorities to bribe the sultan and the ministers in Porta. In order to ensure that a new Ottoman sultan confirmed all privileges of the patriarchate through the issuance of a new berat, the church authorities were required to pay new taxes. This taxation was the miri-peşkeş. For instance, the price of a berat for the appointment of a new patriarch was 100,000 akçes in 1766.41

Legal relations between the authorities of the Patriarchate of Peć and the Ottoman Empire were regulated by the sultan’s firman issued in 1557. From a religious point of view the patriarchate was autonomous and self-governed. Generally, the government of the Ottoman Empire did not interfere in the internal religious life of the Christian churches. For all Ottoman Christian subjects it was very important that destroyed or damaged churches and monasteries be repaired or rebuilt. This required special permission issued by the Ottoman authorities. However, according to Ottoman law, any rebuilt 38 Grafenauer et al., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, 464. 39 Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Etnografski spisi: O Crnoj Gori, ed. Milenko S. Filipović and Golub Dobrašinović (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1985), 78–80. 40 Grafenauer et al., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, 102–03. 41 Slijepčević, Istorija Srpske pravoslavne crkve, 405–07; Radovan Samardžić et al., Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj istoriji (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1989), 105.


Christian religious structure could not be higher than its original height prior to destruction42 or higher than any local minaret.

The privileges and rights which the first patriarch, Macarius (Makarije), received from the sultan were equivalent to the privileges given to the Greek Church in Constantinople. The Serbian patriarch was recognized as the leader of all Serbs in the Ottoman Empire (ethnarch, in Turkish milet başa).43 The Serbs saw their patriarch primarily as a secular national leader. For the Ottoman administration, the Patriarchate of Peć was a legal representative institution of the Serbs in the Ottoman Empire, but for Serbian people it was both a religious and court institution.44 The patriarch, archbishops, and bishops of the Serbian Church had received the right to freely profess their religion, to freely administer the church’s properties, and to collect taxes from the people, priests, and monks. The Ottoman sultan gave the Serbian patriarch the right to appoint archbishops (arhiepiskope, vladike, and mitropolite) and bishops (episkope) with the sultan’s approval. The patriarch also had the right to arrogate properties of the priests, monks, archbishops, and bishops which were left without any successors (ius caducitatis) and to adjudicate marital or civil disputes. Thus, the Ottoman state did not have jurisdiction over the Serbs. The Serbian Church used medieval Christian laws such as Dušan’s Codex from 1349/1354, the Vlastareva Sintagma (revised Byzantine law), and common law.45 Taking these rights and privileges into consideration, we can conclude that the Patriarchate of Peć was in practice a Serbian state within the Ottoman Empire.

The Historical Role of the Patriarchate of PeÊ in the Preservation of Serbian National and Cultural Identity

The Patriarchate of Peć was one of the most significant national institutions in Serbian history. The importance of its role in the history of the Serbs takes on even more significance when we consider the fact that the “second” patriar-chate (1557−1766) was the only Serbian national institution that functioned and subsequently could protect and unify all Serbs in the Ottoman Empire.

42 Ibid., 401. 43 Ibid., 315; Bataković, Kosovo i Metohija u srpsko-arbanaškim odnosima, 22. The independent Serbian-milet (the Serbian religious nation) was separated from the Rum-milet with the establishment of the Patriarchate of Peć in 1557 (Bataković, Kosovo i Metohija: Istorija i ideologija, 32). 44 Jović and Radić, Srpske zemlje i vladari, 128. 45 Vladimir Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Narodno delo, 1933), 312.


The Patriarchate of Peć basically assumed the role of the Serbian state which had disappeared in the mid-15th century.

The upper structure of the patriarchate had a feudal organization,46 but the lower structure was composed of priests who originated in the ordinary Serbian folk social strata. In the course of time the patriarchate succeeded in bringing together the main groups of Serbs who were dispersed across the European territories of the Ottoman Empire into a single national organiza-tion—that of the patriarchate—which served as the Serbian national and political representative in Istanbul. The primary national task of the patriar-chate was to foster the idea of Serbian ethnic unity within Orthodox Christianity and the spirit of St. Sava. Compared to the Patriarchate of Peć, all autonomous local communities of Serbs in the Ottoman Empire played a secondary role in this regard.47 A commonly held opinion of researchers of the history of the Patriarchate of Peć is that this “unique spiritual Serbian community in Turkey took the most important merits, not only for the preservation of Orthodoxy but also for the forming and developing of one common and strong Serbian national conscience throughout all Serbian ethnic territories.”48 In addition, the patriarchate had a significant influence on the Serbian population living in Hungary and under the Habsburg Monarchy.49

By protecting the spiritual and cultural tradition of medieval Serbia, the Serbian Church sustained and continued the cultural development of the Serbs during Ottoman rule. In the 16th century several new printing houses began to operate (in the monastery of Mileševa, in Belgrade, Rujna, Scodra, etc.) in which the religious books written in the Old Church Slavonic language were printed and later used by the Serbian clergy not only in the Ottoman Empire but also in the Habsburg Monarchy. In Serbian monasteries some of the most significant medieval Serbian manuscripts and books were copied. That the Serbian clergy, while under Ottoman rule, continued to write in the traditional (medieval) Serbian manner is exemplified in the case of Serbian patriarch Pajsije Janjevac (1614−48), who wrote a biography (životopis) of the Serbian medieval emperor Uroš (1355−71) according to the style of the Middle Ages. Others collected or revised ancient annals, which were written in the Serbian variant of Old Church Slavonic (Serbian-Slavonic).50

46 Grafenauer et al., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, 462. 47 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 145–47. 48 Popović, Vojvodina, 389. 49 Ibid. 50 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 146–47; Grafenauer et al., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, 102–09.


After the revival of the Patriarchate of Peć the construction of Orthodox shrines increased in Serbia, Slavonia, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina. For instance, immediately after the patriarchate was re-established the most important church buildings in the administrative center of the patriarchate—the city of Peć—were renovated. Patriarch Makarije (1557−1571), for instance, became directly involved in supervising the construction of the narthex (priprata) in the central church in Peć and in the program of its fresco paintings. In 1560 one of the most significant Serbian medieval monasteries—Gračanica in Kosovo-Metohija, near the city of Priština—was restored. The process of restoring ancient Serbian sacred buildings (monasteries and churches) especially affected the region of Kosovo-Metohija, the cultural, political, and spiritual cradle of the Serbian nation.51 According to Serbian art historian Sreten Petković, approximately one hundred monasteries and churches were restored during the first decades of the revival of the patriarchate; twenty of them in Kosovo-Metohija.52 However, this period of restoration and new construction lacked the support of wealthy founders of churches and monasteries typical in Serbia in the Middle Ages. This was the main reason that the buildings and decorative art were modest in comparison to those of the independent Serbian medieval state. However, the style and execution characteristic of medieval Serbian churches and traditional icono-graphy served as prototypes for the creation of the new fresco paintings.53

From the time of the revived Patriarchate of Peć, a special term emerged among the Serbs—the so-called Serbian faith, which, using the model of the Serbian medieval tradition, defined Orthodox Christianity as the synthesis of state and culture, infused with the “spirit of St. Sava.” The “Serbian faith” became in the 17th and 18th centuries a basic foundation of Serbian national identity.54

One of the most important features of the restored Patriarchate of Peć was that it became more interested in domestic national questions than the broader questions of Christian dogma being debated in Europe at a time of struggle 51 Olga Zirojević, Crkve i manastiri na području pećke patrijaršije do 1683. godine (Belgrade: Istorijski institut u Beogradu/“Narodna knjiga,” 1984), 31–33. About Kosovo and Metohija in Serbian history, see Samardžić et al., Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj istoriji. There were c. 1,300 churches, monasteries, and other monuments in Kosovo-Metohija before the Ottomans. Ho-wever, there were only about 15 active Orthodox shrines in this region in the first decades of Ottoman rule (Bataković, Kosovo i Metohija u srpsko-arbanaškim odnosima, 22). 52 Sreten Petković, Zidno slikarstvo na području Pećke patrijaršije: 1557–1614 (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1965), 49–50. 53 Božić et al., Istorija Jugoslavije, 146–47. 54 Slijepčević, Istorija Srpske pravoslavne crkve, 317; Мilivoj Pavlović, “Srpska vjera – Srpski zakon,” Zbornik Matice srpske za društvene nauke (Novi Sad), no. 13–14 (1956): 285.


and conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants. The reason for this was that the patriarchate was primarily interested in the preservation of the medieval Serbian national heritage and Serb national identity. In practice it meant that the primary task of the patriarchate was to prevent Serbs from converting to Islam.55

The Rebellion of the Serbs in Banat in 1594

The conflict between the Muslim Ottoman state and its Christian subjects started in the second half of the 16th century and very soon intensified. The Ottoman feudal system at the end of the 16th century effectively removed the Serbian feudal strata and consequently created conditions in which class and religious opposition to the system were united.56 Enlarged political and social differences between the Ottoman Muslims and Ottoman Christian citizens made a strong impact on the behavior of the Serbian Church toward the Ottoman authorities. The Serbian Church experienced economic and financial pressure from the Ottoman state during the crises in the Ottoman feudal system, which began with the death of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in 1566, and even in the second half of the 16th century some old rights enjoyed by Serbian monasteries were abolished by the Ottoman government.57 Such new policies directed at the Serbian Church aggravated the position of the monasteries. Increased taxes required of the Serbian monasteries and churches were instituted from the first years of Sultan Selim II’s reign (1566−74). There were even cases of Ottoman feudal and military aristocracy appropriat-ing properties of Serbian monasteries and demanding bribes in exchange for solving every dispute.58

Just before the end of the 16th century the Ottoman Empire lost two great battles in its struggle against the European Christian states: a naval battle near Lepanto in 1571 (in the Ionian Sea) and a land battle near Sisak in the Habsburg Monarchy (present-day Croatia) in 1593.59 The moral impact of these two Christian victories on the Ottoman Christians was of great importance for the subsequent Christian uprisings against Ottoman rule in southeast Europe. After 1593 most Ottoman Christians wrongly believed that the military power of the Ottoman Empire could be easily broken and subsequently, with the support of some Christian state, they could be liberated 55 Ćorović, Istorija Srba, 418. 56 Grafenauer et al., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, 462. 57 Ibid., 463. 58 Ibid. 59 On the Battle of Sisak, see von Hammer, Historija Turskog (Osmanskog) carstva, 118−20.


from Ottoman control. Specifically, they had been considering the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II (of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire, 1576−1611)60 as the potential liberator of all Ottoman Christians. The Austrian emperor also viewed himself as the monarch destined to finally break Ottoman power in Europe and become the “Savior of Europe.” In order to fulfill this “holy mission” he primarily expected great support from the Transylvanian prince and the Serbs from southern Hungary. In 1591 the Austrian imperial deputy Richard Schtreit promised the Serbs and the Bulgarians Austrian military support in the event of a Christian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire during the upcoming war between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire (“Long War,” 1593−1606). Both Serbian and Bulgarian negotiators pledged that in the event of war the Serbs and Bulgarians from the Ottoman Empire would contribute fully to support the Habsburg Monarchy—a country seen by many Europeans as antemurale christianitatis.

Relations between the Serbs and the Ottoman government were drastically aggravated during the last decades of the 16th century. There were several causes for this, but the most important was that at the end of the 16th century the pressure on Serbian tax-payers and other non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire increased as the government in Istanbul needed additional funds in order to continue its wars against Austria, Venice, Spain, and the Vatican. Generally, the situation of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire worsened at the turn of the 17th century. Essentially, the Ottoman feudal system was in great crisis, and the Ottoman administration was compelled to increase taxation in order to improve its finances. It was a necessary measure in order to continue Ottoman expansion towards the heart of Central Europe, i.e., the city of Vienna (Wien), which was unsuccessfully besieged in 1529 by the troops of Suleyman the Magnificent. The Serbian Church was already under economic and financial pressure from the Ottoman administration dur-ing the reign of Sultan Selim II, when, for the first time, Serbian monasteries and churches were being sold. The annual taxation rate which the Patriarchate of Peć had to pay to the sultan at the end of the 16th century was increased to 100,000 akçes.

The highest Serbian church administrators became involved in the struggle against the Turks at the end of the 16th century. Patriarch Jovan Kantul (1592−1614) was the first head of the Serbian Church to plot against the Ottoman authorities.61 As a national representative of all Serbs in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbian Church tried to find a protector for the Serbs in 60 For information on Emperor Rudolph II (1576−1611), see Jean Bérenger, A History of the Habsburg Empire, vol. 1, 1273−1700 (London and New York: Longman, 1994), 242−60. 61 Jović and Radić, Srpske zemlje i vladari, 129.


some foreign country. Church representatives negotiated with the representa-tives of Austria, several Italian rulers, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.62 Thus hoping that the Austrian emperor would assist in Serbian liberation from Ottoman rule during the “Long War,” Serbs from the Banat region (historical southern province of the Kingdom of Hungary; today divided between Serbia and Romania), led by their own clergy, took an active role in this war against the Ottoman Empire on the side of the Austrians. Together with the Serbs from Banat, Kosovo-Metohija (in the region of Peć in 1594), and Herzegovina (in 1597), they rose in arms.63 Thus, the Serbs and their national church entered into overt hostilities against the Ottoman government, siding with the Habsburg Monarchy for the attainment of their national liberation and in defense of Christianity.64

This Christian rebellion, the biggest up to this point against the Ottoman authorities, broke out in southern Transylvania and the Banat region among Orthodox Serbs and Romanians. The Serbian intention was to involve on their side the Transylvanian prince Sigismund Bathory. In order to achieve this, a special Serbian delegation, led by one of the highest administrators of the Patriarchate of Peć—the metropolitan of Vršac, Teodor Tividorović—was sent to the Transylvanian city of Belgrade (Giulafehervar in Hungarian, or Alba Iulia in Romanian). The delegation participated in a session of the Transylvanian feudal assembly of local magnates. The Serbian deputies offered Sigismund Bathory the throne of the Serbian kings in exchange for his support of the Serbian rebels. During the rebellion, the Serbs were in constant contact with the prince of Transylvania, as well as the Austrian general Teifenbach. The Serbian deputy Đorđe (Georgije) Rac, helped by General Teifenbach, succeeded in meeting with the Austrian archduke Maximilian, who at that time was leading the siege of the Hungarian fortresses of Esztergom on the Danube River. Đorđe Rac’s talks with him were on the future of the war and Serbian destiny after the war.

A turning point in the Serbian rebellion occurred when the new beglerbeg (governor) of Timişoara (Temišvar), Sophy Sinan-paşa, organized a great military counteroffensive at the end of June 1594 against the Serbs, Romani- 62 Grafenauer et al., Istorija naroda Jugoslavije, 107, 493–94. 63 Jović and Radić, Srpske zemlje i vladari, 129. 64 However, the Habsburg authorities in all their wars against the Ottoman Empire never had in mind the re-establishment of any kind of Serbian independent state in the Balkans in the case of Christian victory. In addition, the Serb national-confessional identity was better protected in the Ottoman Empire than in the Catholic Habsburg Monarchy or Venetian Dalmatia. The Orthodox Serbs, for instance, Dalmatian Serbs, emigrated several times during the 18th century to Russia because of Catholic proselityzing. On this issue, see Мarko Jačov, Venecija i Srbi u Dalmaciji u XVIII veku (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1984).


ans (Wallachians), and Austrians. Firstly, he succeeded in ending the Chris-tian siege of Hungarian Esztergom, and in the same month his troops were merged with the Ottoman army of the pasha of Budim. This united Ottoman army (c. 30,000 soldiers) moved toward the Banatian Serbs. The Serbian army numbered only about 4,300 men. The main battle took place near Bečkerek in western Banat, where the Serbs suffered a great defeat. Sinan-paşa entered the city of Bečkerek and totally plundered it. The Serbian metropolitan of Vršac was arrested and, by order of Sinan-paşa, flayed. With the fall of Bečkerek the rebellion collapsed. In determining the main causes of the failure of the rebellion, the political role of the Roman Catholic pope Clement VIII (1592−1605) must be considered. He had sent many deputies to the Serbs in different Balkan provinces, encouraging them to rise in arms, while promising significant military help from the West in their final struggle against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. However, during the rebellion it became clear that these were only empty promises, and no real military support or help for the rebels was forthcoming. The latter were mainly left alone to deal with the much stronger and far more numerous Ottoman forces.

During the Serbian rebellion, there was one unusual political event of a deeply symbolic character. The Ottoman authorities knew very well that this great Serbian revolt was directly inspired and encouraged by the Serbian patriarch Jovan Kantul, who blessed the revolt. The rebels and their leaders had a picture of Serbian St. Sava on a flag of blue, white, and red colors (the colors of the present-day Serbian national flag), and therefore the rebellion was named “St. Sava’s Rebellion.” In order to exact revenge on the Serbs, and particularly on the Serbian Church, Sinan-paşa (Kodža) ordered on Easter day of 1594 (27 April/10 May) that the body of St. Sava be burned to ashes. The Turks solemnly exhumed the body from its holy grave in the 13th-century monastery of Mileševa (in southern Serbia, on the border with Montenegro), conveyed it to Belgrade, and there (“near Banat”) on Vračar Hill (today the downtown area of Belgrade) incinerated the body of the most significant saint in Serbian history. Some parts of the saint’s relics were saved by the people who had gathered around the bonfire, and were returned to the Mileševa monastery. St. Sava’s relics were again burned by the Turks in 1692 as revenge against the Serbs, who had again sided with the Habsburg Monarchy in its war against the Ottoman Empire (1683–99). In the Banat rebellion of 1594 the rebellious Serbs were led by Đorđe Slankamenac-Rac, Deli Marko, and Sava Temišvarac. During the same “Long War,” the Herzegovinian Serbs were led by the duke Grdan from Nikšić (today in Montenegro) and a local metropolitan, Visarion, who wrote a letter to the new Roman pope, Paul V (1605−21), asking the Vatican for political and military help. After putting


down the rebellion, the Turks invited the Serbian patriarch to Istanbul, where he was murdered in 1614.65 The death of Patriarch Jovan Kantul had a deep impact on the subsequent policy of the Serbian patriarchate with respect to the Ottoman authorities. The patriarch was, in fact, betrayed by several Western diplomatic representatives to the Ottoman Empire, but above all by the Venetian one, who reported to the Ottoman authorities on the former’s secret activities and even negotiations with the Western Christian states regarding the liberation of Christian subjects on the Balkan Peninsula from the Ottoman yoke. This Western conspiracy against the Serbian patriarch, church, and nation became the central reason that many prominent Serbs, and above all, the Serbian Church, abandoned hope for the support of Serbian national liberation by Western European countries. They turned, instead, to Orthodox Russia. This was in fact the case with the first successor of Patriarch Jovan Kantul—Patriarch Pajsije (1614−48).

Even the symbolic act of burning the relics of St. Sava in 1594, however, failed to crush the rebellion, as its success really depended only on Austrian military support.66 The Ottoman authorities had chosen this political act because St. Sava actually was the most remarkable holy man in all of Serbian tradition and history, and the most significant symbol of the Patriarchate of Peć and the Serbs as a nation. Basically, the Serbian Church was identified with its founder. The influence of St. Sava’s spirit and myth nevertheless lived on after the incineration of his body. After 1594 the name of St. Sava passed into legend, and the Serbs came to be known as the “nation of St. Sava.”

Conclusion

The Patriarchate of Peć was one of the most important institutions in the history of the Serbs, particularly with regard to their religious and cultural history. This institution was founded in 1346 during the reign of the most significant of Serbian monarchs—Stefan Dušan, “the Mighty.” The foundation of the national Serbian Patriarchate of Peć was the consequence of a new political situation in the Balkan Peninsula, when Serbia reached ascendancy as the most powerful country in this region, poised to replace the Byzantine Empire. In the same year, Dušan the Mighty was crowned by the patriarch of Peć as emperor of the Serbs and the Greeks (i.e., the Byzantines). 65 Jović and Radić, Srpske zemlje i vladari, 129. According to historian Vladimir Ćorović, Patriarch Jovan Kantul “died” in Istanbul in 1614. Obviously for Ćorović, it was not clear whether Kantul was murdered or not (Ćorović, Istorija Srba, 431). 66 Temperley, History of Serbia, 125.


Concurrently, the Serbian medieval church became independent of the Greek Church of Constantinople.

The “first” Serbian patriarchate was abolished in the mid-15th century, after the demise of the medieval Serbian independent state in 1459. However, one century later, in 1557, the Ottoman authorities allowed the Serbs to restore their national church, which took the name of the old Patriarchate of Peć.

During several centuries of Ottoman occupation, from the collapse of the medieval Serbian state to the First Šumadija-Serb Uprising against the Turks (in 1804), the re-established Patriarchate of Peć was the only national institution of all Serbs under Ottoman rule. This spiritual and national institu-tion lasted for two hundred years (1557−1766), during the most difficult period of Serbian history, when there was neither a national Serbian state or any Serbian national institution. However, the Patriarchate of Peć assumed the historical role of protecting Serbian national identity and national interests during the Ottoman occupation. Consequently, the patriarchate was a political representative of all Serbs in the Ottoman Empire.

Officially, according to Ottoman authorities, the Patriarchate of Peć was restored in the mid-16th century as a continuation of the medieval Serbian national church. However, in reality, it seems to have been more a new church institution of the Serbs than directly connected to the former (“first”) patriar-chate. Nevertheless, the new patriarchate accepted all the medieval traditions and the spiritual legacy of the former patriarchate.

The most important historical achievement of the “second” patriarchate was that it succeeded in legally protecting the majority of Serbs in the Otto-man Empire and influencing them in the preservation of their own national medieval heritage and Christian Orthodoxy as central to the national identity and character of the Serbs. Finally, the history and role of the revived Patriar-chate of Peć remained in the collective memory of all Serbs as the national “lighthouse” during the dark years of Ottoman occupation,67 inspiring the Serbs to persevere in their resistance to the Ottoman policy of denationaliza-tion through acceptance of Islam.68 The Islamization of the Balkan Peninsula

67 Radovan Samardžić, Usmena narodna hronika: Ogledi i prilozi (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1978). 68 The Ottoman successful policy of peaceful conversion of the Christians to Islam is best seen in the case of the Albanians and in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Today a majority of ethnic Albanians are Muslims. After four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina, almost half (43.7%) of its population are Muslim. Timothy Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 317.


during the Ottoman reign was most successful in those regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, and the Rhodopes region in Bulgaria where Christian-ity was not rooted, as it was left without a strong church organization.69

[email protected]

[email protected]

Serbs accepted Islam for two crucial reasons: (1) the feudal aristocracy from the time before the Ottoman occupation did so in order to preserve their estates and benefits; and (2) the ordinary people converted for lucrative reasons. Bataković, Kosovo i Metohija: Istorija i ideologija, 36. 69 Ibid., 33. For additional readings on the topic of this article, see Srpska pravoslavna crkva, 1219–1969: Spomenica o 750-godišnjici autokefalnosti (Belgrade: Sveti arhijerejski sinod Srpske pravoslavne crkve, 1969); Sima Ćirković, Srbi u srednjem veku (Belgrade: “Idea,” 1995); Tatjana Katić, “Serbia under the Ottoman Rule,” in “Serbien und Montenegro,” special issue, Österreichische Osthefte (Vienna) 47, no. 1–4 (2005): 145–58; and Radovan Samardžić, Beograd i Srbija u spisima francuskih savremenika: XVI−XVII vek (Belgrade: Istoriski arhiv Beograda, 1961).

Figure 1. The Serbian Empire during the reign of Stefan Dušan (1346–55)

Figure 2. The territory of the revived Patriarchate of Peć in 1557


Inventing Balkan Identities: Finding the Founding Fathers and Myths of Origin – The Montenegrin Case

Dragana LazareviÊ Cardiff University

1. Addressing National Identity in the Balkans

“To this very day ethnicity strikes many Westerners as being peculiarly re-lated to ‘all those crazy little people and languages out there,’ to the un-washed (and unwanted) of the world, to phenomena that are really not fully civilized and that are more trouble than they are worth.”1 Despite a substan-tial reservoir of Western knowledge about Southeast Europe, public debate about national policies adopted in the Balkans is “full of false dichotomies, flawed analogies, gross historical exaggerations, and well-worn shibboleths with little foundation in historical reality.”2 The national question in the Bal-kans became an explosive issue in the foreign policies of major European powers, which coincided with the creation of the first post-Ottoman Balkan states in the 19th century. The states of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bul-garia emerged in the period when the most desired state structure was a na-tion-state modeled on the great powers of Western Europe, such as Britain and France. However, discontinuity of state traditions and the acquisition of national narratives based on often incomplete material evidence from the past caused a persisting divisiveness between the new nations and states, thus giving the Balkans a notorious nickname as “the powder keg of Europe.”

The Greek national narrative, formed on ancient roots and considerable material heritage from various pre-Ottoman époques, had various degrees of support from West European intellectual circles, and as such, is excluded from this inquiry. On the other hand, the Serbs of Serbia and Montenegro and

1 Joshua A. Fishman, Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective, Multilingual Matters, no. 45 (Philadelphia and Clevedon, England: 1989), 14–15. Quoted in Robert D. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1 (italics mine). 2 Robert Donia and John V. A. Fine, Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Hurst, 1994), 3 (italics mine).

172 Dragana LazareviÊ

the Bulgars, influenced by romantic ideas related to South Slavic nationalism deriving from the intellectual circles of the Habsburg and Russian empires respectively, developed their narratives in accordance with the prevailing methods of nation-creation in those countries. While the Bulgarian national narrative relied almost exclusively on the Russian school of nation-creation, Serbian nation-creation rested predominantly on the academic inquiries of Serbian scholars from various Austrian universities. Unsurprisingly, the ter-ritorial claims and ethnic disputes between the Serbs and Bulgars that arose against the Ottomans and each other later in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century strikingly correspond to the designated spheres of influence of both empires. Throughout this period, the Bulgarian national narrative hardly changed from the one originally conceived in the second part of the 19th century. Because of that, as a case study for the analysis of nation-building in the post-Communist Balkans, Bulgaria is not an obvious example. However, the Serbian national narrative that was originally devised and maintained amongst the early-19th-century educated Serbs of the Habsburg Monarchy once transferred to the Serbian and Montenegrin principalities be-gan a process of transformation that was influenced both by the growing elites in the two Serbian states and by political circumstances within an empire that was experiencing the growth of nationalism in its many constituent nations.

Furthermore, as Austro-Hungarian advances throughout the Balkans after 1878 coincided with the growth of nationalism in the Serbian ethnic territo-ries, the nation-creation of the Serbs was affected by the political decisions of both Vienna and Belgrade. Following the complicated religious and ethnic composition of the South Slav Austrian territories, the imperial policies of Vienna rested on the attempt to divide the Serbian nation into several smaller nations and states that would be unable to function as a unified national cor-pus over the long run. Belgrade, in an attempt to defend its much weaker po-sition in relation to Vienna, endorsed the unifying narrative not only of the Serbs themselves but also of the Croats and Slovenes, eventually leading to the creation of Yugoslavia. However, up to and immediately after the First World War, the Serbian national narrative in all Serbian ethnic territories re-mained largely unaffected by the divisive theories of nation-creation intro-duced by Austro-Hungarian intellectuals promoting imperial policies in the Balkans.3 The situation changed after 1918, when the Yugoslav government

3 The most striking invention of artificial national identities was promoted in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the tenure of Benjamin von Kàllay (1882–1903) and his successors. However, the actions of Vienna were successfully repelled by Serbian intellectuals from both Serbia and Montenegro and the Serbs of Austria-Hungary. Similarly, the Croat historian Ivo Pilar (1874–1933) asserted in 1918 that the Serbs aimed at taking over both

Inventing Balkan Identities: The Montenegrin Case 173

faced political opposition from the Croats, who desired their own nation-state, and some elements of the disappointed Montenegrin elite, who withdrew sup-port for the Serbian dynasty. This was a direct consequence of the decisions made on 26 November 1918, when the Great National Assembly in Podgorica voted for unification with Serbia and effectively deposed the aged King Nikola (1860–1918, king from 1910). Nikola’s supporters, the “Greens,” fa-vored independence for Montenegro, instantaneously embracing the divisive theories developed during the Austro-Hungarian period. Those in favor of unification with Serbia, the “Whites,” maintained the traditional national narrative of Montenegro that insisted on the sameness of the Serbs in Serbia and Serbs in Montenegro.

The rift created in the aftermath of the First World War was never re-moved. Instead, it lay dormant until the Second World War and the creation of Communist Yugoslavia, when the new regime organized the state along the line of federal republics and introduced several new nations in Yugoslavia, one of which was Montenegro. However, not even the Communist scholars insisted on a separate ethnic identity of the Montenegrins. Milovan Djilas (1911–95), before his spectacular disagreement with Tito in 1954, supported the political need to award Montenegro the status of a republic. He argued that the “Montenegrins were essentially Serbs, but different from other Serbs.” Citing Njegoš, Djilas insisted that Montenegro was “a cradle of Serb-dom” and that the Montenegrins were not only the cradle of Serbdom but “the purest and the best of Serbs.” They “had different paths to statehood,” but giving them the new status “would lead to the recognition of a separate na-tion.”4 The attempt to separate Montenegro from the Serbian national core, based on the notion that two independent states have two separate national identities, failed primarily because of the strong identification with the “best of Serbdom” of the Montenegrins throughout the period of romantic national-ism of the 19th century and the common cause in both world wars of the two Serbian states. The dynastic disputes between the Serbian and Montenegrin ruling families that arose after 1918 created a persisting rift between the ad-herents of those who advocated the unified state, and thus a unified nation and national narrative, and those who supported two separate states and national identities.

Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, “ethnic Croat territories,” from the Croats. Some of his conclusions were later used for the creation of a new Montenegrin narrative that insisted on a separate identity of the Montenegrins from the Serbs. 4 Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 3 (italics mine).


From 1918 onwards, the theories of unified and separate national narra-tives were employed during the political disturbances of the 20th century. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of Yugoslav dissolution in the 1990s, a reinter-preted theory of Montenegrin national uniqueness, separate from Serbian, arose as a consequence of political events that took place both within and out-side the Balkans. These reflected the influence that modern great powers maintain over all of the Balkan states. This influence became obvious in the 1990s, when mainstream scholars in the West, following political decisions of their governments, interpreted current Serbian nationalism as primordial and presented its 19th-century features through modern perspectives.5 In its es- 5 One typical example was the 1990s misrepresentation of the Draft (Načertanije), the famous 1844 Serbian document of romantic nationalism, which was reinterpreted in modern terms as a chauvinist guideline for contemporary Serbian nationalism and as such equated with the 20th-century documents of other Yugoslav nations. For this purpose, the works of early modern Serbian scholars, contemporaries of the creation of the independent Serbian state in the 19th century, were labeled “creators of the Greater Serbian ideology.” The selective use of 19th- and early-20th-century sources became a norm in the politically engaged Western historiography of the 1990s. For example, “The Serbs All and Everywhere” (“Srbi svi i svuda”), an article by Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864) published in the revolutionary year 1849, was termed the programme for the expansionist and assimilationist policies of the Serbian principality in the 19th century, despite the explanation given by Vuk himself in the journal Pozor in 1861, which clearly showed that no such intentions ever existed. Similar treatment by modern Western scholars was given to Stojan Novaković (1842–1915), one of the most prominent Serbian historians of the late 19th and early 20th century, whose pro-Yugoslav writings were inter-preted as aggressive and expansionist Serbian policies against Austria-Hungary. Similarly, modern Serbian historians, most of whom were members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), were usually labeled “Serbian nationalists” in the 1990s, and their works were often minimized or disqualified from critical use by politically engaged Western scholars, supporters of the interventionist policies of the West. For example, Philip Cohen, a medical doctor with no knowledge of Serbo-Croatian, published in 1996 Serbia’s Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History, which incited Western governments and media to take action against Serbia, and began his narrative with negative references to the Draft. Cohen used selective documents written by 20th-century Croat nationalist writers and managed to reverse the meanings of the words Nazism, fascism, and genocide and exonerate the genocide committed against the Serbs by the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in WWII. See Philip Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History, East European Studies, bk. 2 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), 3. Similarly, Noel Malcolm, in his highly acclaimed works on Bosnia and Kosovo (Bosnia: A Short History, 1994; and Kosovo: A Short History, 1998), which were both written before the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, respectively, used a number of secondary sources written mostly by late-19th-century Austro-Hungarian historians and 20th-century Croat émigré historians close to the NDH regime of the Second World War in order to present Serbian history as ethnocentric and genocidal. In spite of mistranslations and a lack of references to primary sources, Malcolm eloquently promoted his works as an anti-communist view of history. Marko Hoare, a British scholar of Croat origin, dedicated his career to the politically charged and propagandistic


sence, such depiction of nationalism understandably served the purpose of the interventionist policies adopted by the West. However, from the academic perspective, such interpretation of the historical development of nationalism in the Balkans is unacceptable. Political changes that occurred both in Europe and in the Balkans between the beginnings of nationalism almost two centu-ries ago and its modern substitutes also reflect changes in societal and aca-demic circumstances during this period. The existence of Serbia and Monte-negro, first as independent states and then as Yugoslavia, was dictated throughout this period by decisions made primarily outside of the Balkans. Therefore, the development of nationalism in both of these countries should be examined against the historical development of nationalism itself and the academic context which introduced various interpretations of the nature of nationalism.

1.1. Interpreting Nationalism

The idea of nationalism was born in the works of the great European philoso-phers of the Enlightenment (Kant, Herder, Rousseau, and Fichte) only to be refined by 19th-century thinkers and historians such as Marx, Engels, Michelet, Renan, von Treitschke, and Lord Acton.6 Founded upon the works of these intellectuals, nationalism developed into a separate subject for aca-demic inquiry only after the First World War. The first attempts to understand the fragile and insecure political situation and subsequent ethnic conflicts in the Balkans date from this period. However, the imperfection of early theories and total absence of an academic tradition in the Balkans at the time added to the confusion in both the European scholarly approach and the development of objective indigenous academic ideas.

With the end of the Second World War, studies of nationalism became diversified with the penetration of the ideas of various disciplines, namely sociology, the political sciences, and international relations, all of which at-tempted to address the phenomenon of national identity and nation-building.7 In the last three decades of the 20th century, the ideas of feminism, gender, and cultural studies added to the academic discourse, further complicating

approach to historiography, using suggestive interpretation rather than scientific objectivism. See, for example, Hoare’s The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Saqi Books, 2007), which promotes a separate and anti-Serbian Bosniak identity, as invented in the 20th century. 6 Umut Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (London: MacMillan, 2000), 8. 7 Ibid., 9.


already imperfect theories with the proliferation of research areas. At the same time, the rise of the information society, with its powerful mass media tools, contributed to the polarization of academic views and had a particularly negative impact by creating distorted images of the Balkans.8 By the end of the 20th century , Balkan states were undergoing yet another sociopolitical transformation, which, affected by the wars in former Yugoslavia, hindered the development of a healthy academic discourse. The Balkans, therefore, became once again a convenient case study for modern academic discourse on theories of nationalism.

Regardless of the ethnic origins of the authors, nationalism in its historic setting was the most common method for addressing the ethnic and national claims of various Balkan states. However, in the 1990s this approach, accom-panied by a substantial revisionism of 19th- and early-20th-century Serbian history and historiography, was used as a justification for the creation of new Balkan nations. Thus, as new Balkan nations came into being in the wake of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the modern understanding of nationalism and nation-building processes became entangled in an academic debate that sought to include not only traditional, but also cultural, religious, political, ideological, sociological, economic, and psychological approaches, striving to preserve the current political state of affairs, albeit presented as lasting over la longue durée.

The very latest scholarly approaches to the study of nationalism in the Balkans generally tend to incorporate as many aspects of modern theories as possible, but such studies, whether written by foreign or Balkan scholars, are still based on traditional misconceptions. What is particularly disturbing in discussions of the Balkans, especially reporting and commentary on the terri-tories of former Yugoslavia published concurrent with the ethnic conflicts, is the portrayal of Balkan nations as Oriental societies prone to violence because of their cultural features.9 The arguments presented by (mostly) Western au-thors depict the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans as part of a wider civilizational

8 Quite often, non-academic publications are written in the form of academic works and contain a number of sources. However, the authors themselves frequently do not have academic backgrounds, or if they do, their research is based almost exclusively on secondary sources. This is particularly evident in the works of the journalists-turned-historians, such as the American Robert D. Kaplan, whose book Balkan Ghosts had a strong influence on American policy towards the Balkans in the 1990s. The Bulgarian-American scholar Maria Todorova demolished Kaplan’s theories, but this heated debate remained within academic circles and never reached the wider public. 9 Victor Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 2.


conflict (Islam versus Orthodox versus Catholic). A number of authors10 used their academic and media privileges to promote and justify their governments’ interventionist policies by reducing the conflicts to simplistic explanations (Bad versus Good, Barbaric versus Civilized, communist versus democratic). Furthermore, a number of studies published in recent years were heavily in-fluenced by media reports and various political agendas hidden behind the national, cultural, and socioeconomic issues. Similarly, during the period of the 1990s, academic exchange shriveled due to the wars in former Yugosla-via, while a significant part of the intellectual elite of each country involved in the conflict was employed in war propaganda. Scholars from the (mainly) Western countries that were politically involved in the conflict sought to re-new traditional national, cultural, and territorial claims or argued for new bor-ders in the aftermath of the wars of Yugoslav succession.11 In the process, academic objectivity was irretrievably lost as the complexity of Balkan na-tionalism(s) was often analyzed either from sources dating from the period of Balkan nation-creation or from those that actively endorsed perspectives of a particular side. This led to conceptual and historical inaccuracies which have inadvertently created biased views that have proven remarkably persistent in policy-making and historical discourse between the West and the Balkans.12

This work employed Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of the novelty of the na-tion. If not all nation-states worldwide were created after the French Revolu-tion, those in the Balkans certainly were, and the nation-building there coin-cided with the modernization that took place after the Ottoman departure. This state of affairs perfectly fits Hobsbawm’s conclusions. Furthermore, 10 The plethora of authors who directly participated in the formation of the new nations in the Balkans includes Robert Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, 1992), George F. Kennan (“Introduction” to The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment, 1993), Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations, 1993), and Noel Malcolm (Bosnia: A Short History, 1994; and Kosovo: A Short History, 1998), to mention only the most prominent. Needless to say, the majority of modern postgraduate courses in Western academic institutions feature curricula based on works derived from those of these authors. 11 See, for example, James Pettifer and Miranda Vickers, The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 12 Maria Todorova in her brilliant analysis Imagining the Balkans, published in 1997, summarized Western attitudes towards the Balkans: “(there is) an enduring evolutionary belief in the superiority of orderly [European] civilization over barbarity, archaic predispositions, backwardness, squabbles, uncomforming and unpredictable behaviour—tribalism.” The notion of tribalism, she continues, relegates the Balkans to a lower civilizational category, which is in itself “intrinsically passive, incompatible, and imitative in nature.” This perception enables the maintenance of imperial principles towards the Balkans and “releases the civilized world from any responsibility or empathy that it might otherwise bestow on more reasonable people.” Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 185.


since the modernization of the Balkans meant accepting the then ruling Euro-pean societal principles, Balkan nationalisms can be viewed as imported goods. This said, nationalism in the Balkans was not only a novel product of 19th-century modernization—it was accepted by the Balkan peoples before they had time to achieve political maturity and understanding of the European system of values. The changes brought by the 20th century did not contribute to the political and national consolidation of the majority of the Balkan states. Consequently, the present nation-building processes that are yet again under-taken under the tutelage of Western academia show conceptual flaws, as modern academic discourse neglects perhaps the most important aspect of the dynamics of Balkan nation-state-building: the concept of time. For this pur-pose, I propose that the building of the national identity and nation-state in each Balkan state should be analyzed against given political circumstances at a given specific time when these processes were taking place.

1.2. The Tradition of Inventing Traditions

Used in modern terms, the grand narratives of the 19th century would seem terribly dated had they not been reinterpreted for modern political aims.13 These aims are mainly orientated towards breaking with the practices and ide-ologies established during the communist period, even though the current state borders are predominantly the result of precisely that period. The present-day creation of the new nations of the Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Bosniaks has redeployed 19th-century methods of nation-building, only now the process is much faster, as literacy levels are high and state institu-tions such as schools, universities, and mass media are easily accessible to the population. Similarly, the involvement of foreign academics in constructing or demolishing the existing narratives has accelerated the process of nation-building by supporting the reinterpretation of grand narratives and arguing for the rights of ethnic self-identification, as a consequence of the postwar democratization of the Balkan states.

The democratization of the postwar Balkan states, it is often argued, serves the purpose of rebuilding the said state and promotes the development of individual perceptions of ethnic pride. In other words, ethnicity cannot exist without the awareness of it,14 but neither can it exist without constant re-minders from the state. This can be seen in the constant rewriting of education 13 See n. 5. 14 John V. A. Fine, When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans: A Study of Identity in Pre-Nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 25.


syllabi in the late 20th century, containing quite opposing arguments of the origins of the Balkan nations. The general characteristic of each of these nar-ratives is the use of the primordialistic approach when discussing its own history of statehood, while at the same time neighboring narratives are inter-preted in modernistic terms, that is, as novel and lacking in continuity. The tendency to draw a visible demarcation line between neighboring nations within the contemporary state borders, and vice versa, to make them opaque and fluid, in accordance with the political programmes of the governing elites, is a postmodernistic approach often labeled as “banal nationalism.”15 This is particularly visible among the newly created Balkan nations, which, aware of the fragility of their own claims on national territories based on ethnic self-identification, attempt to portray themselves as the “victims” of older Balkan nation-states. Ironically, their version(s) of nation-building as a contemporary invention is at its core aggressive and exclusive, despite the rhetoric empha-sizing the multiculturalism imposed by the officials of the European Union. This is best expressed through the notion of the reinvented “grand historic narratives” by the arguably skilled manipulation of the sources and material evidence in the territory of the contemporary states, and all that for the pur-pose of obtaining and retaining desired national territories. Equally, as the mutual intelligibility of the South Slav language group appears to be a hin-drance in creating a new national identity, the state institutions in the newly created states support the deliberate construction of new languages associated with the state territories.16

Governing elites and politically engaged intellectuals insist on the uniqueness of the character of the national culture by interpreting the grand narratives in a nationally favorable manner. The intelligibility of these inter-pretations for the majority of the population is usually achieved through repe-tition and reduction of the academic language to the language of mass media and popular culture. The emphasis on national culture and a unique identity

15 Michael Billig, quoted in Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, 203. 16 The Bosniak language, modeled on von Kàllay’s principles, was introduced in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993, during the civil war. The Montenegrin language was introduced as a separate language in 2002, echoing the start of the campaign for independence. The interna-tional community supported the division of the language along ethnic lines throughout the wars in former Yugoslavia, until the world economic crisis started in 2007. The U.S. administration, on account of budget cuts, among other requirements, then recommended the fusion of the Balkan language group, as it was considered to be “one language with several dialects,” thus making the whole campaign of language division illogical and full of contradictions. M. Sretenović, “Američke diplomate o srpsko-hrvatskom jeziku,” 16 February 2011, Politika Online, http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/Kultura/Americke-diplomate-o-srpsko-hrvatskom-jeziku. sr.html (accessed 16 February 2011).


separate from those of neighboring states is expressed through the names and symbols of the most important national cultural institutions, as well as through the design of public displays at national museums and galleries. At the same time, the erection of monuments visually embodying adopted national symbols and celebrating accepted national heroes, and the use of the pre-national heritage, most notably of prehistoric and ancient archaeological sites, increases the populace’s sense of belonging to a particular area.17 These traditional methods of creating a national identity and building a nation-state have been analyzed by a number of scholars in the past. However, it is rea-sonable to argue that the contemporary creation of new nations in the Balkans has little to do with the “democratic valuation of the past” but with political discourse, which might have negative consequences in the future. Smith criti-cized this method as particularly dangerous, as imposing “retrospective nationalism onto communities and cultures whose identities and loyalties are local, regional, and religious, but barely national”18 might prove to be disastrous for the people living in the Balkans.

2. The Montenegrin Case – Finding a Foundation Myth

The invention of new nations in the Balkans as a consequence of the wars of Yugoslav succession represents a finalization of the process that began in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Communist regime in Yugo-slavia, in order to curb the Serbo-Croat dichotomy in the federation, intro-duced three new nations: the Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Muslims. The construction of the Montenegrin national identity as an ongoing state enter-prise is of particular interest as it gives an excellent insight into the circumstances surrounding the decision to begin the whole process.

While 19th-century nation-building is understood to be a consequence of cultural movements occurring in the romantic era, it can be argued that the creation of the new identities after 1945 is an exclusively political construct caused by the transformation of the previous Yugoslav state. This said, during the wars of Yugoslav succession the primary focus of the international par-ticipants was on Serbian nationalism, while the Montenegrins were perceived

17 Of these, the most striking are attempts to prove the ancient origins of the modern Macedonian nation through its links with the ancient kingdom of Macedonians, or the claim that the Croats are not of Slavic but of Iranian origin, or that of the Albanian attempts to prove that the vernacular architecture of Albania influenced the Ottoman conquerors during the Middle Ages. 18 Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.


as indistinguishable from the Serbian national corpus. This was fully under-standable, as until 1945 there was no separately recognized Montenegrin nation. Although between 1878 and 1918 an independent Montenegrin state was internationally recognized, its language, history, religion, and culture were considered unquestionably Serbian, primarily because the Montenegrin elite considered itself Serbian. With the dynastic rift in 1918, attempts to separate Montenegrins from the rest of the Serbs were made with equal diligence by both the Communists and Croat nationalist émigrés. The former developed the notion of “Montenegrins as special Serbs,” but neither this notion nor the creation of a separate Montenegrin nation in 1945 could alter the traditional ethnic identification. A Communist attempt to create an independent Montenegrin Orthodox Church, separate from the Serbian Patri-archate, as had already been done in Macedonia, failed spectacularly, as the majority of the Belgrade political elite were of Montenegrin origin and regarded themselves as “quintessentially Serbian” and were thus unwilling to execute a complete nation-division.19 On the other hand, the notion of Monte-negrins as “Red Croats” appeared among some Croat émigré historians in the mid-20th century.20 This premise was based on old Austro-Hungarian theories that all territories west of the Drina River belonged to the Catholic sphere of influence. As Orthodoxy became closely associated with Serbian national identity, the only Catholic Slavs who could conform to this idea were the Croats.21 However, this attempt also failed, as the Croat emigration was considered anti-Communist and anti-Yugoslav, thus making the use of this argument politically difficult during the existence of Communist Yugoslavia.

The general condemnation of Serbia in the 1990s and the crippling eco-nomic situation divided the politicians in the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, in relation to the future of the state. Being regarded as a junior partner in the Serbian political spectrum and equally affected by the wars, the Podgorica

19 Elizabeth Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro (London: Hurst, 2007), 3. 20 Of these, the most important was a book entitled Red Croatia, published in 1957 by a Croat émigré historian, Dominik Mandić (1889–1973). Relying on older ideas of Ivo Pilar and other Croats loyal to the Austro-Hungarian regime, Mandić developed the idea of Montenegrins as the “purest and best of the Croats.” Today, this argument is not used in Montenegro as such, but the notion of Catholic features in early Montenegro is deployed as one of the main tools for shaping a new Montenegrin identity. 21 The Croat national movement within Austria-Hungary was never as strong as the Hungarian, and as such was supported by Vienna, which aimed to counterbalance the interests of Budapest. Hence, the limited Viennese support for Croat nationalism was seen by Croats loyal to the Habsburg regime as liberating, civilizational, and democratic. On the other hand, the Yugoslav idea was considered Oriental, anti-Croat, and despotic.


government adopted policies to distinguish itself from Serbia. This resulted in the swift (re)construction of the Montenegrin ethnic identity, which is not only separate from Serbian but in total denial of it. The split among the politi-cal elite in Montenegro in 1997 was quickly transferred to all parts of society, particularly affecting the Orthodox population of the republic, now divided between those who still wanted closer ties with Serbia and those who were passionately against it. Quoting a sociologist from Montenegro, Srdjan Darmanović, Elizabeth Roberts adopted a view on Montenegrin identity as that of a national homo duplex, “a victim of double or divided consciousness,” caused by the shared Serbian-Montenegrin identity, until recently conferred by language and religion.22

Lacking easy access to the rest of the Balkan Peninsula, of limited agri-cultural potential and poor in mineral resources, Montenegro is not strategi-cally important to the modern Great Powers, unlike much larger Croatia or Serbia. However, its overland link with Serbia is an invaluable sea access for Serbia through the important port of Bar. Serbia expressed its strategic inter-est towards the sea on several occasions during the 20th century with only partial success. With the separation of Montenegro, Serbia found itself once again without a safe trade route. Therefore, Montenegro’s importance in re-gional geopolitics is to enable or impede Serbian access to the Adriatic Sea. As the Montenegrins were always regarded as “highlander Serbs,” the prob-lem of territoriality is therefore closely related to the severing of links with Serbia. This could be achieved only by reinterpreting the historical narrative, supplementing it with a politically acceptable construct, in order to create an entirely new Montenegrin identity, hostile to its Serbian past.

The first postwar constitution, drafted principally by the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s chief Communist theorist and Politburo member, was based on the premise that the “Greater Serbianism” of Karađorđević Yugoslavia had to be suppressed at any cost. Concurrently with the debate over the borders of the new federal republic, the issue of a separate Montenegrin identity arose, causing a rift within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.23 Despite the fact that the majority of the Partisan army consisted of Bosnian and Montenegrin Serbs and 36% of all Partisan generals were of Montenegrin origin,24 the political leadership, which mainly consisted of Croat and Slovene Com-munists, proclaimed a new Montenegrin nation, much to the dismay of the Serbian members of the Politburo. In the first postwar census, conducted in 22 Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain, 6. 23 Ibid., 397–401. 24 Živko Andrijašević and Šerbo Rastoder, The History of Montenegro: From Ancient Times to 2003 (Podgorica: Diaspora Center, 2006), 227.


1948, the new Montenegrin nation numbered just over 340,000 people.25 Interestingly, all subsequent censuses, including the final Yugoslav census in 1991, witnessed serious fluctuations in the ethnic composition of the tiny re-public: the percentage of those who declared themselves Montenegrins within the republic dropped from 90% in 1948 down to 62% in 1991 and 43% in 2003 in favor of those who regarded themselves as Serbs.26 In all these cen-suses the official language was Serbo-Croatian during the existence of federal Yugoslavia and Serbian from 1993 until 2002.

The present population of Montenegro is just over 620,000 people. Ac-cording to the 2003 census the ethnic composition was 43% Montenegrin, 32% Serbian, 8% Bosniak, 5% Albanian, and 12% others.27 However, in 2002 the authorities in Montenegro introduced a new official language, Montene-grin, which was, in the first census of 2003, spoken by 22% of the population of the republic. In the same census, 63% of the population spoke Serbian. The latest census data of 2011, however, showed a dramatic fall in the percentage of Serbs in the overall population of Montenegro, which did not show any significant demographic change, still numbering around 620,000 people: Montenegrins (45%), Serbs (28%), Bosniak/Muslim Slavs (12%), and Alba-nians (5%). At the same time, the languages spoken by the Montenegrin citi-zens were Montenegrin (37%), Serbian (43%), and Bosnian (5%). According to the same census, nearly 5% of the overall population refused to declare their nationality.28

This sharp change in the ethnic structure of Montenegro is the result of a systematic effort by the Montenegrin government in the past 15 years to forge a new Slavic nation in the Balkans. In order to achieve this goal, the Montenegrin government, led by former President and Prime Minister Milo Đukanović (in power since 1991), adopted the programme of the newly es-tablished Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts, which sought to promote an alternative version of national history that describes the Montenegrins as a Slavic nation separate from other South Slavs and direct descendants of the

25 Miloš Blagojević, et al., Istorijski atlas (Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva/ “Geokarta,” 1997), 91. 26 “Popisi u Crnoj Gori od 1909. do 2003.,” Princip, February 2004, available at History of Montenegro Online, http://www.njegos.org/census/princip.jpg (accessed 5 May 2012). 27 Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications /the-world-factbook/geos/mj.html (accessed 5 May 2012). 28 Statistical Office of Montenegro (Monstat), “Popis stanovništva, domaćinstava i stanova u Crnoj Gori 2011. godine,” 12 July 2011, http://www.monstat.org/userfiles/file/popis2011/saops tenje/saopstenje(1).pdf (accessed 5 May 2012).


mixed Illyrian, Roman, and Slav population that inhabited the territory of present Montenegro in ancient and medieval times.

2.1. The Doclean Narrative – The Myth of Origin and a Founding Father

Doclea, in its Slav version Duklja, was the name of the ancient city whose ruins lie just outside Podgorica. In antiquity the territory was inhabited by the Illyrian tribe Docleatae, although Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus claims that the town itself was founded by the Roman Emperor Diocletian but was by his time deserted and the surrounding territory under Byzantine rule.29 The Ser-bian tribes listed by Porphyrogenitus include Zachlumi, Terbounites, and Kanalites (living in the territory of modern Herzegovina and western Bosnia), and also Pagani/Arentani, who lived in Dalmatia.30 For Doclea, the former territory of the Romanized Illyrians and Roman veterans settled by Diocletian, Porphyrogenitus gives no tribal identity: “(Diocleia) … was repopulated in the time of Heraclius the emperor, just as were Croatia and Serbia and the country of the Zachlumi and Terbounia and the country of Kanali.”31

Based on the geographical and etymological derivatives of Greek origin in Porphyrogenitus’s description, all medievalists thus far have concluded that the Slavic tribes around the ancient Doclea, being surrounded by the Serbian tribes of Zachlumi, Terbounites, and Kanalites, were actually Serbs.32 Even if the ethnic characteristics of the early Slavs around the ancient Doclea are left open to discussion, the later self-identification of the Montenegrins with the Serbs and their insistence, particularly from the early 18th century, on be-longing to the Serbian national corpus point to this conclusion. However, the rewritten history that is currently being promoted by some Montenegrin histo-rians and their Western counterparts relies exclusively on interpretation rather than on material evidence. A typical example of this new interpretation is found in the History of Montenegro by Živko Andrijašević (Montenegrin) and Šerbo Rastoder (a Montenegrin Muslim), which provides a link between

29 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae/Dumbarton Oaks Texts, vol. 1, ed. Gyula Moravcsik, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks/Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967), 35; Florin Curta, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 210. 30 Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, 35, 36. 31 Ibid., 35.7–9. 32 This is certainly the view expressed by John V. A. Fine, author of the seminal 20th-century work on the medieval Balkans in the English language. See John V. A. Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans (1983; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 53.


modern Montenegro and that of the seventh century. The choice of words is revealing:

As Constantine Porphyrogenitus did not supply any data about the ethnic origin of Docleans, it may be assumed that he viewed them as a separate ethnic group, just like the Serbs or Croats. Unlike the Do-cleans, Porphyrogenitus ascribes Serb origins to all other Slavic tribes named after a notion or toponym…. Constantine Porphyrogenitus may not have known the real ethnic origins of the Docleans, but he obviously did not regard them as Serbs or Croats, for otherwise he would have put them into one of the two groups…. Irrespective of all these controversies over their ethnic origin, by setting up a state, founding a dynasty, and developing an awareness of their political distinctness, in historical terms, the Docleans unequivocally man-aged to distinguish themselves from all other tribes and ethnic groups surrounding them.33 Despite the probabilistic terminology used by the new Montenegrin histo-

rians in order to connect their modern identity to an early Doclean, that is, separate identity, there are no indications that there was any firm state struc-ture in Doclea prior to the end of the 10th century, when the Doclean princes joined the Byzantine-Bulgarian wars in the time of Samuil (976–1014). The existence of Doclean princes and later kings in the 11th century was recorded by another primary source used for the creation of the Doclean narrative—The Chronicle of the Priest of Doclea, a highly unreliable source, “long dismissed as a collection of fact and fiction, especially in relation to the coverage of ear-lier periods.”34 The problem of the manuscript is that the events and personali-ties are artificially linked by often invented characters and that the author fre-quently did not differentiate the Serbs from the Croats.35 Similarly, as the manuscript contains no dates, some of the rulers have abnormally long reigns,

33 Andrijašević and Rastoder, History of Montenegro, 10 (emphasis mine). 34 Curta, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 14. 35 Numerous studies of the manuscript appeared from the early 19th century, the majority pointing to the incompleteness of the text and overall confusion of the events and personalities described. As the Slavic original did not survive, its later Latin translation consists of three main parts: the Croatian Chronicle (Libellus Gothorum), which links the Croats to the Goths; the hagiography of St. John Vladimir; and the third, written as a history of Serbian rulers in Zeta. See Slavko Mijušković, Ljetopis popa Dukljanina (Belgrade: Prosveta/Srpska književna zadruga, 1988), 22. The text of the Chronicle within this work was quoted as the Chronicle, while the explanations were quoted as Mijušković’s work.


or the rulers from different epochs coincide with each other.36 For these rea-sons, a number of scholars regarded the manuscript more as a literary than a historical document.

The central link for the creation of a new Montenegrin national identity in the Chronicle of the Priest of Doclea37 is the character of John Vladimir (c. 990–1016), now regarded as a founding father of the Doclean, that is, Monte-negrin nation. The only reference to his ethnic origin given in the manuscript is his Serbian (Raškan) descent through his father Petrislav (his existence was not confirmed either by the contemporary Byzantine sources or archaeology), who ruled Zeta before the Bulgarian expansion under Samuil.38

In the Doclean narrative, however, John Vladimir is described as the prince of Doclea, whose realm incorporated the territory between the Bojana River and Boka Kotorska,39 the Adriatic Coast and the upper valley of the Morača River, which conveniently corresponds to the modern territory of Montenegro.40 There is no mention whatsoever about the Serbian origin of John Vladimir. This omission serves to further expand the narrative about a separate Montenegrin identity, as John Vladimir, after his execution in 1016 in Prespa by the Bulgarian tsar John Vladislav (1015–18), became the first Slavic saint to be venerated throughout Orthodox Christianity. His cult was celebrated by all Orthodox churches that gained autocephaly after 1204, but the new narrative insists on the fact that the Serbian Orthodox Church main-tains stronger cults of the Nemanjić saint kings. In order to distinguish St. John Vladimir from the Serbian Orthodoxy, the Doclean narrative concludes that “Vladimir’s sainthood did not suit the future Nemanjić rulers.”41 In real-ity, after the eponymous Kosovo Battle the cult of Prince Lazar, with the ex-ception of the cult of St. Sava, superseded all other cults within the Serbian Orthodox Church, but the cult of John Vladimir was never lost. The conse-quences of this statement, coined a few years ago, in a subtle way enable the 36 For example, in the first part of the Chronicle, the King of the Ostrogoths, Totila, coincides with the Emperor Anastasius. 37 The two editions of the Chronicle of the Priest of Doclea used here are the aforementioned 1988 text by Dr. Slavko Mijušković (1912–89), former Director of Archives in Kotor, and the 1971 edition by Dr. Nikola Banašević (1895–1992), a professor of Classics at Belgrade University: Ljetopis popa Dukljanina i narodna predanja (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1971). The reason for this is that the two academics conducted heated debates over the fine nuances of translation of the Latin manuscript. However, both of them considered the story of John Vladimir to belong to Serbian historiography. 38 Chronicle, XXIV–XXXVI. 39 Bay of Kotor, Bocche di Cattaro. 40 Andrijašević and Rastoder, History of Montenegro, 11. 41 Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain, 54.


construction of a new theory which, by insisting on the non-Serbian identity of John Vladimir, proceeds to the claim that the subsequent rulers of Doclea, the Vojisavljević dynasty (1034–1186), were not Serbian.

According to the Chronicle, the first Vojisavljević, Stefan Vojislav (1040–43),42 was John Vladimir’s nephew, while his mother was a princess of Raška (Chronicle, XXXVII). Even if the Priest of Doclea invented this, the claim of his Serbian ethnicity was given in contemporary Byzantine authors such as Keukamenos, Zonaras, Cedrenus, and John Skylitzes. However, the new History of Montenegro ignores these sources and simply terms the Voji-slavljević dynasty Doclean—Montenegrin.43 This new narrative asserts that the Doclean rulers’ receipt of the royal insignia from the pope around 1078 and their exercise of power over all other Serbian lands that were Orthodox confirmed their Catholic, that is, ethnic Doclean identity. Outlining the reli-gious affiliation of the Doclean kings serves two objectives. Firstly, it should confirm the existence of a separate ethnic Doclean identity. Secondly, it le-gitimizes the assertion that the Serbs in Montenegro are the conquerors who attempted to destroy the Montenegrin nation.

This oversimplified version of the turbulent events of the 11th century was not put into the context of the regional politics at the time. Of these, par-ticularly important was the changing religious affiliation of the Slavic aristoc-racy. Both Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy were exercising their influence on the local lords, and, depending on which was ascendant at the time, they would swear allegiance to one or the other. The papal recognition of the Doclean kings implies their Catholic allegiance at that time. However, the return of Byzantium under the Comneni dynasty reinstalled Orthodoxy in the Balkans, which was also reasserted in another Serbian land—the Grand Principality of Raška.

According to Andrijašević, the Raškan influence over the Doclean king-dom was a result of conquest by the alien Nemanjić Serbs at the end of the 12th century:

Stefan Nemanja entered Doclea not as a hereditary ruler but as a con-queror. His biographers’ claims that he was related to the Doclean dynasty and that he occupied Doclea as their legitimate descendant and heir were merely an attempt to give legitimacy to his invasion. The Doclean dynasty he allegedly belonged to was banished, and the

42 In the Chronicle Vojislav is referred to as Dobroslav, while all Byzantine authors call him Stefan Vojislav. 43 Andrijašević and Rastoder, History of Montenegro, 14–17.


towns he came to take over as his inheritance were the first to be demolished.44

This claim ignores the family ties between the Houses of Nemanjić and Voji-slavljević, recorded in the Chronicle and several later biographies of Stefan Nemanja written by his sons,45 Stefan the First-Crowned (1199–1228) and St. Sava, in the early 13th century, as well as Domentian of Hilandar, finished in 1264, in the Serbian redaction of the Old Church Slavonic. In the version written by Nemanja’s son Stefan, the first king of the Nemanjić dynasts, Ne-manja was born in Ribnica46 and baptized according to the Catholic rite.47 All three biographies assert that “Zeta was the fatherland and the first kingdom” of Stefan Nemanja, which was later confirmed by its special status: all Ne-manjić heirs to the throne bore the title “The Prince of Zeta”—similar to the title “Prince of Wales,” borne by English male heirs to the throne. Renaming Doclea Zeta occurred gradually. Zeta was originally one župa (a baronial es-tate) within the Doclean kingdom. The term itself was first used by the Byz-antine historian Keukamenos in 1080.48 When the Nemanjić took over the suzerainty, the whole territory of Doclea was being referred to as Zeta, based on the most important territory that belonged to the crown. The Doclean nar-rative argues that the Nemanjić invaders “stripped the formal status of king-dom from Doclea,” acquiring the crown for themselves, and renamed Doclea Zeta.49 Again, there are neither explanations nor references for this claim in the new History of Montenegro.

In order to strengthen the belief in the 2006 version of the history of Montenegro, all medieval writers who were studied within the literature and history curricula in schools throughout Montenegro were officially removed

44 Ibid., 16. 45 The biographies of Stefan Nemanja by Stefan the First-Crowned used here are a 1970 edition by Dragoljub Pavlović in the series Old Serbian Literature in One Hundred Books: Sveti Sava, Život Stefana Nemanje, trans. Milivoje Vašić, Stara srpska književnost u sto knjiga, bk. 1 (Novi Sad: Matica srpska; Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1970); and a 1988 edition by Liljana Juhas-Georgievska in the series Old Serbian Literature in 24 Books: Stefan Prvovenčani, Sabrani spisi, Stara srpska književnost u 24 knjige, bk. 3 (Belgrade: Prosveta/Srpska književna zadruga, 1988). 46 Today a suburb of Podgorica. 47 Stefan Prvovenčani, “Život svetog Simeona,” in Sabrani spisi, 64. 48 Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 212. 49 Andrijašević and Rastoder, History of Montenegro, 17.


from the textbooks in September 2011.50 They were replaced by the local 20th- and 21st-century authors, adherents to the Doclean version of history, or Catholic Renaissance poets from the coastal towns, who wrote in Italian and Latin.

2.2. Towards a New Montenegrin Reality

In 1993 the Liberal Alliance of Montenegro, a minor political party in favor of independence, together with some representatives of the NGO sector, gath-ered in the old capital Cetinje and established the Montenegrin Orthodox Church. The same political party, supported by the pro-Catholic and pro-Muslim members of the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, founded in 1998 a separate Academy of Sciences and Arts called the Doclean Acad-emy of Sciences and Arts, aiming to promote the Doclean narrative separate from the Serbian. Since popular support for an independent church, language, and state was lacking at the time, the activities surrounding the Montenegrin church remained dormant until the early 2000s, when an open call for the re-establishment of an independent Montenegro prompted a heated debate on all issues regarding national identity, revealing in the process deep divisions within Montenegrin society. As a significant number of Montenegrins still consider themselves ethnic Serbs, the Orthodox population split between those who still preferred the union with Serbia and those who were passionately against it.

By 1998, a new historical narrative was being formulated. The new nar-rative finally emerged as The History of Montenegro by Živko Andrijašević and Šerbo Rastoder, both members of the Doclean Academy. It was published and widely distributed in 2006, the year that Montenegro seceded from Ser-bia. In the same period, English-speaking authors undertook the task of sup-porting and promoting this new version of the history of Montenegro, its peo-ple and identity. A significant example is the book by a former diplomat, Elizabeth Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro, published in London in 2007. Her work reaffirms attempts to introduce a new country and its history into the family of European nations and as such is the first base for future foreign academics researching the subject. This general historical overview offered to English-speaking readers was quickly followed by Kenneth Morrison’s Montenegro: A Modern History, which concentrated on contemporary Montenegrin events. In the words of Roberts: 50 “CG: Nestaju srpski pisci iz knjiga,” Večernje novosti, 3 March 2012, available at http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2012&mm=03&dd=03&nav_category=167&nav_id=587676 (accessed 15 May 2012).


Very little has been written exclusively on Montenegro by non-Mon-tenegrins. This book attempts to fill a gap by offering a consecutive general history…. Covering such a long period inevitably required reliance on secondary sources where these exist and recognition of the lack of detailed knowledge at other times.51 As the majority of new narratives written by Western authors advocating

the creation of new nations in the Yugoslav successor states aim to re-inter-pret the past and place it in the context of the 1990s wars of Yugoslav succes-sion, it is reasonable to argue that this serves the realpolitik of contemporary Great Powers involved in regional Balkan politics. The validity of this argu-ment can be tested by comparing the historical and archaeological sources used by Western historians supporting the creation of new nations. It is indic-ative that the majority of these historians rarely include primary sources and the 19th-century secondary sources written in Serbo-Croatian. Instead, they rely heavily on media and documents written in the latter part of the 20th century.

As Smith pointed out, every national grand narrative requires the exist-ence of “myths of origin” and “founding fathers of the nation.” In the Monte-negrin case, a founding myth was obtained by the selective reading of the two major primary sources from the medieval pre-Nemanjić period: De Admin-istrando Imperio of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, written in the 10th century, and the Chronicle of the Priest of Doclea, written by an anonymous monk in the 13th century. Of these two documents De Administrando Imperio is considered more reliable, due to the completeness of the manuscript. On the other hand, the Chronicle of the Priest of Doclea is regarded as an early work written by an ethnic Slav. Archaeology is unhelpful in corroborating these manuscripts, as the field research related to the 8th to 12th centuries is “noto-riously underdeveloped.”52 It is precisely the ambiguity of the two sources and insufficient archaeological research that enabled the promoters of the new Montenegrin national identity to develop a theory which asserts that the Montenegrins are a separate Slav group entering the Balkans in the sixth to seventh centuries. According to this argument, the ancestors of modern Montenegrins are a product of mixing with Romanized Illyrians and Albani-ans, which created a unique identity—separate from all other South Slavs.

51 Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain, xiv (emphasis mine). 52 Curta, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 211.


2.3. Material Evidence Confirming(?) a Separate Montenegrin Identity

Because the existing written sources prove disputable, the Doclean narrative sought reliance on the material heritage: ancient and early medieval sites in Montenegro. A problem arose immediately, as the urban characteristics of the post-Roman territory inhabited by the Slavs from the 6th to 7th centuries were only partially researched. As the University of Montenegro still has no Archaeology Department and all Montenegrin archaeologists to date were graduates from (mainly) Belgrade or Zagreb universities, it can be expected that future research in Montenegro will take place gradually and with approved international support. To bridge this gap, the Montenegrin government created a Montenegrin Center for Conservation and Archaeology in July 2011, with offices in Cetinje and Kotor.53 However, work done during the existence of Yugoslavia underlined major differences in the heritage studies in Montenegro. Firstly, there is a general division between the archaeology and architecture of the coastal towns and the interior. Secondly, the coastal towns once under the Venetians—Kotor, Bar, Budva, and Herceg Novi, to mention the most important ones—have been better preserved and possess solid archives. Admittedly, the catastrophic earthquakes of 1563 and 1667 annihilated the early medieval architecture of the coastal areas, and the rebuilding that took place following this devastation was executed under Venetian influence, giving these coastal towns unmistakably Italian Renais-sance and baroque features. Thus, early medieval monuments survive in fragments.

On the other hand, the heritage of the interior surviving to this day bears either Nemanjić features in the ecclesiastical buildings or the modified urban features of the Ottoman period. As there are no readily available data on the medieval urban structures in the interior due to the lack of evidence and insuf-ficient research, the initial archaeological classification, done primarily by Belgrade researchers, managed to date the earliest urban settlements to the time of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. However, between the Porphyrogenitus and Nemanjić periods, most towns in the interior were subject to major alterations and changes.54 Better-preserved architectural heritage in the Montenegrin interior dates from the late 12th century and is ecclesiastical. The best-preserved examples of the churches and monasteries

53 “Odluka o organizovanju Javne ustanove centar za konzervaciju i arheologiju Crne Gore,” Službeni list Crne Gore, no. 47 (23 September 2011), http://www.sluzbenilist.me/PravniAkt Detalji.aspx?tag={F6027EA2-6462-465E-957A-E123BB43F8FB} (accessed 5 May 2012). 54 Siniša Mišić, ed., Leksikon gradova i trgova srednjovekovnih srpskih zemalja: Prema pisanim izvorima (Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike, 2010), 12.


belong to the Raška School, such as the Morača Monastery (1252), and unequivocally coincide with the Nemanjić period. As the Raška School itself was a fusion of the Catholic and Orthodox influences that flourished under the early Nemanjić kings, who also showed tendencies towards changing their religious affiliations, it can be argued that the combination of Catholic and Orthodox elements in ecclesiastical architecture reflects the political ambigu-ity of the rulers rather than prescribed methods of building. But even this argument is an interpellation from the modern perspective, as it is widely accepted that the sense of national identity and nationalism did not exist prior to the 19th century. The Doclean narrative, however, uses interpellation for its hypothesis of the symbiotic Romanesque-Gothic style autochthonous to Montenegro by examining the ruins of the medieval monasteries in southern Montenegro and northern Albania around Lake Skadar.55 Insisting exclusively on “Serbian demolition of the 13th century,” the Doclean narrative supports its claim of “deliberate destruction of Doclean identity” in the context of the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia, when the destruction of religious objects was a primary tool for removing the traces of national identities in warring areas. Insisting on the exclusively Catholic character of the Doclean kings, without putting this character into the context of Catholic-Orthodox relations in the 11th century, endorses the modern differentiation of the Montenegrins from Serbs. Since the archaeology so far has been unable to locate and con-firm the existence of large numbers of Catholic churches and monasteries beyond the coast, the Doclean narrative explains this by the destruction that occurred after the Ottoman conquest.56

2.4. Becoming Doclean

After Montenegro declared independence from Serbia in 2006, the Doclean narrative, devised in the 1998–2006 period, received great publicity, both in Montenegro itself and in Western academic circles. Since the new narrative

55 One such example of imposed interpretations is related to the ruins of St. Sergio and Vakh Church, south of Skadar, which changed its use several times over the centuries. The new explanation insists that “the previously Benedictine Monastery suffered certain alterations in the 13th century” (Andrijašević and Rastoder, The History of Montenegro, 30). In reality, the site had been known as a holy ground since late antiquity and was demolished and rebuilt several times over the centuries. It was rebuilt in 1290 by Queen Helen of Anjou, the French wife of King Uroš I, on the site of the medieval port, whose remains had sunk into the river over the centuries. Finally demolished by the Ottomans in the 16th century, the ruins were first described by the Russian consul Jasterbov in the late 19th century, which the Doclean narrative barely mentions. 56 Ibid.


was still in its early days, the existence of a separate Montenegrin nation had yet to be confirmed by the existence of a separate language.

In 1993, the establishment of Matica crnogorska57 traced the path for the invention of the separate ethnic origins of the Montenegrins:

Matica was needed in Montenegro because we considered ourselves to have our own country yet we had no such organization. The official government in Montenegro threw their lot in with Serbia completely. Also, there had been a suggestion that the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts would be merged into the Serbian Academy. So we formed Montenegrin Matica as a resistance to that.58

As Matica crnogorska was modeled on Matica srpska and Matica hrvatska, which are both supreme cultural institutions in Serbia and Croatia concerned with language, an argument for a separate and “unique” Montenegrin lan-guage was devised as the right of every nation to have and call its own language what it wants.59

For this purpose, on the requirement of the Montenegrin Ministry of Edu-cation in 2008, members of the Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts and Matica crnogorska developed a new Montenegrin language and orthography. Vuk’s language and orthography, used both in Serbia and Montenegro since 1868, was replaced by a new alphabet. Instead of 30 letters, it added two new graphemes as separate signs for minor dialectological differences.60 As in Ser-bian, the new alphabet retained the duality, and it can be written in both Cy-rillic and Latin scripts. But this is only declarative. According to Kenneth Morrison, “ethnic Montenegrins and Montenegrin minorities” prefer the use of Latinic script.61 This argument directly corresponds to the new Doclean identity based on the Catholic, that is, Latin tradition of the coastal area.62 57 Matica literally means “Queen Bee,” but it refers to her role as the matriarch of the society. 58 Marko Špadijer, quoted in Kenneth Morrison, Montenegro: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 113. 59 Dušan Ičević, Crnogorska nacija, Forum za etničke odnose (Belgrade: Evropa Press, 1998), quoted in Morrison, Montenegro: A Modern History, 113. 60 Ministarstvo prosvjete i nauke [Ministry of Education and Science], Pravopis crnogorskoga jezika i rječnik crnogorskoga jezika (Podgorica: Ministarstvo prosvjete i nauke, 2009), 6, available at http://www.gov.me/files/1248442673.pdf. 61 Morrison, Montenegro: A Modern History, 210. 62 Furthermore, this argument is in accordance with the Western interest of separating Montenegro from Serbia, so evident since the beginning of the wars of Yugoslav succession. Morrison is yet another of those “engaged scholars” who base their writings on contemporary rather than primary sources.


Indeed, the compilers of the new orthography are linguists from very inter-esting backgrounds: Dr. Milenko Perović, a declared Montenegrin, until re-cently of the University of Novi Sad (Vojvodina, Serbia), Dr. Josip Silić of the University of Zagreb (Croatia), and Dr. Ludmila Vasiljeva of the Univer-sity of Lvov (Ukraine). The rest of the team are professors from the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić (established in 1988 as a branch of the University of Podgorica63), with the evident absence of professors from Podgorica itself.64 The new Montenegrin language and orthography were approved by the government in 2010, when the Institute for Montenegrin Language and Litera-ture was founded in Podgorica under the directorship of Dr. Adnan Čirgić, a Montenegrin Muslim. The new language was introduced in Montenegrin schools in September 2011. Parallel with this, the Serbian language was downgraded as the language of the minority, but, following the census results of 2011, when 43% of the population declared Serbian as their mother tongue, Serbian was returned to use, albeit reluctantly.65 Since September 2011, all official documents issued by the republic’s authorities have been written in the new orthography. Unsurprisingly, the linguists from Belgrade and Novi Sad, many of whom are natives of Montenegro, were not amused. In the ensuing media war, the most commonly used argument by the Serbian side was that this was a deliberate step in the further disintegration of the Serbian national core, supported by the anti-Serbian regime in Podgorica. On the other hand, what Belgrade sees as further humiliation and disgrace, Zagreb greets with a great sense of pride. In August 2011, the Zagreb daily Jutarnji list, under the title “Croats Introduced New Letters to the Montenegrins,” carried the story of the participation of the Zagreb-educated linguists in creating the new Montenegrin language.66

Parallel with the language argument, there was a call for a separate Montenegrin Orthodox Church. The argument was that the Montenegrin

63 Then University of Titograd—the name of the capital was re-established in 1992. 64 Pravopis, 3. 65 The official census of the Montenegrin Statistical Office (July 2011), http://www.monstat. org/userfiles/file/popis2011/saopstenje/saopstenje(1).pdf (accessed 30 May 2012). Interestingly, in the 2003 census, Serbian was spoken by 63.6% of the overall population. This rapid decrease in Serbian-speakers on behalf of the Montenegrin-speakers is explained by discrimination against those who declare themselves Serbs, i.e., for any progress in professional life, one not only has to declare oneself a Montenegrin, but also a Montenegrin speaker. 66 Ivana Kalogjera, “Novi pravopis: Hrvati Crnogorcima uveli nova slova, za meko Š i Ž, i time ih izbezumili,” 18 August 2011, Jutarnji list, http://www.jutarnji.hr/crnogorski-pravopis—hrvati-crnogorcima-uveli-nova-slova--za-meko-s-i-z--i-time-ih-izbezumili/966697/ (accessed 30 May 2012). The triumphalism of the Croat media ominously recalls that of Austria-Hungary from the beginning of the 20th century.


metropolitanate had been separate from the Serbian patriarchate since 1766, until it was “illegally incorporated into the Serbian Orthodox Church” in 1920. The fact that the two subsequent Serbian patriarchs, who conducted the unification in 1920, were natives to Montenegro was regarded as “a betrayal of the national interests” and that the Serbian Orthodox Church worked on the project of creating the Greater Serbia.67 The Montenegrin Orthodox Church, in order to distinguish itself from the Serbian, argued that a Catholic king, St. John Vladimir, was a founder of Doclea and that the Montenegrins converted to Orthodoxy only after the “occupation of Serbian despot Nemanja in 1186.”68 Even though ecumenically unrecognized, the Montenegrin Church appealed to the Montenegrin government to start the process of “returning the churches and monasteries on the territory of Montenegro to the rightful church, unlawfully held by the Serbian Orthodox Church.”69 The current situation regarding the ownership of ecclesiastical buildings is in a stalemate, but it is reasonable to expect that in the near future the priests belonging to the Serbian Orthodox Church will be duly expelled from Montenegro and replaced by priests loyal to the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, as is the case in Macedonia.

3. What Next?

The invention of the new historical narrative, the creation of a separate lan-guage, and foundation of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church are the first steps in creating a new Montenegrin nation. As shown above, these were the result of neither real cultural need nor break-through research methods that would confirm the arguments stated in the Doclean narrative. As in Macedonia, the next step will be to support these actions by creating the material heritage that would emphasize the link to the early medieval past, with the emphasis on the Doclean period. Even though the Institute for the Protection of Monuments has existed since 1948, as the Doclean narrative further develops it is reason-able to expect the foundation of an Archaeology Department within the uni- 67 Morrison, Montenegro: A Modern History, 131. 68 Ibid., 136. 69 This is a famous statement made by the Montenegrin Orthodox Church to the media in 2006, encapsulating its attitude toward the Serbian Orthodox Church (italics mine). In 2006, immediately after the separation of Montenegro, the reputable Belgrade weekly Vreme predicted the problem of the church separation. Bojan Pantić, “Ovce i pašnjaci,” Vreme, no. 804 (1 June 2006), http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=454863 (accessed 30 May 2012). The debate is ongoing and with every year the rhetoric fuels the nationalist sentiments between adherents to the new Montenegrin identity and the remaining Montenegrin Serbs in both Montenegrin and Serbian media.


versity in the near future with the task of uncovering the Montenegrin Doclean past. Currently, the whole territory of Montenegro encompasses 22 museums.70 Of these, the most important is the complex in Cetinje, which celebrates the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty and Montenegrin sovereignty. How-ever, as the Doclean narrative emphasizes the Catholic nature of St. John Vladimir, it is expected that the museums in coastal towns, together with their urban characteristics, will receive further reinterpretation, with greater emphasis on the Catholic heritage. Although the Serbian Orthodox Church celebrates not only Nemanjić kings but also St. Peter of Cetinje and St. John Vladimir, it can be expected that the Montenegrin Orthodox Church will replace the Nemanjić saint-kings with the Catholic saints of coastal towns, arguing their Montenegrin ethnic identity.

As there are still no programmes for the erection of public monuments on a scale similar to that in the Macedonian republic, in order to stress Monte-negro’s newly acquired identity the Montenegrin Ministry for Development and Economy, with the financial support of the German Ministry for Eco-nomic Cooperation and Development, published in 2007 a guideline for the construction of new housing with the following intention:

to demonstrate the beauty and value of Montenegro’s traditional ar-chitecture and to show how our traditions can be converted into a modern life-style and language without losing their regional charac-teristics and identity…. [the] purpose is to encourage the municipali-ties, the architects, and the homebuilders to use as guidelines the samples and ideas that have been specified in this handbook and to support common efforts to develop Montenegro in respect of our past.71

Behind the initiative of the government to prescribe these guidelines lies the attempt to re-create traditional architecture in order to assert the unique char-acter of the new Montenegrin identity. Referring the new architecture to the traditional regional specificities serves the purpose of differentiating newly found Montenegrin authenticity among the former Yugoslav nations. This decision is also very much in accordance with the Doclean narrative: all refer-ences to Serbia are to be minimized and, eventually, replaced by the theories

70 Andrijašević and Rastoder, The History of Montenegro, 248. 71 Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Savremeni izraz tradicional-nih kuća u Crnoj Gori/Contemporary Expression of Traditional Houses in Montenegro (Podgorica: Ministarstvo turizma i zaštite životne sredine/Ministarstvo za ekonomski razvoj, 2008), 4–5 (emphasis mine).


developed on the re-interpreted Chronicle of the Priest of Doclea. Basing a narrative on the assumption of the lack of knowledge and general confusion of the medieval authors reveals the primordialistic-perennialist explanation of the building of the new national identity in Montenegro, albeit using exclu-sively political aspects of modernism, as described by John Breuilly in 1993.72

The greatest problem for Montenegro is its ambiguous position in relation to Serbia. As around 264,000 Montenegrins living in Serbia were not allowed to vote in the 2006 referendum, independence was decided with approxi-mately 50,000 votes in favor of separation. This left those who still regard themselves as Serbian, that is, nearly a third of the population of Montenegro according to the last census, deeply dissatisfied.73 For the proclamation of independence, the Montenegrin government had to rely on support from Muslim and Albanian political parties but alienated the Montenegrin Serbs. In March 2012, the government voted a new act that would sanction the unifica-tion of the two mutually exclusive academies. Since the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts disagrees with the Doclean Academy, it appears that the act is aimed at ordering the former to accept the latter without the right to object.74 By securing a unified academy, Serbian objections would finally be silenced and the disconnection of Serbian from the Montenegrin identity would achieve its objectives.

72 John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Quoted in Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, 104. 73 Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain, 475. 74 H.M., “Novi sastav Crnogorske akademije nauka do kraja aprila?” 1 March 2012, Pobjeda: Dnevni list, http://www.pobjeda.me/2012/03/01/novi-sastav-crnogorske-akademije-nauka-do-kraja-aprila/#.UzBdo17eo8p (accessed 30 May 2012).


Lela Mevorah: A Professional Jewish Woman’s Contribution to the Practice of Medicine in Serbia in the Aftermath of the Holocaust*

Ruûica KovaËeviÊ-RistanoviÊ, M.D.

University of Chicago

Even when reading is impossible, the pres-ence of books acquired produces such an ec-stasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reach-ing towards infinity…. We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.1

These sketches from the history of the Medical School in Belgrade are dedi-cated to Lela Mevorah, the former head of the Central Medical Library at the Medical School of Belgrade.

This article provides a brief study of a Jewish woman living in Serbia who was a professional librarian, exceptional teacher, outstanding person, and patriot. Lela Mevorah’s life story contributes not only to the history of the Medical School in Belgrade, but also to a better understanding of the histori- * The author greatly appreciates the opportunity to interview Mrs. Luci Petrović, who provided invaluable information about Lela Mevorah, her aunt, and Moše Mevorah, her father, as well as Avram Mevorah, her grandfather. Without her help it would not have been possible to write this article and bring to life the history of Lela Mevorah. The author is grateful to Ms. Radmila Petrović (Luci Petrović’s daughter, grandniece of Lela Mevorah), who kindly and generously provided photographs of Lela Mevorah and added illuminating anecdotal details about the Mevorah family. The author greatly benefited from the guidance and generous editorial input of Ljubica D. Popovich, coeditor with Lilien Robinson of Serbian Studies. The author expresses special thanks to Vojislava Radovanović, director of the Jewish History Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, and Aleksandar Necak, president of the Jewish Communities of Serbia, for their sup-port, knowledge, and information, and for graciously copying Moše Mevorah’s autobiography for this article. 1 Quote attributed to Alfred Edward Newton. The source is unknown but may likely be Newton’s book The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1918) or A Magnificent Farce and Other Diversions of a Book-Collector (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921).

200 Ruûica KovaËeviÊ-RistanoviÊ

cal circumstances that drove both her dedication to medical knowledge and possibly the sorrow behind her smile (Fig. 1 following p. 205).

While reviewing her life story, based mainly on my personal interview with Mrs. Luci Petrović in Belgrade about 20 to 25 years ago, it impressed me that most Jews living in Serbia considered themselves Serbs of a different faith rather than a different nationality. This type of self-identification is a reflection of the fact that the Jews of Serbia were integrated into the Serbian community and were loyal citizens of the young state. In fact, the concept of Jews as a separate nationality did not exist in the Balkans prior to World War I.2 Lela Mevorah’s brother, Moše Mevorah, echoes this perception in his un-published and handwritten autobiography. He states that Jews in Serbia en-joyed equal civil rights along with the rest of the population. He goes on to say that the Jews were sincerely committed to the defense of their motherland and were aware of carrying out their societal duties.3

The Foundation for Lela Mevorah’s Pursuit of Knowledge

In order to obtain a complete picture of Lela Mevorah, one must understand her background. She was born on 17 January 1898 in Belgrade, the youngest of four children of Avram and Esther (née Koen) Mevorah. Her brothers were Samuel, born in 1892; Solomon, born in 1895; and Moše, born in 1890. Av-ram Mevorah was a trade representative for different foreign firms. He worked in his father’s office, the Royal Currency Exchange of Moše Mevo-rah, which was appointed by the king. (See Figs. 2 and 3 for photographs of Belgrade during this period.)

Prior to her marriage, Esther Mevorah was a trailblazer. Following her father’s untimely death, she took over his wholesale store. Together with her sister Rachel, she successfully ran the store, which was nicknamed “Kod Devojčica,” an endearing term meaning “At the Girls’.”

Despite her business success, she stepped away from the store following her marriage. Esther Mevorah was known as the most selfless and most dedi-cated mother, whose ultimate mission in life was her home, or ognjište, and her family.

The Mevorah family cultivated a love for books and respect for knowledge that is preserved in the memories of Lela’s niece, Radmila

2 Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jews of Yugoslavia: A Quest for Community (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 55–68. 3 Moše Mevorah’s autobiographical notes, under the title “Biografija Moše Mevoraha” (1974), can be found in the unpublished, handwritten original manuscript kept in the collection of the Jewish History Museum in Belgrade.

Lela Mevorah’s Contribution to Medicine in Serbia after the Holocaust 201

Petrović. Ms. Petrović described the atmosphere in the Mevorahs’ home as one where books were “everywhere.” She stated that “the only place the books were not found was the kitchen and in the bathroom.”4

World War I

At the onset of World War I, Lela was 16 years old. Even at that young age, she volunteered to serve as a nurse. Her brothers served alongside their fellow Serbs in the Serbian army. Her brother Solomon, a First Sergeant-Student, was captured in Austria. Her brother Samuel was interned in Hungary. Her brother Moše served as a Cavalry Officer in the Balkan Wars in Timok’s Cavalry Division, Second Order.5 At the end of WWI, he was promoted to Captain, Second Class and awarded numerous medals.6

Due to the circumstances of the war, Lela spent WWI in Nice, France, along with her parents. While there, she completed high school. Miraculously, her highschool essay has survived and sheds light on her feelings for her Serb compatriots. The essay was written in response to the question “What are the reasons the world respects Serbs?” Lela wrote: “Serbia, although a young country, was well organized. The Serbs put forth a great effort to import all the good things they observed in the outside world and apply them in their own country. They had success in everything because they were capable of every type of work.”7 In fact, these words foretell Lela’s own future pioneer-ing efforts to import and make available medical knowledge in Serbia by obtaining medical literature for the library at the Medical School.

4 Radmila Petrović, personal communication with the author. 5 He participated in every battle prior to reaching the Albanian border, where he passed the Albanian Golgotha (Albanska golgota), that is, the retreat of the Serbian army through Albania. When he recovered from the injuries sustained there, he was moved to the Salonika Front, where he participated in the breach of that front. 6 He was awarded the Albanska spomenica, the Albanian commemorative medal, as well as the commemorative medal for the wars of 1912 and 1913, the wars of 1913–14, and World War I. 7 She further wrote: “The entire world got to know the Serb, to judge his character, his abilities, his bravery, and realized how many noble feelings reside in his soul. There are many examples in Serbian history documenting torture and suffering under the Turks, because the Turks wanted to force the Serbs to betray their faith and brothers. But, the Serbs never broke their promise, so their honor remained unstained and their character remained firm. Even today, when the Serbs have lost their country, they have not stained their honor.” She concluded her essay by stating that “it is because of these characteristics that the entire world got to like and respect Serbs, and their name will always be mentioned with respect.” Lela Mevorah, “Po čemu nas Srbe ceni svet” (unpublished manuscript in the collection of the Archives of the Republic of Serbia), 2. This essay was written for a final exam in Serbian given on 24 July 1917.


Following high school, Lela wanted to pursue the study of medicine. However, her father did not permit her to follow this dream, most likely because at the time women were not expected to have professional careers. After all, Lela’s mother’s successful business career was brought about by the circumstances of her father’s untimely death rather than a career pursued in its own right.8 Nonetheless, the pursuit of knowledge, even if not a career, was paramount, and Lela was able to study philosophy in Paris.

World War II

Despite their self-identification as Serbs of a different faith, the Jews of Serbia could not escape from the horror that befell the Jews of Europe during the dark days of the Holocaust. The tragedy of the Holocaust was felt by the Mevorah family as well. In April 1941, the Mevorah family separated. Lela’s father decided to stay in Belgrade. He was denounced by a medical student while being transported from the hospital where he was receiving treatments. He was killed by the Nazis in a gas van in 1943.

Lela fled with the rest of her family to Herceg Novi in Montenegro and was captured on 3 June 1941. She was transferred to Kavaja, a small city in the western inlands of Albania, just a few kilometers from the Adriatic coast. From there, she was moved to Ferramonti, Italy. This camp was situated in Ferramonti di Tarsia, located near Cosenza in southern Italy, and was the largest camp for Jews and foreigners established by Mussolini.9 The prisoners were released in September 1943, six weeks after Mussolini’s downfall.10 Lela spent the remainder of WWII in Asti, until returning to Serbia in October 1945.

Sadly, Lela’s brothers Samuel and Solomon were among the 6 million European Jews exterminated in the Holocaust. In 1941, Moše Mevorah was serving in the Yugoslav Army as a reserve lieutenant colonel under the Supreme Command. He was captured by the Nazis in Pale near Sarajevo and placed in a prisoner of war camp (POW) inside Germany. Moše spent WWII as a POW, where he was held until the end of the war. 8 Esther Mevorah died in 1936, prior to the outbreak of WWII. Her death rekindled Lela’s interest in becoming a nurse, so she took courses for volunteer nurses given by the Red Cross. 9 The internees at this camp were neither killed as part of the “Final Solution” nor subjected to violence or torture. They were protected from deportation to Germany. The main proponents of this unique treatment were the director of the camp Paolo Salvatore and the Capuchin monk Fra Capisto Lopinot. Wikipedia, http://sr.wikipedia.org-FerramontidiTarsia (accessed 31 December 2011), s.v., “Ferramonti di Tarsia.” 10 Many of the internees joined the Allied forces, and about 1,000 were sent to the United States.


Because he was a prisoner of war, Moše was protected from execution in spite of his Jewish heritage. He was a very talented painter and made more than 600 portraits of other prisoners at the camps in Osnabrick and Nurn-berg.11 This corpus of images provides very important visual documentation of those hard times.

Miraculously, Moše’s wife and two children survived the Holocaust as well by hiding in a remote mountain village in Albania. As Moše made his way back to Serbia, his family crossed the trenches surrounding Tirana and rushed back to Belgrade. His daughter, Lela’s niece, Luci Petrović, stated: “We were rushing to our home. We were the first to return to Belgrade. We were overwhelmed by the feeling that we were no longer in a life-threatening situation. The feeling of happiness, was comparable to slowly eating a piece of cake, bite by bite, piece by piece”12 (Fig. 4).

As the survival of these members of the Mevorah family demonstrates, it was largely random luck that enabled any Jew to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. Despite the murders of her brothers and father, having one brother, a sister-in-law, and two nieces who did survive was remarkable, given how many families were wiped out in their entirety. Nonetheless, as Jews in hiding and imprisoned, the members of the Mevorah family bore witness to one of the darkest times in human history.

Lela Mevorah as the Key Figure in the Development of the Central Medical Library of the Medical School of Belgrade

Set against this backdrop, Lela’s dedication to the Central Medical Library of the Medical School of Belgrade (Medical Library) is all the more impressive and inspiring. In many ways, Lela’s professional life parallels the growth and development of the Medical Library. Professor and doctor Matija Ambrozić founded the Medical Library, and the University Council approved its for-mation on 5 August 1946, just one year after the end of the war.13 Dr. Am-brozić carried out all the duties alone until he was joined by Lela Mevorah on 17 May 1947. Shortly thereafter, Lela was appointed head of the Medical Li-brary, where her pioneering work began (Fig. 5). 11 Following his emigration to Israel in 1949, he became a painter. 12 Luci Petrović, personal communication with the author during an interview c. 1993 in Belgrade. 13 The declared mission of the Medical Library was to serve the physicians at the Medical School as well as those working outside the Medical School, thereby spreading knowledge to all who sought it. On 25 April 1947, the Medical Library was fully established. It was given two rooms in the Pediatric Clinic building, with one room serving as a working room and the other serving as a reading room.


At this point, Yugoslavia was barely two years past the devastation of the war and still recovering from the killings, deportations, bombings, and short-ages. In the midst of this destruction, and following the loss of her father and two brothers, Lela began the work of establishing the Medical Library. In addition to increasing the number of books and medical literature, Lela personally guided numerous generations of medical students and physicians in the process of searching for and using the appropriate information. Her contribution to the Medical Library was enhanced by her great general erudition and knowledge of several languages. Her devotion to medical science and love for books as a direct source of knowledge and development of thought and creativity was handed down as a live flame to all who had the honor to meet, work with, and get to know her, including myself.

Lela was a visionary, and, as documented in an article written in 1962, she expressed concerns about how medical libraries with limited budgets would be able to obtain the latest medical books and information. She elo-quently stated, “Diseases do not know borders; furthermore, progress and new methods of treatment should not know them either. Innovation should be accessible at the same time to a scientist as well as a physician lost in some remote area.” She stressed that a medical librarian acts as an intermediary between medicine, science, and the practice of life itself.14

To address the need of underdeveloped countries to plan their book pur-chases, Lela proposed publishing a bulletin, at the expense of publishing firms and subscribers. This bulletin would inform libraries and other potential cli-ents about future publications. In that way, even libraries with very limited funds, such as the Medical Library of the Medical School in Belgrade, would be able to plan their purchases, better manage their budget, and more effec-tively allocate limited resources. Lela correctly envisioned that such a bulletin would be in the interest of publishing houses since it would serve as an advertisement for future publications. Additionally, it would provide the pub-lishers with an estimate of how many copies of a given work should be printed. This idea is still used today, particularly with the advent of the Internet.

Given the Medical Library’s budgetary constraints, numerous books and journals came as gifts from various organizations and countries. One of the largest and most valuable contributions was from the United Yugoslavian

14 Lela Mevorah, “The Problem of Planning and Policy of Purchase of Books for Medical Libraries with Limited Budgets Belonging to Underdeveloped Countries” (1962), translated from French, “Le Probleme du Plan et de la Politique d’achat des Livres pour les Bibliotheques Medicales dans les Pays Moins Developpe.” It is unclear if this was an oral presentation at a meeting or was published in a journal at some time.


funds as part of the United States’ assistance to Yugoslavia. This collection formed the basis of scientific literature in the Medical Library.15 Since many of these donated works were not written in Serbian, it was Lela’s extensive knowledge of foreign languages that allowed her to read the books, while it was her keen intellect that allowed her to understand the information and convey it to the physicians who sought her help.

Conclusion

Lela Mevorah passed away in her sleep on 13 November 1972.16 At that time she was not retired but still actively working (Fig. 6).

Indeed, Lela Mevorah, whose own dreams of becoming a physician were deferred due to the constraints society placed on women at that time and whose family was devastated by the Holocaust, was able to use her knowledge and talent for medicine to help medical students and physicians pursue their field of study. In a sense, even though she did not become a phy-sician, her medical knowledge was carried through in each physician she helped educate, thereby touching many more patients than she could have as an individual doctor herself.

15 The collection was acquired by Professors K. Sahović, R. Berović, and Docent A. Rotović during their stay in the United States in early 1947. 16 The Serbian folklore tradition holds that only the righteous die in their sleep.

Figure 1. Lela Mevorah shortly after World War II

[Source: Petrović family archives, courtesy of Radmila Petrović]

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friends the Podvinec family on the terrace of Dr. Srećko Podvinec’s house (c. 1958–60). (Dr. Srećko Podvinec is first on the right, Lela is second from the left, and the matriarch Mrs. Ruža Podvinec is in the middle.)

[Source: Petrović family archives, courtesy of Radmila Petrović]

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Svetislav StefanoviÊ as a Translator of English Victorian Poetry: Early Versions of

Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” in Serbian

Jelena VujiÊ University of Belgrade

The beginning of the 21st century in Serbia brought about major social changes marked by the fall of the communist regime after more than half a century of rule. The country and its people have experienced the pains typical of a society in transition. While for the broad Serbian public the new post-communist age has meant job loss, capitalization, and privatization of state property, concurrently it has also been a time when some old and forgotten artistic and cultural values have emerged after being forbidden and ignored for over 60 years. Some of the greatest minds and names of Serbian culture, art, and science, such as Branko Popović, Jovan Dučić, Prince Pavle Karađorđević, and Radovan Grujić, among others, are being rehabilitated and returned to their people, where they are given the appreciation they deserve.

One such figure, who is often forgotten despite his great patriotism, hu-manism, and literary work, is Svetislav Stefanović (1874–1944), a medical doctor, poet, and translator whose creative work represents a significant con-tribution to the Serbian literary heritage (Fig. 1 following p. 237). Stefanović and his work are even more intriguing in these turbulent times of ours, which are much like the times in which Stefanović himself lived. He entered Serbian public life at the end of the 19th century, when the intelligentsia from Vojvodina open-heartedly, but with very little knowledge of the true Serbian (sr. srbijanski) mentality, brought the beacon of “enlightenment and educa-tion” (sr. pravosveštenije) to Serbia. Belonging to the same intellectual circle as Sima Pandurović, Veljko Petrović, and Jovan Dučić, Stefanović got himself noticed by the public at the end of the 19th century as a fervent defender of Laza Kostić at the time when he was severely attacked for his work by his opponents.1 This paper represents an initial effort to present

1 Dragoljub S. Ignjatović, Sa piscima i o piscima međuratnim, Priručnici, vol. 3 (Belgrade: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1979).

214 Jelena VujiÊ

objectively Stefanović’s contribution to Serbian translation and interpretation practices with respect to poetry.

***

Svetislav Stefanović was born in 1874 in Novi Sad.2 From 1900 on he became preoccupied mainly with literary criticism. In 1905 he received Serbian citi-zenship, which represented the fulfillment of his lifelong wish. Ever since his student days he expressed a strong interest in English literature, poetry in par-ticular, an interest which resulted in the publication of a collection of poems entitled Pesme: Originalne i prevedene, published in Mostar from 1903 to 1905.3 For this first collection of poems Stefanović selected poetic works written by some of the greatest names of English poetry, such as William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Swinburne, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, and Oscar Wilde. In 1907 he had a collection of essays, Iz engleske književnosti, published. Though engaged in literary translation, Stefanović did not abandon his medical vocation, working under horrible conditions and treating patients in rural areas of Serbia. In 1907 he traveled to Vienna to specialize in and practice medicine. While working as a doctor there he joined a circle of Vi-enna Anglicists and began to study German and English literature. This was as close as he would get to the English language and culture, since he himself would never set foot in an English-speaking country.

Returning to Serbia, Stefanović was again sent to the poorest and most remote parts to work both as a medical doctor and veterinarian. His profes-sional hardships seem to have served as an additional inspiration for spending hours dedicated to literary work and transforming himself from a trained medical professional into a philologist, writer, reader, and poet. From 1912 to 1918 he was actively involved first in the Balkan Wars and then in the Great War. On the Salonica Front he served as a liaison officer between the Serbian and British medical corps.

Between the two world wars Stefanović’s literary activities intensified, resulting in his second collection of English poetry, Iz novije engleske lirike, published in 1923.4 The collection contained some of the poems previously

2 All bio-bibliographic data are taken from Predrag Protić, ed., Pisci kao kritičari pre Prvog svetskog rata: Izabrani kritički radovi (Belgrade: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1979). 3 Svetislav Stefanović, Pesme: Originalne i prevedene, 3 vols. (Mostar: Paher i Kisić, 1903–05). 4 Svetislav Stefanović, comp., Iz novije engleske lirike (Belgrade: Napredak, 1923).

Svetislav StefanoviÊ as a Translator of English Victorian Poetry 215

translated and published in the collection from 1904/05. However, the ver-sions of poems published in the 1923 collection were revised, displaying maturity, smoothness, and elegance in expression. At this time Stefanović was engaged in a tough debate with Sima Pandurović over the latter’s translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. During the 1930s his fascination with English liter-ature resulted in excellent translations of the works of Shakespeare. He was preparing his complete works for publication when World War II broke out in Europe and Yugoslavia came under German occupation. Torn between art and patriotism, he finally accepted the position of acting president of Srpska književna zadruga (Serbian Literary Cooperative), where he remained until he was shot as a collaborator and traitor in 1944. The man who was desperately in love with European literature (English and German, in particular) and who had devoted his life to establishing cultural ties between the Serbian literary tradition and German, English, and Hungarian literature did not live to read the article “Razbojnici u SKZ” (Bandits in SKZ), published in the daily Borba on 31 December 1944, in which the author, Eli Finci, branded him “a bandit.” For seven decades Svetislav Stefanović’s literary work has been ignored by Serbian literary critics.

***

It has been more than 100 years since the publication of the first collection of English poetry translated by Svetislav Stefanović. Although belonging to the early pioneers of translation from English, as a translator, critic, and poet Stefanović made an immeasurable contribution to the Serbian literary heritage by paving the way for the establishment of Anglo-Serbian literary ties. Such ties grew stronger and more intricate throughout the 20th century. While much has been written on Anglo-Serbian literary ties and their various aspects, very little has been said of Stefanović’s work as a translator. His translations deserve critical evaluation and analysis.5 This article constitutes one of the first critical approaches to and revisions of Stefanović’s translational endeavors.

Stefanović was fascinated by 19th-century poets, particularly England’s Victorian poets, some of whom were his contemporaries and whose sensibil-ity and atmosphere he seemed to have understood best. Stefanović appears to have been especially fond of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry. Rossetti (1828–82), a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was certainly one of the

5 Svetozar Ignjačević, “Teze za kritiku prevoda poezije,” Književne novine (Belgrade) 41, no. 769 (1989): 13.

216 Jelena VujiÊ

greatest English poets of the 19th century. One of the most beautiful works of English poetry is Rossetti’s masterpiece “The Blessed Damozel,” which was written in 1846 and published for the first time in 1850 in the pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ.6 In this poem Rossetti describes the soul of a deceased girl in Heaven who still yearns for her sweetheart on Earth.7 The poem is characterized by a combination of real and surreal and mystic details. For over 150 years, literary critics have praised this work of Rossetti’s as both supernatural and humanly warm, both mystic and sensual.8

In his two collections of poetry (from 1904/05 and 1923) Stefanović in-cluded some dozen poems by Rossetti, among them “The Blessed Damozel.” Since this poem appears in both collections, the two versions of translation are evaluated, compared, and contrasted in the analysis presented in this article.9 According to Stefanović himself, the later version was revised, corrected, stylistically refined, and in some cases, completely altered.10

Structurally, the poem consists of 24 stanzas, with 6 verses in each. Every stanza has the following rhyming pattern: abcdbd. The even verses are those that rhyme. Such a rhyming pattern was kept in Stefanović’s translation as well, together with the total number of verses and stanzas. The rhythm of the English original is iamb-anapest, which in translation was successfully re-placed with a smooth trochee-dactyl. At the same time, Stefanović tried to respect the enjambments that existed in the original wherever it was possible in the Serbian version of the poem.

A contrastive metrical analysis of the English original and the translated version of the poem is applied to the pattern of the first stanza, which is followed in later stanzas in both texts. The metrical schemes of the original and the translation are presented as follows:

6 Omer Hadžiselimović et al., Engleska književnost, vol. 3, Edicija strane književnosti (Sarajevo: Svjetlost; Belgrade: Nolit, 1984), 48–50. 7 In the following analysis I refer to the version of Rossetti’s “Blessed Damozel” found in Christopher Ricks, ed., The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 269–72. 8 Bernard Richards, English Poetry of the Victorian Period, Longman Literature in English Series (London: Longman, 1990), 301. 9 The two Serbian translations by Stefanović and the original Rossetti poem, as it appears in Ricks’s anthology, are provided in the appendix following this paper. 10 Stefanović, preface to Iz novije engleske lirike, x.


Original metric scheme Metric scheme of the translation

U_U_U | _U _UU | _U | _UU | U_U UU_|_U_U _UU | _UU | _U U_ | U_U | UU_ _UU | _U_UU | _U U_U | _U_U _UU | U_UU UU_ _U | UU_ U_U | U_U_U | _U UU_ | UU_ | U_U U_U | U_UU ______________ ________________ 0 3 3 5 0 4 0 3 0 4 2 0 3 3 2 2 0 2 1 0

This metrical scheme shows that the rhythmic change in the Serbian transla-tion causes the difference in the number of stressed and unstressed syllables, the so-called ictuses.11 Due to the specific characteristics of Serbian verse, the caesura is found after the third syllable, while the metric constant of the un-stressed syllables lies on the third, eighth, and eleventh syllable. Furthermore, rhythmic tendencies, which are reflected in the most stressed syllables in translation, are placed on the first, fourth, fifth, and seventh syllable.12

The original stanza, however, does not have a constant caesura as the syllable boundary is not constant throughout the six verses of the stanza. Therefore, in the English text we are faced with a movable caesura. As far as the metric constant of unstressed syllables is concerned, it is laid on the third, fifth, seventh, and ninth syllable in the original poem, while the rhythmic tendencies fall on the fourth and sixth syllable. From the given metric schemes we see that the number of ictuses in the English stanza is four, while in the Serbian translation there are five ictuses.

As for the type of rhymes, Stefanović mainly used masculine rhymes (e.g., ceo/beo/vreo), with occasional use of feminine rhymes (e.g., njeni/sneni/ meni) or even oblique rhymes (e.g., četa/pogleda/leta).

The emotional and philosophical aspect of Rossetti’s original was mostly followed and respected in the translation. It is evident, however, that Stefa-nović often used over-poetization but did not interfere with the use of com-plex epithets and paraphrases as a key feature of Victorian poetry.13 He suc-ceeded in retaining the solemn atmosphere of the original without forced pathos and pathetic emotions. The genuineness of emotions is preserved even

11 Metrical analysis was based on the lectures on versification given by Professor Svetozar Petrović, Department of Literature and Literary Theory, Faculty of Philology at Belgrade University, during the academic year of 1989–90. 12 In Serbian, all verses which are longer than a hexameter tend to be divided into segments by caesura. 13 Richards, English Poetry of the Victorian Period, 28.

218 Jelena VujiÊ

in those occasional spots where the expression lacks precision and semantic correctness, which may blur the clarity of the original poetic images.

As has previously been stated, this analysis includes both versions of the translations (see appendix for Rossetti’s original poem and the two Serbian translations). Moreover, special attention is given to semantic, metric, formal, and structural features.

The two versions of the first stanza do not display major differences. However, the second version neatly follows the feminine rhyme pattern (strana/utišana/ljijlana), which is an improvement from the early version in which we are faced with the oblique rhymes in verses 2, 4, and 6 (strana/ utišana/krina). Such an improvement is the result of the better choice of the bisyllabic word ljiljan, which is synonymous with monosyllabic krin and more appropriately fits the rhyming pattern. The translation of the second stanza is nearly identical in both versions. Although Stefanović successfully conveyed the original poetic image, he failed to translate the very important fourth verse, “For service meetly worn.” Consequently, the poetic image in verses 3 and 4 of the original, “But a white rose of Mary’s gift / For service meetly worn,” is completely lost in the translation:

Već samo dar joj od Marije, bela Ruža zadenuta;

Comparing and contrasting the original and the translation, we see that there is enjambment in the translation since the adjective bela ends the third verse although, in accordance with the original “white rose,” it both semantically and syntactically functions as a modifier of the noun ruža from verse 4.

The translation of the third stanza is nearly the same in both versions, and Stefanović managed to preserve the strength of the original poetic image without breaking the rhythm of the stanza. A particularly good solution occurs in the later translation of the paraphrase “to them she left” from verse 5, despite the fact that Stefanović failed to keep the enjambment.

Albeit, to them she left, her day Had counted as ten years.

Al’ njezin dan za ostale bez nje Brojaše deset leta. (1904/05)


Al’ njezin dan za one što ostaše bez nje Brojaše deset leta. (1923) On the other hand, the paraphrase from the first verse of the fourth stanza,

“ten years of years,” was simplified into “stotina leta,” which may be poetically weaker but is semantically quite correct. The translation of this stanza reveals certain deviations from the original, since Stefanović used the interrogative form to translate a declarative, as illustrated below:

(To one it is ten years of years, …Yet now, and in this place, Surely she leaned o’er me—her hair Fell about my face… Nothing: the autumn-fall of leaves. The whole year sets apace.) (Za nekoga je stotina leta. Al ovo zar nije java, Da se nad mene nagla i kosom Sav lik mi umotava? Ne, ne, to jesenje lišće pada Godina vidno svršava.) (1904/05) (Za jednoga je stotina leta. Baš ovo sad nije li java, Da se nad mene nagla i kosom Sav lik mi umotava? Ne, ne, to jesenje lišće pada Godina vidno svršava.) (1923)

The interrogative form in verses 2, 3, and 4 brings uncertainty and doubt into the tone of stanza 4, which is something that can barely be felt in the original. Consequently, the negative pronoun “nothing,” which in the original text creates a sudden contrast in rhythm and whose aim is to make an abrupt shift from daydreaming to reality, Stefanović translated with the double negative particle “ne, ne” as a sign of reassurance.

220 Jelena VujiÊ

In stanza 5 the second verse of the original, “That she was standing on,” in both translations became exceptionally well poetized in “Gde njena stajaše noga.” However, in order to preserve the rhyme (noga/Boga/moga), Stefa-nović used the verb form moga (from the verb moći),14 which does not quite well agree with the omitted subject clearly bearing reference to the third-person singular ona.

She scarce could see the sun.

Dogledat’ sunca moga. (1904/05) Stanza 6 is almost identical in both versions of Stefanović’s translations,

apart from a few minor changes in the later version which are all of a lexical nature. It remains unclear why the word “ether” (“across the flood of ether”) was capitalized in both versions, as if the translator interpreted it as the name of the sea (“Ko neki most preko mora Etra”). In the original text, the given prepositional phrase stretches across the first two verses of the sixth stanza due to the enjambment, which was omitted in the translation. Despite these minor flaws, we can say that the strength of the original poetic image was successfully interpreted in this early Serbian version.

As much as the translation of this stanza is imaginative and inspired, the Serbian text of the next stanza is hardly comprehensible in expression in the earlier version due to Stefanović’s interventions and imprecise interpretations, which occasionally sound inadequate and artificial. Such is the poetic picture presented in verses 2 and 3. Also, the last line, “K’o tanki plamenovi,” is indeed a rather strange and not quite comprehensible metaphor in Serbian, primarily due to the unusual collocation of the adjective tanki with the noun plamenovi.

The 1923 version of the translation is, on the one hand, semantically more precise, but on the other hand, contains, yet again, some problematic grammatical agreement:

Around her, lovers, newly met ’Mid deathless love’s acclaims, Spoke evermore among themselves Their heart-remembered names;

14 Stefanović might have used the form moga as an abbreviated form of the imperfect mogaše from the verb moći. It can also be interpreted as an archaic grammatical form.


And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames. Oko nje dragi dočarani Besmrtne ljubavi snovi, Blaženo jedno s drugim veže, S’ imeni uvek novi, Pokraj nje uzleću Bogu duše K’o tanki plamenovi. (1904/05) Oko nje svi dragi istom se našli U ljubavi večnoj, blaženi, Jednak’ se međ’ sobom neže sa svoji Čarobni novi imeni, Pokraj nje prolaze duše k Bogu K’o ognji uzneseni. (1923) In stanza 8 of the translation the smoothness and rhythm of the original

verse are preserved by vowels a, e, and o. The two versions display only minor lexical differences. Similarly, stanza 9 in the original is quite challenging from a structural point of view, with enjambments in verses 1, 3, and 4. Such a structure was successfully preserved in translation. In verses 2, 4, and 6 of the original we find slant rhymes (fierce/pierce/spheres), while Stefanović used syllabic masculine rhymes in the earlier version (vali/pali/ stali) and masculine semi-rhymes in the later version (uzdrhatao/pao/stao). Despite successfully overcoming the technical challenges of this stanza, Stefanović failed to find solutions that were sufficiently effective and poetic to match the poetic images depicted in verses 2 and 4 of the original.

From the fixed place of Heaven she saw Time like a pulse shake fierce Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove Within the gulf to pierce Its path; and now she spoke as when The stars sang in their spheres. S neba je gledala Vreme gde se Ko besno uzdrhatao

222 Jelena VujiÊ

Puls kroz svetove trese. Njen pogled Na struju mu sekuć’ pao. Tad zborit’ poče k’o da je svet Zvezdani pevat stao. (1904/05) S neba je gledala Vreme gde Što se u besni vali Kroz svetove treslo. Pogledi njeni Da tok mu preseku pali Tad zborit’ poče k’o da su kruzi Zvezdani pevati stali. (1923) In stanza 10 Rossetti gives a vivid description of the evening by choosing

lovely metaphors and original adjectives and onomatopoeic verbs, so that the reader gets an almost tangible feeling of the calmness of the evening. This impression is further enhanced by the calmness of the rhythm and intonation, which is achieved by enjambment in verses 1, 3, and 5 and additionally supported by punctuation.

The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the still weather. Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together.

Stanza 10 is identical in both versions of the translation. Aside from some minor deviations from the original, such as the interpretation of the syntagm “curled moon” and a bit awkward translation of verse 3, Stefanović used equivalent translational and poetic tools in the Serbian version. He too employed an onomatopoeic verb—lepršajuć. Such brief expressions with a falling intonation create the peace and stillness of a calm evening.

The translation of the next stanza differs in the earlier and later version. Neither version, however, is consistent as Stefanović managed to find better solutions for some segments in the first version, while for others the later version provides more adequate translation. Thus, “Strove not her accents there” was translated as “Naglasci jeknuli njeni” in the earlier version and as “Baš njenog zvuka blažena” in the later one. The second is more poetic, but


the first is more precise. Similarly, “echoing stair” became “odjek stepena” in the version from 1904/05 and “dršćuće stepenice” in the one from 1923.

Stanza 12 of the original is emotionally powerful, poetically effective, and expressive. The intensity of the maiden’s emotions and her yearning are exceptionally strong and convincing. Divine and earthly desire reach their crescendo in this stanza. Stefanović succeeded in transmitting the same intensity of emotions in the Serbian translation.

While the later version of translation is more neutral in tone, the earlier one is characterized by a better choice of lexical devices. Stefanović even managed to emphasize the yearning of the young girl by the effective expres-sion “željna sam” as a translational equivalent of the English subjunctive unreal phrase “I wish that he were come to me” and the intensifying personal verb form znam, which is an excellent solution for modal “will” denoting certainty in the original text.

‘I wish that he were come to me For he will come,’ she said. Rekla je: Željna sam da već dođe Jer on će doći znam. (1904/05) The earlier translation of the next stanza seems artificial and somewhat

rough, characterized by certain interventions on the part of the translator; the later version is a completely different story, though. It is comprehensive, effective, and inspirational, although the order of the first two verses of the original stanza was switched in the translation.

Stanzas 14 and 15 were fairly correctly and adequately translated with few minor lexical inconsistencies in the translation of stanza 14. Such is the construction in verse 3, “Whose lamps are stirred continually,” which became “Kandila večna stvara.” The verb stvarati is a poor and semantically incorrect choice for the verb ‘to stir.’ A much more appropriate Serbian equivalent which collocates with the noun kandila is paliti. Almost every poetic image, paraphrase, and description is successfully transmitted into Serbian.

The early and later translation of stanza 16, though quite different, are equally good and precise from a lexical as well as structural aspect.

Pa ću ga učit pesme što ovde pevam ležeći sa njim, A on će me prekidati svojim glasom,

224 Jelena VujiÊ

Tihim, dubokim, I pri tom ćemo se upoznat S nečim neznanim. (1904/05) Ja ću ga učiti ležeći ovako, Pesme što ovde pevamo, A on će ih prekidati svojim glasom, Stišano polagano, I pri svakom prekidu poznaće nešto Novo, što ima da znamo. (1923)

Similarly, the following two stanzas, stanzas 17 and 18, were so precisely translated that they almost literally reflect the original. The original artistic ideas and emotions are preserved in the Serbian text, which remained as poetic as its English equivalent. The only inconsistency is the order in which the names of God’s maidens are given, but this was done for the purpose of rhyme preservation. For the same reason, the name “Margaret” was shortened to “Greta,” while “Rosalys” became Serbian equivalent “Ruža.”

Rossetti’s vivid poetic description created in stanza 19 was successfully translated following the author’s original concept. The translation of this stanza is characterized by a few very innovative coinages that Stefanović formed, such as the compound noun mrtvorođene as an equivalent for English relative clause “Who are just born, being dead” and the derivative povojnica for the English compound “birth-robe.”

Stefanović managed to stay true to Rossetti’s concept by precisely selecting lexical units in Serbian which effectively reflect the original both semantically and rhythmically. Structurally, in the later translation Stefanović remained devoted to enjambments as one of the favorite and most common rhyme features in Victorian poetry.

As he was approaching the end of the poem, Stefanović seemed to get better and better at embracing Rossetti’s poetic expression and transposing it onto Serbian. Therefore, both versions of the translation of the next two stanzas are in perfect harmony with the original, and hardly any objections can be made to the Serbian version. Unlike stanza 22, which is identical in both versions of the translation, stanza 21 was translated in two quite different ways. That is, the earlier version contains masculine rhymes (kim/zlaćanim/ tananim), while in the later version the rhyme is feminine (sama/oreolama/


citolama). However the differences may be on the lexical level, the earlier version appears and sounds smoother and more natural.

There are few objections to either version of the next stanza. Although Stefanović made a few changes in the later version, which were mainly cosmetic in nature, he failed to address the real flaws displayed in the compression of the very impressive image “The light thrilled towards her, fill’d/With angels in strong level flight,” which appears oversimplified and constricted in the single verse “Pun anđela zadrhta zrak” (both versions).

Such an intervention on the part of the translator seriously interferes with the rhyme pattern of the six-verse stanza, since there was a verse missing. To make up for this “shortage,” Stefanović simply “borrowed” the opening bracketed phrase from the next stanza, which became the closing verse of stanza 23 in the translation.

Pogleda, oslušnu, pa onda reče, Govor joj setan i blag; “To sve kad dođe on.” Tu presta. Pun anđela zadrhta zrak. Oči se njene mole. I smeše. (Ja videh njen osmeh drag.) (both versions)

However, this intervention and alternation can be justified as being in harmony with the structure of the last stanza of the original, which also ends with a bracketed verse.

On the other hand, one must praise Stefanović’s choice of the aorist verb form in Serbian (“Pogleda, oslušnu, pa onda reče…”) as the equivalent of the preterite in English (“She gazed and listened and then said…”). Thus, this stanza in the Serbian version sounds more dynamic and dramatic.

The last stanza is identical in both versions. The intonation which creates a sombre atmosphere in the original text is successfully preserved in the translation. Rossetti created a religious and melancholic tone by short but expressive forms (“I saw her smile… / And laid her face between her hands / And wept. [I heard her tears]”). Stefanović used the corresponding forms in Serbian:

Al’ tek što se anđela izgubi hod U sfere udaljene, A ona pruži niz ogradu zlatnu Ruke raširene.

226 Jelena VujiÊ

I spusti međ njih glavu. Pa briznu. (Čuo sam suze njene).

***

Although from the modern perspective Stefanović’s literary expression may occasionally sound archaic and obsolete, it should be viewed as a reflection of the times and traditions that have been forgotten for too long. However, his literary gift is evident.

The translation of Rossetti’s “Blessed Damozel” in both versions (from 1904/05 and 1923) represents a typical product of the time. In spite of certain inconsistencies and rigidness, and occasional awkwardness and clumsiness of expression, these translations reflect Stefanović’s tendency to establish similarities between poetic motifs in Serbian and English poetry. Governed by those similarities, in his translations he often strayed from the comparative-ness of that time. Simultaneously, in his search for similarities he emphasized the differences and peculiarities of the Serbian poetic tradition. The greatest value of Stefanović’s poetic translations today lies in the fact that because of their authenticity they represent the beacons of enlightenment and education born from his obsession with English poetic expression. His early translations of English Victorian poetry are pioneering works of literary translation from English into Serbian. They, together with his original poetry, still await a comprehensive examination and critical evaluation.

More impulsive than systematic but both educated and talented, Svetislav Stefanović, as a literary critic and translator, is an important figure of Serbian Modernism who holds a special place in the history of Anglo-Serbian literary and cultural ties.15

[email protected]

15 Protić, Pisci kao kritičari, 34.


Glossary

anapest – a metrical foot used in formal poetry. In quantitative meters it consists of two short unstressed syllables followed by a long stressed one.

caesura – a complete stop (pause) in a line of poetry. dactyl – a metrical foot consisting of a long stressed syllable followed by two

short unstressed ones. enjambment – the breaking of a syntactic construction and a semantic whole

(like an utterance) over two or more lines without punctuation indicating a pause.

feminine rhyme – also known as a “double rhyme” and opposed to masculine “single rhyme,” feminine rhyme is a rhyme that matches two or more syllables, usually at the end of respective lines, in which the final syllable or syllables are unstressed. It is not very common in English poetry.

iamb – a disyllabic metrical foot consisting of two syllables, the first un-stressed and the second stressed.

masculine rhyme – a rhyme that matches only one syllable, usually at the end of respective lines. In English prosody, it is often the rhyme lying on the final stressed syllable of a line/verse.

trochee – a disyllabic metrical foot consisting of two syllables: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed. Usually seen as a reverse iamb.

228 Jelena VujiÊ

Appendix

The Blessed Damozel By Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82)

THE blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth

Of waters stilled at even; She had three lilies in her hand,

And the stars in her hair were seven. Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,

No wrought flowers did adorn, But a white rose of Mary’s gift,

For service meetly worn; Her hair that lay along her back

Was yellow like ripe corn. Herseemed she scarce had been a day

One of God’s choristers; The wonder was not yet quite gone

From that still look of hers; Albeit, to them she left, her day

Had counted as ten years.

(To one, it is ten years of years: …Yet now, and in this place,

Surely she leaned o’er me—her hair Fell all about my face…

Nothing: the autumn-fall of leaves. The whole year sets apace.)

It was the rampart of God’s house That she was standing on;


By God built over the sheer depth The which is Space begun;

So high, that looking downward thence She scarce could see the sun.

It lies in Heaven, across the flood Of ether, as a bridge.

Beneath, the tides of day and night With flame and darkness ridge

The void, as low as where this earth Spins like a fretful midge.

Around her, lovers, newly met ’Mid deathless love’s acclaims,

Spoke evermore among themselves Their heart-remember’d names;

And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bowed herself and stooped Out of the circling charm;

Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm,

And the lilies lay as if asleep Along her bended arm.

From the fixed place of Heaven she saw Time like a pulse shake fierce

Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove Within the gulf to pierce

Its path; and now she spoke as when The stars sang in their spheres.

The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather

Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the still weather.

Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together.

230 Jelena VujiÊ

(Ah sweet! Even now, in that bird’s song, Strove not her accents there,

Fain to be hearkened? When those bells Possessed the mid-day air,

Strove not her steps to reach my side Down all the echoing stair?)

‘I wish that he were come to me, For he will come,’ she said.

‘Have I not prayed in Heaven?—on earth, Lord, Lord, has he not pray’d?

Are not two prayers a perfect strength? And shall I feel afraid?

‘When round his head the aureole clings, And he is clothed in white,

I’ll take his hand and go with him To the deep wells of light;

As unto a stream we will step down, And bathe there in God’s sight.

‘We two will stand beside that shrine, Occult, withheld, untrod,

Whose lamps are stirred continually With prayer sent up to God;

And see our old prayers, granted, melt Each like a little cloud.

‘We two will lie i’ the shadow of That living mystic tree

Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be,

While every leaf that His plumes touch Saith His Name audibly.

‘And I myself will teach to him, I myself, lying so,

The songs I sing here; which his voice Shall pause in, hushed and slow,


And find some knowledge at each pause, Or some new thing to know.’

(Alas! we two, we two, thou say’st! Yea, one wast thou with me

That once of old. But shall God lift To endless unity

The soul whose likeness with thy soul Was but its love for thee?)

‘We two,’ she said, ‘will seek the groves Where the lady Mary is,

With her five handmaidens, whose names Are five sweet symphonies,

Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret and Rosalys.

‘Circlewise sit they, with bound locks And foreheads garlanded;

Into the fine cloth white like flame Weaving the golden thread,

To fashion the birth-robes for them Who are just born, being dead.

‘He shall fear, haply, and be dumb: Then will I lay my cheek

To his, and tell about our love, Not once abashed or weak:

And the dear Mother will approve My pride, and let me speak.

‘Herself shall bring us, hand in hand, To Him round whom all souls

Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads Bowed with their aureoles:

And angels meeting us shall sing To their citherns and citoles.

‘There will I ask of Christ the Lord Thus much for him and me:—

232 Jelena VujiÊ

Only to live as once on earth With Love,—only to be,

As then awhile, for ever now Together, I and he.’

She gazed and listened and then said,

Less sad of speech than mild,— ‘All this is when he comes.’ She ceased.

The light thrilled towards her, fill’d With angels in strong level flight.

Her eyes prayed, and she smil’d.

(I saw her smile.) But soon their path Was vague in distant spheres:

And then she cast her arms along The golden barriers,

And laid her face between her hands, And wept. (I heard her tears.)


Blaûena Deva Translated by Svetislav StefanoviÊ (version from 1904/05)

Blaûena Deva Translated by Svetislav StefanoviÊ (version from 1923)

Blažena Deva nagla se na zlatnu Ogradu nebeskih strana; Oči joj behu dublje neg vode Večerom utišana; U kosi joj behu sedam zvezda U ruci do tri krina.

Blažena Deva nagla se na zlatnu Ogradu nebeskih strana; Oči joj behu dublje neg mora Večerom utišana; U kosi joj behu sedam zvezda U ruci tri ljiljana.

Cveće ne reši njenih labavih Rukava niti skuta, Do spreda tek, dar joj od Marije bela Ruža zadenuta; A kosa što niz leđa pala, Ko zrelo žito zuta.

Cveće ne reši njenih labavih Rukava niti skuta, Do spreda tek, dar joj od Marije bela Ruža zadenuta; A kosa što niz leđa pala, Ko zrelo žito zuta.

Njoj beše ko da je tek jedan dan U horu božjih četa; Još čuđenja joj nestalo nije Iz mirna pogleda. Al njezin dan za ostale bez nje, Brojaše deset leta.

Njoj beše ko da je tek jedan dan U horu božjih četa; Još divljenja joj nestalo nije Iz mirnoga pogleda. Al njen dan, za one što ostaše bez nje, Brojaše deset leta.

(Za nekoga je stotina leta.— Al zar ovo nije java, Da se nad mene nagla i kosom Sav lik mi umotava? Ne, ne, to jesenje lišće pada Godina vidno svršava.)

(Za jednoga je stotina leta.— Baš ovo sad nije li java, Da se nad mene nagla i kosom Sav lik mi umotava? Ne, ne, to jesenje lišće pada Godina vidno svršava.)

To beše bedem oko božje kuće Gde njena stojaše noga, Nad dubinama na prostora međi Dignut od samog Boga,

To beše bedem oko božje kuće Gde njena stojaše noga, Iznad dubina, na prostora međi Dignut od samog Boga,

234 Jelena VujiÊ

A tako visoko da nizgledeć’ jedva Dogledat sunca moga.

A tako visoko da nizgledeć’ jedva Sunce se videt moga.

Ko neki most preko mora Etra Leži u nebu samom, Pod njime talasi noći i dana Brazdaju sjajem i tamom Prazninu do dole, gde se zemlja vrti Ko ljutita muva za plamom.

Ko neki most preko mora Etra Leži u nebu samom, Pod njime struje noći i dana Brazdaju sjajem i tamom Prazninu do dole, gde se zemlja vrti Ko ljutita muva za plamom.

Oko nje dragi dočarani Besmrtne ljubavi snovi, Blaženo jedno s drugim veže, S imeni uvek novi, Pokraj nje uzleću Bogu duše Ko tanki plamenovi.

Oko nje svi dragi istom se našli Ljubavi večnoj, blaženi, Jednak’ se međ’ sobom neže sa svoji, Čarobni novi imeni, Pokraj nje prolaze duše k Bogu K’o ognji uzneseni.

Al ona je tiho ostavila Čarobni krug im ceo Pa se na naslon nagla da ovaj Od grudi joj posta vreo, A po njenoj ruci polego svaki Ko usnuo ljiljan beo.

Al’ ona je tiho ostavila Čarobni krug im ceo Nagla se na naslon dok ovaj posta Od grudi njenih vreo, A po njenoj ruci polego svaki Ko usnuo ljiljan beo.

S neba je gledala Vreme gde Što se u besni vali Kroz svetove treslo. Pogledi njeni Da tok mu preseku pali Tad zborit poče ko da su kruzi Zvezdani pevati stali.

S neba je gledala Vreme gde se K’o besno uzdrhatao Puls kroz svetove trese. Njen pogled Na struju mu, sekući pao Tad zborit poče ko da je svet Zvezdani pevati stao.

Sunce je zašlo, a mesec beše Ko pero il bela vlas, Lepršajuć se daleko strujom Kroz tihi ovaj čas, Ko glas u zvezda kad zapevaju, Čuo se njezin glas.

Sunce je zašlo, a mesec beše K’o pero il bela vlas, Lepršajuć’ se daleko strujom Kroz tihi ovaj čas, Ko glas u zvezda kad zapevaju, Čuo se njezin glas.

(Ah, drago? Nije l’ ta pesma ptice, Baš njenog zvuka blažena

(Ah, drago? Nisu l’ u toj pesmi ptice, Naglasci jeknuli njeni,


Što ja je čujem? S tih zvona zvukom Sir vazduha, podneva Ne silazi l’ ona u susret meni Uz odjek stepena?)

Tek jedva čujni? S ovim zvonom zvukom Kroz vazduh podnevni, sneni, Ne silazi l’ ona s tih stepenica Dršćućih u susret meni?)

Rekla je: Željna sam da već dođe Jer on će doći znam. Nisam se dosta molila na nebu? I on na zemlji sam? Nisu l’ dve molitve dosta jake? Zar strah da osećam?

Rekla je: Htela bih da je već došo, Jer on će doći, znam. Nisam se zar dosta molila na nebu? I on na zemlji sam? Nisu l’ dve molitve dosta jake? Zar strah da osećam?

Kad bude sav obučen u belo S nimbusom oko glave, Ja ću ga za ruke držeć’ povesti K izvoru svetlosti prave I u nj’ ćemo sići pred licem Boga, Kao u vale plave.

Kad ga budem imala sa oreolom I svega obučenog u belo, Ja ću ga za ruke uzeti i poći Na svetlosti duboko vrelo, I sić’ćemo u nj’, i kupati se, U videlu Boga, zacelo.

Pa ćemo stojat kraj sakrivena Neslužena oltara, Na kome svaka molitva Bogu Vijuge plamenu stvara I oblakom dima biva svaka Molitva naša stvara.

Pa ćemo stati kraj onog skrivenog Neophođenog oltara, Gde svaka molitva poslata Bogu Kandila večna stvara I u dim se topi ispunjena svaka Molitva naša stvara.

I ležaćemo u senci onog Mističnog drveta živa, U čijoj kruni tajanstvenoj se Ponekad Golub skriva, Gde šum svakog lista od njegovog pera U njegovo ime se sliva.

I ležaćemo u senci onog Mističnog drveta živa, U čijoj kruni tajanstvenoj se Ponekad Golub skriva, Gde šum svakog lista od njegovog pera Ime mu čujnim biva.

Pa ću ga učit pesme što ovde Pevam ležeći s njim, A on će me prekidati svojim glasom, Tihim dubokim, I pri tom ćemo se uvek upoznat S nečim neznanim.

Ja ću ga učiti ležeći ovako, Pesme što ovde pevamo, A on će ih prekidati svojim glasom, Stišano, polagano, I pri svakom prekidu poznaće nešto Novo, što ima da znamo.

236 Jelena VujiÊ

(Nas dvoje, avaj, nas dvoje kažeš! Jest, jedno si bila sa mnome, Odavno nekad; al hoće li se uzdić K jedinstvu beskrajnome Moj duh što samo ljubavlju za te Bejaše sličan tvome?)

(Nas dvoje, avaj, nas dvoje kažeš! Jest, jedno si bila sa mnome, Odavno nekad; al hoće li Gospod K jedinstvu beskrajnome Uzdići duh moj što tek ljubavlju za te Bejaše sličan tvome?)

Nas dvoje ćemo tražiti hlada Gde j’ sveta gospa Marija S pet svojih devica, čija imena Ko pet su simfonija: Gertruda, Ruža, Magdalena, Greta i Cecijija.

Nas dvoje ćemo tražiti senke Gde sveta je gospa Marija S pet svojih devica, čija imena Ko pet su simfonija: Gertruda, Ruža, Magdalena, Greta i Cecijija.

U krugu one sede, a venci im Uvojke rese te U belom ko plamen odelu tkaju, Konce zlaćane Da povojnicu ovom otkaju Što rodi se kad mre.

U krugu one sede sa vezanim Kosama, a njina cela Pod vencima su, a zlatne konce, U platna k’o plamen bela Tkaju, da otkaju za mrtvorođene Povojna odela.

On će zanemit i bojaće se, A ja ću moj obraz naslonit Uz njegov i pričati o ljubavi našoj, Neoslabljenoj, nit Postiđenoj; a majka će hvalit Moj govor ponosit.

On će zanemit i bojaće se, A ja ću mu obraz svoj Naslonit, i pričati o ljubavi našoj, Nikad klonuloj, Ni postiđenoj, a majka će hvalit Ponosit govor moj.

I ona će nas za ruke sama Odvesti onom, pred kim Sve duše kleče i bezbroj glava S nimbusom zlađanim; A anđeli srećuć’ nas pevaće na svojim Harfama tananim.

I ona će nas spojenih ruku Odvesti onom sama, Pred kim sve duše kleče i bezbroj Glava sa oreolama A anđeli srećuć nas pevaće i svirat Na svojim citolama.

I tu ću moliti od Hrista Boga Da to nam samo da, Da živimo kao nekad na zemlji S ljubavlju—samo, da

I tu ću moliti od Hrista Boga Da to nam samo da, Da živimo kao nekad na zemlji S ljubavlju—samo, da


Ko nekad ono da budemo uvek Zajedno—on i ja.

Ko nekad ono da budemo uvek Zajedno—on i ja.

Pogleda, oslušnu, pa onda reče, Govor joj setan i blag: “To sve kad dođe on.” Tu presta. Pun anđela zadrhta zrak. U njenom pogledu molba. (Videh joj osmeh drag.)

Pogleda, oslušnu, pa onda reče, Govor joj setan i blag: “To sve kad dođe on.” Tu presta. Pun anđela zadrhta zrak. Oči se njene mole. I smeše. (Ja videh njen osmeh drag.)

Al tek što anđela izgubi hod U sfere udaljene, A ona pruži niz ogradu zlatnu Ruke raširene. I spusti međ njih glavu. Pa briznu. (Čuo sam suze njene.)

Al tek što anđela izgubi hod U sfere udaljene, A ona pruži niz ogradu zlatnu Ruke raširene. I spusti međ njih glavu. Pa briznu. (Čuo sam suze njene.)

Figure 1. Dr. Svetislav Stefanović [Source: Unknown]


Tears of the Prodigal Daughter: Homoeroticism in Leposava MijuökoviÊ’s Prose*

éarka SvirËev

University of Belgrade

Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me, Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature…

Sappho1

In the context of the poetic paradigm of Serbian literature in the first decade of the 20th century, it would be expected that Leposava Mijušković’s2 homoerotic prose provoked a kind of reception shock for readers and pri-marily critics. In the period 1905–1910, Mijušković published four stories in

* I express my deep gratitude to Dr. Svetlana Tomić, professor at Alfa University, Belgrade, Dr. Lilien F. Robinson, professor at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and Dr. Ljubica D. Popovich, professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, for their helpful comments, suggestions, and support during my work on this study. 1 Sappho, “Fragments, on Love and Desire,” VII, in Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. A. S. Kline, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Sappho.htm#_Toc76357051. 2 Little is known about Leposava Mijušković’s life. Born in Jagodina in 1882, she was edu-cated in the Girls’ College in Belgrade. In the period 1901–04 she studied at Zurich University, but it is not known exactly what she studied. Mijušković was a socialist and one of the few highly educated women of that time. She worked as a teacher for a short time and was also an associate of several women’s magazines. She died under mysterious circumstances in 1910. During her lifetime, Mijušković published only four stories: “Utisci života” (Impressions of Life), “Blizu smrti” (Near to Death), “Bolna ljubav” (Painful Love), and “Priča o duši sa večitom čežnjom” (A Story about the Eternally Longing Soul) in 1906 and 1907. In 1910 she published two lyrics, “Zemlji” (To Earth) and “Misli” (Thoughts). All papers published during her lifetime were signed only with the initials L.M. In 1996 her stories were published in a book for the first time. Leposava Mijušković’s biography is taken from the database Knjiženstvo—Theory and History of Women’s Writing in Serbian until 1915. The article is available at http://knjizenstvo.etf.bg.ac.rs/en/authors/leposava-mijuskovic (accessed 23 March 2012). I extend my thanks to Jelena Milinković, the author of Mijušković’s biography and bib-liography at the aforementioned site, for her assistance in solving my perplexity about Mijušković’s biography.

242 éarka SvirËev

Srpski književni glasnik (Serbian Literary Gazette), which was the literary institution par excellence at that time. In this journal the major authority of critical thought, Jovan Skerlić (1887–1914), marked Mijušković’s work as one of the most important literary phenomena. After 1910, her work was covered by decades of oblivion; a fact that raises the question of the motives for this “silence.” This silence is even more surprising because Skerlić’s criti-cism, both positive and negative, was a seminal reference in all the later research of literary history. Did Skerlić perhaps overestimate Mijušković’s narrative gift, or was he asking the researchers to take up a challenge for which they were not yet ready? Mijušković’s prose is still a challenge for researchers. On the one hand, it opens chapters of Serbian literature which have so far not been researched and have been only partially illuminated. On the other hand, it suggests the need for a reconceptualization of Serbian literature courses and a new perspective on the literary tradition.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the aspects of Mijušković’s work which are not interpreted or have been interpreted insufficiently so far. What I have in mind is homoeroticism, its position in the narrative network and the ideological outcomes that it implies. The examination of homoeroticism in Mijušković’s prose suggests a different contextualization of her work within the Serbian prose tradition.

Leposava Mijušković’s work corresponds to the birth of modern Serbian prose. In fact, she has been credited as its founder. Skerlić pointed out that “her prose may represent a new direction in literature.”3 Decades later, Dragiša Vitošević (1939–87) placed her next to Veljko Milićević (1888–1929) as an innovator and one of the first modernists in Serbian literature,4 noting that in her prose everything is new: the themes, the narrative technique, and the style.5 Slavica Garonja-Radovanac (1957), in her study dedicated to Mijušković’s prose, also puts the author among the pioneers of Serbian modernism because of her “ innovativeness of themes and characters (free love, a rebellious woman, homoeroticism, self-destruction, suicide, insanity, intellectual characters), as well as literary technique (automatic writing, fragment, subconsciousness).”6 3 Jovan Skerlić, “Srpska književnost 1906,” in Pisci i knjige, vol. 4 (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1964), 298. 4 “U sklopu onovremene srpske proze i njenog ‘evropeiziranja,’ Leposava Mijušković i mladi Veljko Milićević … prvi su i glavni novatori i modernisti.” Dragiša Vitošević, Srpski književni glasnik, 1901–1914 (Novi Sad: Matica srpska; Belgrade: Institut za književnost, 1990), 272. 5 “Druga priča, Blizu smrti, bila je takođe sasvim nova: i temom, i pripovedačkim postupkom, i stilom” (ibid., 270). 6 Slavica Garonja-Radovanac, “Leposava Mijušković—začetnica srpske moderne,” in Žena u srpskoj književnosti (Novi Sad: Dnevnik, 2010), 67.

Homoeroticism in Leposava MijuökoviÊ’s Prose 243

Leposava Mijušković’s prose indeed represented a novelty in every sense, even to the extent that some aspects of her prose remain insufficiently ex-plored in terms of their interpretation. Mijušković simultaneously initiates the queer identity in Serbian literature and processes it in a way that becomes communicative only to future readers. Hence, perhaps, the absence of recep-tion shock and the “silence” which enveloped her work in the ensuing dec-ades. The erotic in her fiction gets outflanked by understanding of the motifs related to Serbian modernism. Therefore, the true nature of her rebellious fe-male characters remains unperceived in its ultimate consequences. However, the erotic, articulated in a non-heterosexual matrix, is essentially the node of her first two published works of fiction. It is provocative enough to be an im-petus for the reinterpretation of Mijušković’s prose in the context of the Ser-bian modern literary tradition. The stories “Utisci života” (Impressions of Life, 1905) and “Blizu smrti” (Near to Death, 1906), which form a single nar-rative unit, are the confessional-diary dramatization of “gender trouble” as defined by Judith Butler7 and a literary treatment of homoeroticism and gen-der identity behind the articulation of the gynomorphic “Otherness” that is rarely encountered in Serbian literature.

The mapping of the erotic in Mijušković’s prose ranges from complete suppression to a precise name-giving. The reception of her prose can also serve as a contribution to the cultural history and testimony of the treatment of gender Otherness. Skerlić did not speak specifically about the eroticism in Mijušković’s prose. However, in writing about the common features of the works of writers of her generation, he emphasized that what connects them all is the will to live with broader perspectives and “more flourishing of the whole human nature”8 and that they have “sensuality, which can upset forty-year-old virgins and those who deem that the books are written for the pensions for young girls.”9 Skerlić included Mijušković among the most 7 Judith Butler rejects naturalized, essentialist gender identities and the illusion of a primary and internal gender-specific self. She considers gender as a performative act, contingent upon constructed meanings. The effect of gender implies that the performance is repeated, that it repeats the meanings which are already socially established, and those who do not form their gender properly are punished. She elaborates the idea of gender identity in the first chapter of Gender Trouble: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.” Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33. 8 Jovan Skerlić, “Mlada srpska poezija i proza,” in Pisci i knjige, 328. 9 Ibid.

244 éarka SvirËev

interesting young prose writers. Although one cannot overlook the potential of Skerlić’s far-reaching insight, what seems to be at work here is the so-called gender neutralization. By emphasizing the poetic features that correspond to the dominant (male) course, Skerlić ignores specific meanings determined by specific gender identity. Dragiša Vitošević names the “brand new theme”10 brought by Mijušković’s prose as “the relationship between two women, a passionate friendship” (odnos dveju žena, strasno prijateljstvo),11 noting that “perhaps such a relationship has not been depicted in such a deep and modern, almost fateful way.”12 Despite the dilemma of whether to understand the qualifier “almost” as a deciding one in regard to the intensity or predestina-tion, it is undeniable that Vitošević sensed the nature of the passionate friend-ship at the center of Mijušković’s prose, but he did not use its real name to identify it. In Živorad Đorđević’s afterword to the first collection of Mijušković’s prose and poetry he points out that “this prose speaks about love in a manner a bit confusing for that time,”13 and “it is crisscrossed by a fine, airy cobweb of female, almost erotic tenderness” (premrežena je finom, vazdušastom paučinom ženske, skoro erotske nežnosti).14 It remains unfath-omable to me what the phrase “airy cobweb of female, almost erotic ten-derness” means, whether it alludes to the instability of women’s eroticism or to Mijušković’s subtlety in expressing the same. In neither case do I find support for this statement in Mijušković’s prose. In a recent work devoted to the author, her eroticism is explicitly labeled as homoeroticism, and more precisely, lesbian homoeroticism.15

“Utisci života” and “Blizu smrti” are complementary on many levels—thematic, stylistic, genre, and conceptual. These stories thematize the dishar-monious experience of the selfhood of the anxious narrative “I.” At the thematic core is also the desire for a free life, which is being hampered by the conservative environment. The confrontation with (repressive) social values and patriarchal world views is the thematic topos. In both stories the author reaches for the intimate genre of confession. According to genre choice, the

10 Vitošević, Srpski književni glasnik, 270. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Živorad Đorđević, “Leposava Mijušković, junakinja našeg doba,” in Leposava Mijušković, Priče o duši, ed. Živorad Đorđević and Dobrica Milićević (Belgrade: Radnička štampa, 1996), 86. 14 Ibid., 87. 15 See Garonja-Radovanac, “Leposava Mijušković,” 67; and Jelena Milinković, “Ljubav kao performativni čin u pripovetkama Leposave Mijušković,” Knjiženstvo: Časopis za studije književnosti, roda i kulture 1, no. 1 (2011), http://www.knjizenstvo.rs/magazine.php?text=11.


narrative perspective becomes subjective and the narration moves to the topography of the narrator’s inner world. The stories are additionally intri-guing since the narrator is female, leading to the discovery of female subjec-tivity in Serbian literature. Mijušković’s predecessors also debated the social norms which inhibit women. However, in Mijušković’s prose the rebellious attitude is devoid of collective and social dimensions of engagement. The drama of insurrection takes place on a chamber stage. The problem of gender is primarily seen as an existential problem. Most strikingly, the issue of gen-der was developed in correlation with eros. Eros in Mijušković’s prose is a source of frustration, fear, and agony. However, the detection of the ambiva-lence of eros and the refusal to deny it further complicates the semantic layer of Mijušković’s prose. The sequence of sharpened and ambiguous categories, and their counterpoint affluence, conducts the rhythm of her prose.

The story “Utisci života” is an intimate confession of a disappointed and unfulfilled young woman. The narrative structure is suggested by the title. The girl’s confession is articulated in fragments, and the impressions are linked by means of association. Time past, a time of joy, and time present, a time of grief, are opposed through clips of confession that have a filmic qual-ity. Although the author has signed the “generic pact”16 that filled the horizon of expectations of the public, it is used for the articulation of content that goes beyond that horizon.

The thematic backbone of “Utisci života” is the sudden and involuntary separation from a loved one. This separation conditions a bisection of the being that leads to the suicide attempt of the narrator. The author proceeds from the genre of the love story, a genre ranked low in the traditional hierarchy, to her own version of it. The love story is perceived as a typically female genre, trivial and easy, but Mijušković breaks with tradition. Her love triangle involves two women and a man, but the drama of rupture and disillusionment is compounded by the fact that the “friend” who leaves the intimate world of the narrator is her girlfriend. Thus, a woman leaves another woman for a man. Mijušković uses the conventional template of the love story to illuminate a homoerotic relationship. This homoerotic relationship is the node of the narrative texture that involves existential problems of self-delusion and alienation. The narrator’s life with her girlfriend in the past is

16 The term “generic pact” is used by Magdalena Koch to describe the test of Serbian female modernist writers in the intimate genres (confession, letter, diary). Women writers of the early 20th century were adjusted to the genre awareness of the epoch because in this way they could legitimize their work on the literary scene. But, they used conventional form to express subversive contents. See Magdalena Koch, Kada sazremo kao kultura…: Stvaralaštvo srpskih spisateljica na početku XX veka, trans. Jelena Jović (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012).

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presented in images that abound in metaphors of stars and the universe. Her life after their separation, in contrast, is described using metaphors of mud.

The narrator encrypts the true nature of their relationship, masking sexu-ality in the so-called neoclassical form of Greek love.17 Thus she reduces the erotic charge and emphasizes the intellectual nature of the relationship, painting it as a relationship which was no more than ordinary. She sees her friend “with an expression of fervent enthusiasm for everything beautiful and sublime” (sa izrazom žarka oduševljena za sve lepo i uzvišeno).18 As the narrative unfolds, the erotic charge that imbues their friendship is revealed. Homoeroticism is masked not only in the Greek ideal of love but in the narra-tive’s intertextual dialogue with Christianity as well. The narrator’s experi-ence of love is based on purity and selfless giving. Love elevates and enno-bles a person. An individual without love is empty. The narrator’s reflections correspond to the apostle Paul’s words on love in his First Epistle to the Corinthians. However, references to Christianity in “Utisci života” are not only invoked in the concept of love, for Christianity is a vertical of values against which identity in traditional culture is a scale. It is a kind of meto-nymic projection of patriarchy. The author explicitly expresses her own rebellion through the narrator’s polemic with the convention of marriage, the imperative of childbirth, and the imperative opposition between spiritual and physical, which is a substantive Christian norm.

The separation of the two women is caused by the narrator’s realization that her girlfriend is her “noble friend, an ordinary woman with all the pas-sions, and false, all false!”19 Namely, the narrator learns that her friend is get-ting married. This news totally changes the narrator’s former ideals and hopes, inflicting untold pain and decentralizing her. The marriage is seen by the narrator as a betrayal and the beginning of her absolute loneliness. She exclaims, “Alone, all alone in the surroundings that I cannot comprehend and neither can it comprehend me.”20 The narrator confesses being aware of her gender inability to fit into the social mainstream. The narrator considers her friend’s marriage to be a false one, a mimicry. Within the framework of mar-riage, the narrator sees her friend’s concession to social norms, that is, the 17 This technique of masking sexuality will be, for example, used by Rastko Petrović in his African itineraries. This is also suggested by Slavica Garonja-Radovanac, who calls the parting of the two women a “Sapphian tragedy.” To be more precise, Garonja-Radovanac used this phrase to characterize Mijušković’s separation from her friend Milica Rakić, a parting that, according to this author, served as a documentary weft for the story “Utisci života” (Radovanac, “Leposava Mijušković,” 74). 18 Mijušković, “Utisci života,” in Đorđević and Milićević, eds., Priče o duši, 18. 19 Ibid., 20. 20 Ibid., 24.


acceptance of women’s prescribed social role. The narrator finds herself ex-iled from the realm specified for the legitimate practice of identity because she refuses to capitulate: “By what right does this life, and this society, re-quire from me to live for it only? What can give me the compensation for it?… What right does it have to ask from me to annihilate myself, to leave my dearest desires, to burn out within myself?”21 The narrator’s “dearest desires” can be understood as a desire for deflection, for countering patriarchal-coded female identity, which her friend betrays by accepting the “social contract.” Moreover, her questions reflect the tragic dimension of a social-outsider existence.

In the narrative fragments of explicit rhetorical charge and pathetic into-nation, sorrow, anger, and self-blame alternate. The narrator’s psycho-emo-tional state after the separation reflects melancholy, into which she sinks deeper and deeper. The melancholy is recognized as an important factor in the formation of gender identity. In the drama of the narrator’s split identity there can be recognized melancholic denial and preservation of homosexuality in the process of gender formation in a heterosexual framework.22 The manifes-tation of melancholy is one of the textual “cracks” that reveals the falsity of the friendship’s pretense of asexuality. The narrator’s struggle to stabilize herself can be understood in light of this melancholy:

I see what I need to do in order not to perish—I must get married! To love my husband, to have children, to have a family, to be an obedient slave to the world—and of that family, yes…. Oh! Oh!… Hold on,

21 “S kakvim pravom traži od mene ovaj život, ovo društvo, da ja živim za njega samo? Šta mi daje u naknadu za to?… S kakvim pravom hoće da ja satrem svoje ja, da svoje najmilije težnje ostavim da sagore u meni samoj?” (ibid.). 22 Compare: “As a set of sanctions and taboos, the ego ideal regulates and determines masculine and feminine identification. Because identifications substitute for object relations, and identifications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition. This prohibition sanctions and regulates discrete gendered identity and the law of heterosexual desire” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 63); and “Consider that the refusal of homosexual cathexis, desire and aim together, a refusal both compelled by social taboo and appropriated through developmental stages, results in a melancholic structure which effectively encloses that aim and object within the corporeal space or ‘crypt’ established through an abiding denial. If the heterosexual denial of homosexuality results in melancholia and if melancholia operates through incorporation, then the disavowed homosexual love is preserved through the cultivation of an oppositionally defined gender identity” (ibid., 69).

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girl, hold on—I shouted to myself aloud. It’s all well and pretty, but I must first be reconciled with it.23

Reconciliation, however, is impossible. The narrator sends a “scream,” the “scream” symbolizing the desire to overcome existential narrowness. Yet, she stays absolutely isolated and lonely. The narrator’s sense of emptiness and loneliness assumes cosmic proportions, and she exclaims, “The dark outside, the dark in the soul, the dark everywhere!”24 In a delirious state, she denies the existence of God, who ignores her prayers and suffering. The experience of nihilism becomes the main feature of the narrator’s experience of the world. Even nowadays what the reader finds surprising is the author’s will-ingness to deprive her fictional world of an existential stronghold, whether of a sacred or profane provenance, and to highlight a modern narrative self with incredible lucidity.

The rebellion against social norms is motivated not only by the aspira-tions of a woman who does not agree to the societally imposed roles of wife and mother, but is motivated also by the experience of one who is unable to articulate her identity at all. The narrator is in a position of double powerless-ness: “unable to overcome the protest of thriving life in myself against the obvious tyranny over it” (nemoćna da više savlađujem protest nabujalog života u sebi protiv te očite tiranije nad njim).25 She is, at the same time, unable to articulate publicly this “thriving life,” being in a collision with her own instincts and sexuality. The narrator’s corporeality cannot be reconciled with the heterosexual pattern legitimatized by the marital model. However, in “Utisci života” the narrator consistently denies her corporeality, giving primacy to the spiritual principle. At the same time, she becomes aware that she betrays the spiritual principle as it is understood in a traditional context. The impossibility of gender identification within socially codified norms takes the narrator to “the uninhabitability zone.”26 Thus, death in the omnipresent 23 “I ja vidim šta mi treba raditi da ne propadnem,—da se udam! Da volim svog muža, da rađam decu, da zasnujem porodicu, da budem pokorni rob celog tog sveta—te porodice, da…. Oh! Oh!… Stani devojko, stani malo—viknula sam sama sebi glasno. Sve je to lepo i krasno, ali se najpre treba izmiriti sa tim” (Mijušković, “Utisci života,” 25). The stories “Utisci života” and “Blizu smrti” are extremely open to psychoanalytic interpretations. However, their breadth surpasses the scope of this work. Jelena Milinković analyzes gender melancholy in the structure of characters in Mijušković’s fiction, relying on psychoanalytic interpretations. See Milinković, “Ljubav kao performativni čin.” 24 Mijušković, “Utisci života,” 27. 25 Ibid., 24. 26 Butler designated “the uninhabitability zone” as an area of despised beings. Despised beings are those beings that the law does not recognize as the subject. These are the beings who are


darkness is, in fact, seen as the light. It is not experienced as nothingness. On the contrary, death is fulfillment, an epistemologically relevant experience. The final scene is the encounter with personified death. The narrator surren-ders to the ecstatic embrace of death. Death appears as a woman to whom the narrator attributes a saintly beauty, just as she once did to her friend. This hallucinatory vision on the existential brink is, in fact, psychological and emo-tional compensation. Leposava Mijušković could speak about the forbidden and taboo only through the discourse of the fantastic.

The story “Blizu smrti” thematizes a recovery in the hospital after a sui-cide attempt and an introspective confrontation with an extreme experience. As in the case of the story “Utisci života,” the interpretative results gravitate around the resolution of “gender trouble.” The reflective-emotional horizon of the story oscillates between feelings of rejection, maladjustment, existential angst, and irrational feelings of guilt. The title covers both the corporeality and psycho-emotional experience of the narrator. It can be interpreted in a lit-eral and in a symbolic sense. The death experience in the story is a symbolically rich motif, and it is an interpretive challenge for readers.

Živorad Đorđević separates the two dominant motifs: “the motif of the father as the embodiment of needed protection and the motif of a saved soul, which by the act of suicide is liberated of everything that dirtied it in a real and now former life.”27 Đorđević reads “Blizu smrti” as a story about “the human need to live and experience all that life pushes in front of him as an obstacle.”28 Garonja-Radovanac, following the same idea, describes this story as “the only prose of Mijušković’s with an optimistic ending, where the will to live predominates.”29 She points out that “the only time the soul feels good is when it is ‘liberated’ and out of the body, beyond the bounds of material existence,” and this is “the most important experience of the individual and the morale of this prose.”30 The end of the story can be viewed in an optimis-tic key as the renewal of the narrator’s life force. However, the narrator’s healing is not the fruit of reconciliation with her father, who embodies the barred from the area populated by subjects and who are denied the right to participate in politics (for example, marginalized genders). Although they should be “invisible,” they emerge as “terrifying identifications,” as a condition for being to become subject every time it questions its own personality. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). The settling the score with herself in the story Utisci života can be understood as a confrontation with “terrifying identifications,” which her own queer alterity at one point suggests to the narrator. 27 Đorđević, “Leposava Mijušković, junakinja našeg doba,” 88–89. 28 Ibid., 88. 29 Garonja-Radovanac, “Leposava Mijušković,” 83. 30 Ibid.

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paradigm of social values, as previous interpreters of Mijušković’s work have suggested.

Having awakened in a hospital bed after surgery, through flashbacks the narrator goes back to the night when a shot was fired from a revolver. In the hallucinatory images she revives the reflexive-philosophical dialogue between the Soul and the Body that took place in the “torn, disturbed being” that night. Their dialogue reveals the source of the narrator’s self-destructiveness:

You must not deceive yourself more! The voice of the Soul com-mands me. Where is your consciousness?… Where’s the pride of a conscious being?… To deceive myself!… To deceive myself! Repeats the voice of the Body with the most bitter irony. Why not deceive? Who else does not deceive himself? Who dares to believe that everything is exactly as it seems?… Is it not true that thought and feeling deceive as well as my senses? You have to get used to bearing the pressure of necessity, the pressures of life. And consciously, and consciously deceive your-self you must, because you have to live!… One should live!… Do you understand, one should live!… What about me? Do you not feel sorry for me? Sobs the voice of the Soul. Oh, I’m sorry for you, my dear Soul! I pity you so much!—I say in a crying voice.31

The Soul resists the hegemony of the Body, the deception of urges, insisting on consciousness, on the “pride of a conscious being” as cultured and disci-plined. The Body responds that everything is a deception, thought and feeling, and that the Soul has to get used to bearing “the pressure of necessity, the pressure of life,” while yelling that one should live. A cleaved being inflicts a lethal shot to itself in order to save its soul. Death is in this place devoid of any lyrical or idealized note. It is rendered by a naturalistic image of the

31 “Ti ne smeš da obmanjuješ više sebe! zapoveda mi glas Duše. Gde ti je svest?… Gde ti je ponos svesnog čoveka?… Da obmanjujem sebe!… Da obmanjujem sebe! ponavlja sa najgorčom ironijom glas Tela. Zašto da ne obmanjujem? Ko se još ne obmanjuje? Ko sme da veruje da je sve baš onako kako se čini?… Zar ne obmanjuje i misao i osećanje, isto tako, kao i moja čula? Ti se moraš navići da snosiš pritisak neophodnoga, pritisak života. I svesno, i svesno baš moraš obmanjivati sebe, jer treba živeti!… Treba živeti!… Razumeš li, treba živeti!… A mene? Zar ti mene nije žao? Jeca glas Duše. Oh žao i te je, Dušo moja! Tebe mi je žao mnogo!—govorim ja plačno.”

Leposava Mijušković, “Blizu smrti,” in Đorđević and Milićević, eds., Priče o duši, 31.


decomposing body. The impossibility of existence is attached to the paradigm of corporeality, through which the body manifests itself as abjection par excellence.32

In the first part of the story, the author sharply contrasts eros and ethos. Only through ethos can existence be transcended. Corporeality threatens and harasses, corporeality being traditionally associated with the feminine as op-posed to the rational and masculine. The coupling of body and the feminine symbolizes evasiveness, danger, dirt. The feminine and corporeality should be tamed, disciplined, and regulated.

In a kind of astral vision of her body, the narrator’s own experience of corporeality is shaped in a Cartesian spirit: “I can see my Body clearly … limp, helpless, protruding in bed, the Body … the mass of washed-out, bloody meat.… How awful!… How gruesome! Yuck!… And shaking with disgust, I would like not to look at it anymore.”33 The body is a source of anxiety; it de-stabilizes and endangers order and coherence. The body becomes a projection screen of the narrator’s traumatic confrontation with her own sexuality: “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them.”34 The narrator sees her own body as some-thing that radically undermines something that otherwise should be a stable and unequivocal order of the economy of desire. Thus, the corporeality, de-sire, and sexuality that were incompatible with a well-established system of heterosexual values lead to ultimate frontiers. The narrator, smitten under the burden of abjection, denies her being.

The abundance of modernity contained in Leposava Mijušković’s prose is also revealed in correspondence with the “fascination with the abjection” that is inherent to modern literature. Julia Kristeva notes that modern literature, that is, literature that denies religion and morality and points directly at their violence and absurdity, originated from “the untenable aspects of perverse or superego positions.”35 Modern literature, moreover, goes beyond the opposi-tion of the categories pure/impure, prohibition/sin, and morality/immorality 32 The concept of abjection in the work rests on Julia Kristeva’s definition: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 33 “Vidim lepo svoje Telo … mlitavo, bespomoćno, ispruženo u krevetu, Telo … tu masu ispranoga, krvavoga mesa.… Kako je gadno!… Kako je grozno!… Uh!… i stresajući se sa odvratnošću, htela bih da ga ne gledam više” (Mijušković, “Blizu smrti,” 33). 34 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 15. 35 Ibid., 16.

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and surpasses them.36 In the end of Mijušković’s narration, the introduced contrast between the soul and body is not dismissed in a way that implies the narrator’s suicide attempt.

The dichotomies soul/body, clean/dirty, and the imperative of the soul’s salvation evoke Christian heritage. The phenomenon of abjection reveals it-self in the act of negation of corporeality and imposes its cogitation through the lens of the Christian concept of sin. The equating of the body with dirt in the aforecited section is equivalent to the evangelization process of internaliz-ing sin. The abjection is not something that will jeopardize the being from the outside, something that can be implemented into the body as in the Old Testa-ment, but the being itself that becomes its original, a threatening alterity,37 expressed through an improper act. The body becomes one of the epicenters of the New Testament’s hamartiology and is equated with the drive related to greed and lust—“those various descriptions of sin converge on the flesh or rather on what might be called, by anticipation, an overwhelming release of drives, unrestrained by the symbolic.”38 The narrator’s rift is just triggered by the knowledge that instinctive nature is incompatible with the paradigmatic matrix. In order to be purified of her sins, she must recognize and verbalize her own abjection, because sin is redeemed by the Word. For Christianity the speech and confession are conditions sine qua non for purification from abjec-tion and atonement, i.e., forgiveness. Thus, it is critical when the narrator’s speech stops.

Examining the confession mode in Mijušković’s stories, Jelena Milinković draws on Foucault and views the autobiographical narrative as one of the key successors of Christian confession, specificum of Western civiliza-tion, a means for establishing the truth within scientia sexualis as opposed to ars sexualis. Milinković points out that the confession can be interpreted in two ways—in the liberating and the restricted sense. From the formal stand-point, the confession is liberating because it allows the formation and expres-sion of the hero’s internal contents. From the position of the hero’s motivation to confess, the confession is a negative phenomenon. The hero is forced to confess in order to explain the exceeds of the norm. However, confession 36 Ibid. 37 Alterity is a philosophical term meaning “otherness,” strictly being in the sense of the other of two (Latin alter). In the phenomenological tradition it is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed, and it implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self and consequently to assume the existence of an alternative viewpoint. The concept was established by Emmanuel Levinas in a series of essays collected under the title Alterity and Transcendence. See Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 38 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 124.


does not bring them any relief or forgiveness. On the contrary, confession takes them to madness or death. Milinković concludes that the confession in Mijušković’s prose does not fulfill its function as established by Christianity. The only exception for Milinković is “Blizu smrti,” in which an optimistic ending is implied.39 The fact is that the “optimistic ending” is implied, yet the question is from whose position it can be seen as a positive—the father’s or the daughter’s. The conclusion of Milinković’s stimulating interpretations of confessional genre seems to me equivalent to the finale of the story “Blizu smrti.” Although forgiveness is only deceptive, relief is present, just not in the key which dominated in previous interpretations of the story. Mijušković se-duces her readers with a penchant for paradoxes. But her openness to experience existential paradoxes makes her prose a reading challenge.

The narrator is visited in the hospital by her girlfriend, the girlfriend who provoked the emotional state which resulted in a suicide attempt. The friend’s arrival is one of the narrative links to “Utisci života” and an allusion to the homoerotic nature of the relationship. The narrator refuses communication with her girlfriend. The key visit, however, is the father’s visit. “Why would they stop me from being happy even now?”40 is the narrator’s first thought after meeting her loved ones: “I felt that they were now here only to force upon me that from which I am now so far and what so disgusted me … so disgusted; and to tear away from me what made me endlessly happy.”41 The reproachful glance she sees in their faces is not a rebuke addressed to the attempted suicide but that of failed expectations. To her loved ones her suicide attempt signified a refusal to play the identity role. The narrator wants to deflect, but their presence again impels her to think about herself in the context of the spiritual/corporeality opposition. It is a rebuke because the narrator negates the body, which is the symbolic synonym of corporeality, standardized by the reproductive function and female identity. The narrator’s re-legitimating implies the acceptance of social inhibitions and the proscrip-tion of regulatory norms. The narrator of “Utisci života” and “Blizu smrti” tried to reshape gender formative significations, and she was punished. It remains an open question how much the hug with her father at the end of the narration represents her return, which would mean ensuring ontological status in the field of socially recognized beings. Does the author only gender-modify the motif of the return of the prodigal son? The event that precedes the episode of “reconciliation”—the narrator’s dream—provides the ambiguity to the final stage. The narrator’s dream questions the confession mode or cathar- 39 Milinković, “Ljubav kao performativni čin.” 40 Mijušković, “Blizu smrti,” 34. 41 Ibid.

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sis inherent to Christianity that is attributed to it and encourages me to view the episode from a new angle.

The narrator’s dream in dithyramb rhythm and idyllic landscape invokes Sapphian iconography into its circle. The dream, full of impulsive outbursts and bodily pleasures, opens up the narrator to her own alterity. The narrator becomes ecstatically intimate with alterity, intimate in a way of mystical experiences, which are articulated in oneiric and hallucinatory dimensions:

And there is the crowd of happy, exuberant youth, in a hurry to go somewhere, and, it seems, I am there too!… This healthy, vigorous joy and youth fascinates me…. In the distance flare pale-green wooded hills against the young spring sun, spilling over into countless shades and irresistibly luring to themselves…. And we hasten there!… The deaf, sleepy silence of the forest is just like that broken by our frenzied joy, and the old, rejuvenated forest sings along with us a mighty song of love and youth…. And the song hums loudly, gracefully … ebullient blood vessels through the veins, burning the young trembling body…. The soul trembles … and I tighten, tighten the hands on my chest, forcefully restraining a frantic scream, trying not to disturb the perfect harmony of the song…. But I feel I cannot hold it, and that I can’t is what is good…. An irresistible torrent of passion floods stronger and stronger, I try hard to keep it, but my strength collapses…. And just a little bit…. Yet a little while—and the dam snapped!… I stumble and squeal deliriously, falling wildly into the grass.42 After awakening, the narrator, in “cathartic” condition, surrenders to her

father’s arms. From the father’s perspective, the embrace marks his daugh-ter’s return to the Symbolic, in Lacanian terms, that is asking for forgiveness, a refuge. At that point her speech stops. In the last segment of the story, the

42 “I eno gomile vesele, bujne mladosti, žuri se nekud i, kao, tu sam i ja!… To zdravo, bujno veselje i mladost zanosi me…. U daljini odbleskiju bledo-zeleni, š umoviti brežuljci prema mladom, prolećnom suncu, prelivaju se u bezbroj preliva i mame neodoljivo k sebi.… I mi hitamo tamo!… Gluha, sanjiva tišina šume razbi se očas našim pomamnim veseljem i stara, podmlađena šuma zapeva s nama zajedno silnu pesmu mladosti i ljubavi…. I pesma bruji gromko, skladno … uzavrela krv šiba kroz žile, paleći mlado, uzdrhtalo telo…. Duša drhti … a ja pritežem, pritežem rukama prsa, zadržavajući silom mahniti vrisak da ne poremetim savršenu skladnost pesme…. Ali osećam kako ne mogu da ga zadržim, i kako je baš to dobro š to ne mogu…. Neodoljiva bujica strasti navire sve jače i jače, ja se upinjem da je zadržim, ali snaga malaksava…. I još samo malo … i još malo i—brana puče!… Ja posrnuh, pa ciknuh mahnito, divlje padoh u travu” (ibid., 35).


narrator is addressed by the medical doctor, whose questionably intoned words suggest that to live is still sweet. But her response is missing. Her con-dition is marked by pleasure, boundless love for all people and creatures, and by vigor, but also by a lack of speech. The speech ends, the testimony of her own abjection. Her own familiarity with abjection the narrator keeps to herself. The narrator’s silence is the rejection of her testimony in front of the Other, who resolves, clears up, and removes difficulties. The narrator’s silence is not the author’s silence. On the contrary, the narrator’s silence is the author’s richly symbolic gesture or speech. Modern writers do not give up from the heritage and experience of abjection. They find dismissal in union with abjection. The act of writing is the “catharsis unparalleled,” and the art is a space of liberation. Leposava Mijušković’s prose diptych itself confirms Kristeva’s assessment that modern literature “in its multiple variants, and when it is written as the language, possible at last, of that impossible consti-tuted either by a-subjectivity or by non-objectivity, propounds, as a matter of fact, a sublimation of abjection. Thus it becomes a substitute for the role formerly played by the sacred, at the limits of social and subjective identity. But we are dealing here with a sublimation without consecration. Forfeited.”43

The confessional form of the stories “Utisci života” and “Blizu smrti” imposes the topic of the autobiographical in previous studies dedicated to Mijušković’s prose. However, the nature of articulated selfhood can be a starting point for the relativization of a biographical positivist reading of her prose. Sidonie Smith argues that twentieth-century women writers used auto-biography as a constructive field for cultural critique. She notes that “from their myriad positions at the margins, these autobiographers write ‘beyond the ending’ of conventional narrative and its closures.… As they do so they challenge the discourses of patriarchal culture and narrative with combative power, dramatizing the encounter between margins and centers. Contesting old notions of self [unitary, irreducible, well-defined, stable, and impermea-ble] and story, they effectively destabilize generic margins, rendering the genre flexible.”44 The narrative self, as is formed and presented in Mijušković’s prose, in fact, confirms the weakness of autobiography, the ina-bility of writing of one’s own life that depends on establishing a consistent identity, which is a traditional demand of this genre.

The articulation of subjectivity in the autobiographical genre involves meeting with the ideological and political discourses of power through which the subjective position can be modified. The need to be a willing, unchange- 43 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 26. 44 Sidonie Smith, “Self, Subject, and Resistance: Marginalities and Twentieth-Century Auto-biographical Practice,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9, no. 1 (1990): 21.

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able, and rational being is created due to ideological pressures within state, religion, and family. The power of discourses that seek to shape knowledge can be confronted with some subjective positions. The struggle that subse-quently arises then manages the autobiographical texts. Felicity Nussbaum notes that through the autobiographical an individual can be identified with a subjective position that is imposed upon him/her at a time when s/he was reviewed by the society. Also, the counteraction of available subject positions is possible, and the third possibility is de-identification because subjects occupy incompatible subjective positions.45 The narrator in the story “Blizu smrti” only seemingly settles with her father and the worldview that he represents. Her renegade of the language encrypts her real incompatible sub-jective positions. I do not deny, of course, the possibility that Leposava Mijušković transposed her own life experience onto fiction. But I think the process of lateralization is more important. At the time in which she lived and created, lateralization was the only way to express the dispersion, contin-gency, and performativity of gender identity, precisely homosexual identity, which counts on the ambivalence and slippage and which escapes from patriarchal censorship.

Departure from the autobiographical confession mode of narration does not have to result in the reconstruction of the author’s biography. On the con-trary, this approach could be directed towards deconstruction of both the genre itself and the identity that shapes the narrative, which also makes the author akin to modernist female writers such as Colette, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, who also experimented with the confessional genre articulat-ing homosexual identity.46 Therefore, the tears of the prodigal daughter in her father’s arms can be seen if not consistently in the Butlerian key, then certainly in the subversive one.

At the dawn of the 20th century the subject of Leposava Mijušković’s prose is what would later become actuality in the literature of the last century. Originating in her poetic-aesthetic features the prose of Modernism, Mijušković at the same time transcends it and approaches the interwar Expressionist literature. The coping with wild eros makes her, primarily, close to the aesthetic of Expressionism. Her closeness to Expressionism is also evi-dent in the narrative strategies (fragmentary, associative narration) and stylis-

45 See Felisiti A. Nusbaum [Felicity A. Nussbaum], “Politika subjektivnosti i Ideologija žanra,” translation into Serbian of “The Politics of Subjectivity and The Ideology of Genre” by Viktorija Krombholc, Polja: Časopis za književnost i teoriju (Novi Sad) 54, no. 459 (2009): 81–89, at 86. 46 See Jan Hokenson, “The Pronouns of Gomorrah: A Lesbian Prose Tradition,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10, no. 1 (1988): 62–69.


tic features (rhetoric of oration, cinematic style, unconventional use of punctuation). Nevertheless, most challenging are the central characters in Mijušković’s prose—intellectuals and rebellious women. The identity of her subjects is a focal point of her subversive opposition to the dominant patriar-chal ideological pattern. By examining the unique features of identity in Expressionist prose, Bojana Stojanović-Pantović allocated the final dissocia-tion of the subject that begins in the era of Symbolism, which “incites necessity for its new construction, usually done through a vision, a dream, or a hallucination and links through the various formal procedures the fragments of a new reality.”47 The dominant Expressionist thematic complex includes erotic experience as well as the physical and spiritual antinomy, and the con-cept of sexuality as an elemental force in the biological and psychological sense, in the wake of the naturalists but also under the influence of Freud’s psychoanalysis.48 The aforementioned aspects of Expressionist prose are dom-inant features of selfhood in Mijušković’s prose. Hence, the contextualization of her works within the course of Serbian Expressionism would revise its po-etic map and rooted theory about the absence of women writers in the Serbian avant-garde.

Leposava Mijušković can be seen as the precursor of both Serbian avant-garde prose and queer trends in Serbian literature, which were followed by interwar writers such as David Pijade (1881–1942), Rastko Petrović (1898–1949), Boško Tokin (1894–1953), Miloš Crnjanski (1893–1977), and Ranko Mladenović (1892–1943).49 In particular, David Pijade’s novel Strast (Passion, 1921) thematizes lesbian love, narrated from the cross-gendered perspective as he exceeds the borders of narration of the first-person male nar-rator and instead uses the female narration—a technique that was used by Ser-bian female writers of the first decade of the 20th century and by Mijušković herself in the story “Priča o duši sa večitom čežnjom” (A Story about the 47 Bojana Stojanović-Pantović, “Aspekti identiteta u poetici ekspresionizma,” in Peti međunarodni interdisciplinarni simpozijum “Susret kultura”: Zbornik radova, bk. 2 (Novi Sad: Univerzitet u Novom Sadu/Filozofski fakultet, 2010), 956. 48 Ibid. 49 In the context of “gender trouble” and queer theory, Rastko Petrović is the author most written about so far. See Ivana Živančević-Sekeruš, “Homoerotizam u putopisima Rastka Petrovića,” in Kako (o)pisati različitost?: Slika Drugog u srpskoj književnosti (Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet, 2009), 37–48; and Kristina Stevanović, Osvajanje modernog (Novi Sad: Akademska knjiga, 2012), 211–33. Bojana Stojanović-Pantović suggests that this may be the key to the interpretation of certain works by Miloš Crnjanski, Stanislav Krakov, and Ranko Mladenović. So far, queer identity in the novels Strast, by David Pijade, and Terazije, by Boško Tokin, has been written about in the Slovenian language only. See Suzana Tratnik, Lezbična zgodba: Literarna konstrukcija seksualnosti, Zbirka Lambda, vol. 37 (Ljubljana: Škuc, 2004). The book has not been translated into Serbian or English.

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Eternally Longing Soul). This traditional arch of lesbianism fruitfully flows into Biljana Jovanović’s (1953–96) novels in the late 1970s.50

At the root of Mijušković’s stories about lesbian identity is the story of decentered and disingrained subjectivity. It is something the twentieth-century literary world will perceive from a reflexive perspective. Leposava Mijuško-vić illuminates one of the archetypal paradigms of modern literature, the conflict of the individual and society, from a gender perspective. However, the gender perspective did not narrow the author’s ideological and symbolic horizons. The experience of her narrator is the experience that, in its protean forms, can be recognized in the experience of a twentieth-century literary out-sider, persecuted by different ideologies. The issues that preoccupy Mijuško-vić still meander through contemporary reflection of human existence and its literary transpositions.

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50 The parallels between the fiction of Leposava Mijušković and Biljana Jovanović deserve special research.


Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow: Revisiting Pontevedro*

Jelena MilojkoviÊ-DjuriÊ

Franz Lehár’s operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) premiered in 1905 in Vienna at the famed Theater an der Wien and gradually attained great popularity. The setting of the operetta was a fictional country called Pontevedro, reminiscent of the principality of Montenegro. The libretto por-trayed the ethnic otherness as compelling by accentuating the cultural diver-sity in contrast to the Viennese milieu at large. Yet, the skillfully written libretto, celebrating most of all romance, and the equally effervescent musical score underlined the human bonds of shared aspirations, emotions, and ethical values, fostering acceptance and superseding any superfluous differences. In an oblique way it reflected also an appreciation of the manifest presence of the Slavic population within the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ac-cording to the reviewer from the Volksblatt, the premiere achieved a deserved success most of all “thanks to the magnificent music, the intelligent book, and to the excellent production.”1

The operetta starts with the opening ball in the Embassy of Pontevedro. The glittering stage setting was enhanced by the exceptional stylized gold-embroidered ethnic costumes worn by the protagonists Mizzi Gűnther and Louis Treumann. Their presence and engaged musical interpretation was duly noted and eventually attained the admiration of the public and critics alike.

For promotional reasons the young composer Franz Lehár was photo-graphed alongside the lead singers Gűnther and Treumann (Fig. 1 following p. 268). This group picture captures the distinctive appearance of the artists as compared to the sleek appearance of the composer, dressed in an elegant suit and sporting the fashionable smooth hairstyle of the day. He is leaning slightly towards the famed artists, as if attesting to his pride in creating real * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference “Visual Encounters with Alterity: Representing East-Central and South-Eastern Europeans in the 19th Century and the First Half of the 20th Century,” held 24–26 May 2012 in Budapest. 1 Franz Lehár, Confessions (1946), quoted in Bernard Grun, Gold and Silver: The Life and Times of Franz Lehár (New York: David McKay Co., 1970), 116.

260 Jelena MilojkoviÊ-DjuriÊ

human beings under a semblance of visual alterity in dress and appearance. The whole production stressed an appreciation for a different, distant tradition.

The librettists had considerable knowledge of Montenegro, its history, customs, epic poetry, and the real and mythical figures of Balkan folklore, including the ruling royal dynasty, Petrović-Njegoš. Most of all, the popular figure of the dashing heir apparent, Prince Danilo, alluded to in Treumann’s stage role, provided additional interest to the plot.

True to the perception of their roles, both Gűnther and Treumann care-fully chose their stage attire, suggestive of traditional Montenegrin costumes. Gűnther chose an embroidered long shirt and a bodice under a graceful sleeveless coat. Her dark, luxurious hair was skillfully turned up and adorned by a small cap. Treumann wore traditional knee-high breeches held by a col-orful sash. He sported a Western-style shirt and a tie under a gold-braided vest and sleeveless jacket. His mustache and curly hair were styled with care and he achieved a stunning likeness to the real Prince Danilo. These individual choices pointed to the awareness of another cultural tradition as well as to the studious effort to bring credence to their respective stage roles. Lehár’s melo-dies provided another link to the distinctly Slavic intonations that he introduced in this masterful score.

Lehár was born in 1870 in the historic twin cities of Komarom-Komarno, on the border between Hungary and Slovakia.2 He received his higher musical education in Prague. He entered the Music Academy in 1881 and continued his advanced education until graduation in 1888. His violin teacher was Anton Bennewitz, who was also the rector of the academy. It is remarkable that he was fortunate enough to have among his teachers the world-famous composer Antonin Dvořak. Dvořak taught composition, and it is very likely that his own predilection for exquisite melodic inflection based on folkloric elements in-fluenced his young student. Dvořak appreciated Lehár and praised his early compositions. Later on, Lehár became known to a great extent thanks to his unforgettable arias and skillful orchestration, which at times were reminiscent of Slavic melodic lore.

Although the leading cast and the operatic ensemble fully embraced the new operetta, the public was slow in accepting the new production. Revenues continued to be modest. The management of the Theater an der Wien was concerned, and even the librettists voiced doubts about the novelties of

2 The Slovakian town Komarom is the historic seat of the Serbian minority. The town is situated at the confluence of the Danube and Vah rivers.

Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow: Revisiting Pontevedro 261

Lehár’s compositional style. At first it seemed as if hardly anyone anticipated the ensuing success and the intrinsic significance of the new operetta.3

Lehár was surprised by the unjustified criticism and voiced his concern. Most importantly, Lehár elucidated his own approach to the operetta genre and in particular to his own operetta Die lustige Witwe:

A few years ago when I plunged into Viennese operetta blind and un-suspecting, I fancied that my ignorance of the métier would be an ad-vantage for me, would make me an experimenter: someone to blast a tunnel through the dark of the mountain, to blast the light on the other side. I wanted new subjects, new people, and new forms. Because I am a man of the present, not an echo of the past. The Merry Widow is an experiment! If Leon [librettist, JMDj] expected an ordinary musi-cal farce with dance numbers and drinking songs thrown in—he is making a mistake. I recognize that as a commodity the operetta must consider the demands of the masses to a certain extent. All the same, it has no obligation to be a farce or comedy. I am against operetta nonsense. I want to write music for and around human beings: their hearts and souls, their emotions and passions, their joy and sadness.4 Eventually, after some 25 performances, the operetta conquered the pub-

lic, and performances took place in a sold-out theater for months and even years ahead.5

The librettist Leo Stein was credited for selecting French playwright Henri Meilhac’s L’ Attaché d’ambassade and using it as an outline for his own libretto. More precisely, he chose Alexander Bergen’s German adapta-tion of Meilhac’s play Der Gesandschafts Attaché. This version was staged in Vienna’s Carlstheater in 1862. It was well received and was periodically re-vived over the years. A revival in early 1905 attracted Stein’s attention.6

After some deliberation Stein decided that this play could serve well as an operetta libretto, and he shared this idea with his occasional collaborator Victor Leon. Together, they decided to rewrite the Meilhac play, introducing a number of changes. The setting of the plot was changed from the German principality of Birkenfeld to the fictional principality of Pontevedro. 3 Grun, Gold and Silver, 116. 4 Lehár, Confessions, quoted in Grun, Gold and Silver, 106–07. 5 Ibid., 117. 6 The play was first produced at the Theatre de Vauseville in Paris in 1861 but was poorly received and closed after only 15 performances. Meilhac was the co-author of the libretto for Carmen as well as for Manon, in addition to libretti for many well-known Offenbach operettas.


The motivations for these changes were many. Political and popular inter-est in Bosnia-Herzegovina and adjacent Montenegro, with its people, sur-roundings, and natural resources, was on the rise. The librettists were ostensi-bly well aware of the long-standing aspirations of the Habsburg Empire to establish a colonial presence in the Balkan principalities.7 Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro were strategically positioned for achieving further expansion in the Balkans and along the Adriatic coast. The uprising in Herzegovina in 1875 and the ensuing Eastern Crisis provided the long-awaited opportunity for the fulfillment of these aspirations. The Berlin Congress in 1878 gave the mandate to the Habsburg Monarchy to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina and provide humanitarian protection to the embattled populace.8

The newly installed Landesregierung (Land Government) in Sarajevo as well as the finance minister Benjamin von Kállay were instrumental in stressing the benevolent and enlightening role of the monarchy. Von Kállay was an astute historian and wrote a well-received book, History of the Serbs.9 Under von Kállay’s aegis the collections of historic and folkloric artifacts grew, leading to the establishment of the imposing Landesmuseum (Land Museum) in Sarajevo and contributing to the greater knowledge of the culture and history of the South Slavs.

The adjacent principality of Montenegro shared many cultural traditions with Bosnia-Herzegovina. Moreover, it commanded attention due to its inde-pendent spirit and long-standing resistance to Ottoman advances. The clever ruler Prince Nikola, the beautiful princesses, and the heir apparent Danilo Petrović Njegoš were complex personalities in their own rights. Prince Danilo often visited France, since Paris was his favorite city. He attracted public at-tention, and the daily press wrote often about his escapades. His popular im-age even graced the wrapper of a French chocolate candy in a successful advertisement by a well-known French chocolatier (Fig. 2).

7 “Fur Osterreich galten die beiden Provinzen als strategisches unverzichtbares Hinterland zum Dalmatien sowie auch wie Ausgangspunkt fur ein weiteres Vordringen auf dem Balkan” (Both provinces were considered an important strategic starting position towards further penetration into Dalmatia and the Balkans). Valeria Heuberger, Heinz Ilming, and Joachim Riedl, Bosnien-Herzegowina, 1878–1918: Alte Ansichten vom gelungenen Zusammenleben (Vienna: Christian Brandstätter, 1994), 75. 8 Jelena Milojković-Djurić, The Eastern Question and the Voices of Reason, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Balkan States, 1875–1908 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2002), v, 80–86. 9 Von Kállay’s History of the Serbs was first published in Budapest in 1877. The German translation, Geschichte der Serben, was published in 1878 (Vienna and Leipzig: W. Laufer). The Serbian translation, Istorija srpskog naroda (Belgrade: Državna š tamparija), appeared in 1882.


Interestingly, when compared to the photo of Treumann in costume (see Fig. 1), the image of Prince Danilo reproduced by Parisian chocolatiers points to the striking resemblance Treumann was able to capture in his stage role. Prince Danilo chose to wear the traditional Montenegrin costume at times, even when traveling abroad, suggesting that he enjoyed presenting an image of distinct otherness and was proud of his Montenegrin roots. His own attire was distinguished by its fine workmanship, exquisite cloth, and opulent gold trim. He was obviously conscious of the effect that his appearance and carefully chosen attire produced on the public at large.

Prince Nikola was dubbed the “father-in-law” of European royalty: his daughter Jelena married the Italian king, Victor Emanuel. Her sister Milica was married to Prince Peter Nikolaevich Romanov of Russia. In spite of the glitter of foreign royalty associated with his family, Nikola dressed in tradi-tional Montenegrin garb throughout his life. He sported knee-high breeches with a colorful sash, a shirt, and gold-embroidered vest, and a typical Montenegrin cap was on his head. On special occasions he wore a broad order band of selected decorations. His wife, Milena, followed suit, dressing in a long garment, embroidered shirt, and sleeveless vest. Her braided hair was covered with a cap or thin veil. The coronation picture showing Nikola and Milena strolling along the central Promenade captured the contrasting images of the old and the new in the middle of the capital, Cetinje (Fig. 3). While the royal couple sported traditional ethnic attire, their daughter Milica and her princely Russian husband appeared in glittering European apparel according to the fashion of the day.10

Lehár’s librettists demonstrated considerable knowledge of Montenegro and its history. The Pontevedran ambassador was given the surname Zeta, which was notably the ancient geographic and historic denomination for Montenegro. Their choice of Paris, the city of light and world stage of oper-atic and theatrical productions, as the setting suggests an acceptance of shared cultural traditions. The Pontevedran embassy appears as a cultural island, with its officials acting very much like any others in a similar professional position.

The opening scene takes place in the ballroom and gardens of the Embassy of Pontevedro in Paris. The cast of leading actors is presented on the scene. The central figure is the prima donna Hanna Glawari, who is opening the festivities honoring the Prince of Pontevedro. Hanna is dressed in an opu-lent gown reminiscent of traditional Montenegrin costume. Her luxurious, dark wavy hair is turned over and contained with an embroidered cap and at times with a translucent veil framing her face.

10 See Fig. 3 where Milica sports a plumed Edwardian hat and striking rose outfit.


This splendid gathering reminds Hanna of her home at Letinje. Obvi-ously, the name “Letinje” alludes to Cetinje, the one-time capital of Montene-gro. Stressing further the true identity of Hanna’s homeland, the chorus introduces a joyous refrain in the Serbian language:

Mi velimo da se veselimo! (repeated) Das Fest des Fürsten so begangen wird, Als ob man in Letinje wär daheim. We declare to rejoice! (repeated) The Prince’s festivities are starting As once at home at Letinje.

At the end, the Serbian refrain is jubilantly repeated: Mi velimo da se veselimo! Hei!

In order to enhance the visual and musical appreciation of the milieu, the old Slavic folk ring dance—kolo—is performed by a group of swift dancers dressed in stylized ethnic costumes.

Nun lasst uns aber wie daheim Jetzt singen unser’n Ringelreim Von einer Fee, die Daheim ein Waldmägdelein, die Vilja wird genannt! Let us sing just like at home Our ring dance tune About a fairy Known at home as Vilja, the wood maiden.

Hanna continues to lead the celebration with the aria “Vilja, o Vilja,” invok-ing a nostalgic mood of longing for her homeland. The aria also refers to the mythical realm of the good fairy vila of the famed Balkan epic lore. The ethe-real and beautiful vila proverbially dwells in the green mountains, with their stately old trees reaching the heavenly heights. In folk poems the vila always appears seemingly from above, offering solace, encouragement, and advice to the heroes and heroines in distress.

The well-known painter Paja Jovanović dedicated some of his canvases to the portrayal of the mythical vila. In a unique “Certificate of Membership” commissioned by the Belgrade Singers’ Society, a version of this painting was skillfully incorporated. Jovanović captured the ethereal vila as she ap-


peared to two young noblemen, Marko Kraljević and Miloš Obilić, while rid-ing through the woods. They are recognized as men of honor and legendary heroes. Their rich attire is often mentioned in the folk epics, as if to attest to their high social standing. One of them plays the ancient stringed instrument the gusle to accompany his song while asking the vila for guidance (Fig. 4).11

The aria “Vilja, o Vilja” became one of the best known of Lehár’s musi-cal offerings. This most popular aria used a musical motif that was repeated in the equally famous Merry Widow Waltz, providing the musical essence of the operetta, symbolically uniting the once-separated lovers. The aria has a pro-nounced Slavic intonation supported by soft orchestral coloring with ingen-ious use of violins divisi and woodwinds. The music had lightness, clarity, and a sweeping appeal.

The entrance of the young, dashing attaché Danilo Danilović with his en-tourage brings as well a contrasting cosmopolitan flair of sorts. Although aware of the festivities in the embassy, Danilo lingers at Café Maxime and arrives late to the ball. He even brings with him a group of his favorite vaudeville dancers, dressed in flashy costumes.

The performances of the newly staged operetta The Merry Widow on 30 December 1905 in Vienna drew attention again to the real Prince Danilo. His former adventures, real and invented, were in due course remembered by the international press. By that time, Prince Danilo was already a married man. His wife was the German Duchess Jutta von Mecklenburg-Sterlitz (1880–1946). Their wedding took place in the Orthodox church at Cetinje in 1899. His young bride was accompanied to her wedding by the Italian king, Victor Emanuel, and Queen Elena (Jelena), his spouse. Elena was the sister of the groom—Prince Danilo.

Not all of the operetta public, however, appreciated the thinly veiled far-cical evocation of Prince Danilo Petrović, the heir to the royal dynasty of Montenegro. One memorable Sunday performance of the operetta at the The-ater an der Wien was unexpectedly disrupted by a group of students and young men, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians, and Russians, led by one Risto Rundo.

Rundo was born in Herzegovina in Mostar but eventually moved to Belgrade and then to Montenegro, where he became a bookseller, opening a

11 Jovanović completed his vila painting, entitled Miloš, Marko i vila, in 1898. Overall, he devoted great attention to historical paintings, portraying not only Serbian history but German as well. Such was his painting Furor Teutonicus, which garnered him the Reichel Künstler Preiss and later the silver medal at the World Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Miroslav Timotijević, Paja Jovanović/Paul Joanowitch (Belgrade: Galerija SANU/Narodni muzej, 2010), 48.


bookstore in Cetinje. In the early summer of 1906, he came to Vienna on a business venture. While in Vienna he stayed in a guesthouse whose guests included a group of Russian students who attended Vienna University. During a friendly chat, the students briefed Rundo on the new operetta by Lehár. Ob-viously, they did not consider the allusion to the Montenegrin Prince Danilo acceptable but regarded it as an exaggerated and disrespectful portrayal of the Montenegrin principality as well. Rundo fully agreed and declared the oper-etta “shameful”—sramotna. He decided to take action and eventually shared his plan with the same group. On a Sunday morning, Risto Rundo bought ten expensive tickets for the first row of seats and proceeded with his new friends to the theater. They enjoyed the opening numbers until the singer Treumann, portraying the young Prince Danilo, appeared on the scene, accompanied by a group of grisettes—young, scantily dressed vaudeville entertainers.

At this moment the theater became a scene of unusual disorderly conduct (including throwing chairs onto the proscenium). The performance was interrupted due to the unexpected and unruly behavior of Rundo and his group.

Alarmed, the public crowded the theater exit. Risto Rundo, dressed in tra-ditional Montenegrin costume, tried to pacify the public. He knew German well and stated in a loud voice that he and his companions meant no harm to the public or the actors themselves. They just wanted to protest the scandalous allusion to Prince Danilo, the heir apparent of the Montenegrin royal house. Although this particular performance was cut short, the operetta company was not adversely influenced. On the contrary, it became even more popular, at-tracting new audiences, including eventually Emperor Franz Joseph himself. Many years later the conductor of this Sunday performance, Robert Stolz, remembered the incident as excellent advertising for Lehár’s operetta, paving the way for its success.12

The young rebels were quickly evicted from the premises by the police, ultimately landing in prison. Prince Nikola intervened by sending a formal request to Emperor Franz Joseph asking for the closure of any further perfor-mances of the operetta. His plea was rejected, and the operetta continued to be performed with ever-growing success.

Under police interrogation, Risto Rundo explained that he had acted in good faith to protect the honor of the Montenegrin dynasty in Vienna. He also stated that he would have acted in the same manner if the members of the Habsburg dynasty were criticized and their honor questioned in Cetinje. Fol-

12 A letter from Dr. Mihailo Rundo described the mentioned incident to the author of these lines.


lowing the intervention of Prince Nikola and the Russian Consul in Vienna Rundo and the Russian students were released after two days of confinement.

Upon Rundo’s return to Kotor (Cattaro), the prince sent his own carriage to take Rundo directly to his summer residence on the bank of the Crnojević River in the Ceklin region, adjoining Lake Skadar.13 The prince was impatient to hear the full report about the incident and did not allow even a short detour and visit in Cetinje, where Rundo’s family waited to greet him.

Upon his arrival, Rundo was shown to the garden. The prince was seated under his favorite old oak tree and ordered the famous Ceklin brandy for him-self and for his visitor. He wanted to hear the whole story, and repeatedly asked for details.

Rundo often recalled his audience with the prince and enjoyed relating to his family the details of their conversation. In due time he received the highest Montenegrin decoration, named after Prince Danilo I, uncle of Nikola. Rundo also mentioned that on his later visits to the court he was treated with high respect by the entourage and admitted without showing any identification.

In 1909 the operetta company of the Theater an der Wien was on a guest tour in Constantinople. Lehár’s The Merry Widow was featured on their pro-gram. As it happened, a number of Montenegrin royalists decided to stage a protest.14 The anticipated incident was described by the Italian correspondent for La Domenica del Corriere and made the headlines on the front page, complete with a picture of young rebels dressed in traditional Montenegrin costumes and vigorously hoisting chairs onto the proscenium. The picture also portrayed the frightened public in attendance, with the expression of surprise and fear on their faces. After all, the Italian press was interested in covering the protest of young Montenegrins, since their beloved Queen Elena was the sister of Prince Danilo and the daughter of Prince Nikola.

Eventually, Risto Rundo was briefed about the incident in Constantinople by one of the participants, Krsto Milošević. Milošević disclosed that the Turkish police heard beforehand about the planned demonstration and pre-vented them from entering the theater. As proof that the demonstrators never entered the theater, Milošević produced his unused tickets to the opera. Later on, Rundo provided employment to Milošević in his bookstore. The illustra-tion in the Italian paper was created anticipating the incident that apparently never took place in Constantinople.

13 The prince received petitioners who wished to talk to him every Friday. His secretary made notes of these conversations, grievances, or requests for advice and help that were duly addressed. 14 This event was planned but was averted by the police, according to the eyewitness report of a participant. This comment was disclosed to the author of these lines by Dr. Mihailo Rundo.


Coda

By sheer chance, I had the privilege of hearing the story about the interrupted performance in Vienna and planned protest in Constantinople from the grand-son of Risto Rundo, the physician Dr. Mihailo Rundo. Dr. Rundo’s profes-sional career led him some forty years ago to Austria and later to Germany, where he established himself in Frankfurt am Main.

Interestingly, in 1972 the operetta Die lustige Witwe opened at the opera house in Frankfurt am Main (Oper Frankfurt). Dr. Rundo attended the per-formance and was delighted to witness the artistry of Robert Stolz, who con-ducted the overture. He asked for an interview with the old maestro. Stolz readily agreed, and the interview led to a delightful conversation. Stolz viv-idly remembered the famed incident and spoke with expressed satisfaction, recalling the fateful performance. It was Stolz who conducted the orchestra at this performance in 1906, when the incident occurred. Dr. Rundo was relieved that Stolz did not harbor any hard feelings relating to the incident. The chairs that flew onto the proscenium were dangerously close to the head of the conductor, and one loose leg grazed his head, but he was not hurt.15

Moreover, Stolz assured Dr. Mihailo Rundo that the incident led by Risto Rundo actually helped to draw attention to the new production of the operetta. He thought that the reports of the press that filled the pages, recounting the incident, presented an excellent promotion and free advertisement for the composer and the artistic ensemble performing at the Theater an der Wien. He seemed to consider the whole incident a godsend for the entire company.

During the interview, Stolz mentioned the famed tenor Johannes Hesters, whom he considered the best Prince Danilo Danilović, adored by the public in this particular role. Hesters continued singing the operetta practically all his life, and he lived until he was 108. It seems that Lehár’s music guarantees a long and prosperous life to all concerned.

The numerous recordings of the operetta, and in particular the well-known arias, are witness to the lasting presence of Lehár’s musical legacy.

15 Robert Stolz was born in 1880 and was at the time of the interview 92 years old. He died in 1976.

Figure 1. The composer Franz Lehár with lead singers Mizzi Gűnther and Louis Treumann

Figure 2. The handsome image of Prince Danilo in traditional Montenegrin

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Orientalism through the Balkan Lens of Paja JovanoviÊ

Lilien Filipovitch Robinson George Washington University

The term “Orientalism” is typically applied to European art referencing the cultures of the Near East, Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans.1 While interest in these exotic areas made its early appearance in medieval art and continued as a point of interest in Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo art, its full flowering was in the nineteenth century, from the first to the last decade. Within these geographic parameters the primary object of fascination was the exotic Islamic world, whether prompted through eight centuries of Moorish presence in Spain or general contact with Arab and Turkic peoples by means of trade and travel, or more dramatically via the Crusades. Defenders of the faith, diplomats, merchants, or simply curious travelers brought back a treas-ure trove of commodities, collectibles, and curiosities. For painters the latter were exotic enhancements for their creations. By the fifteenth century and into the seventeenth century, a number of Italian, Dutch, and French artists traveled to the East, particularly to Istanbul (Constantinople). Contacts on various levels—commercial, diplomatic, and personal—continued and ex-panded throughout the eighteenth century and in the process increased Euro-pean exposure to the Orient through travel accounts, letters, and merchandise, from clothing to utilitarian and decorative objects. Informed and inspired by personal accounts, illustrated travel books, translation of tales such as A Thou-sand and One Nights,2 and direct experience with Islamic life via excavations of ancient sites on Ottoman-controlled lands, European writers, playwrights,

1 The term may have been introduced by French writer, critic, and supporter of Realism Jules Antoine Castagnary, who viewed the Orientalists’ departure from contemporary French subjects as escapist and unpatriotic and the style as a trend. However, other critics, the public, and even the state not only recognized the legitimacy of the Orientalist genre but supported and promoted it. Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 24–25. 2 It was translated into French in 1717. Donald Rosenthal, Orientalism: The Near East in French Painting, 1800–1880 (Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1982), 15.

274 Lilien Filipovitch Robinson

and painters found a wealth of material for their interpretations of the remote and exotic “Other.” The resultant expansion of the world of the Europeans was both an anticipation of and preparation for the overwhelming outpouring of interest which found remarkable expression in nineteenth-century art as well as public engagement. France took the lead and throughout much of the century dominated Orientalism in art.3

Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: French Inception and Centrality

An initial catalyst in the emergence of Orientalism may have been Napoleon’s military campaigns in the East, specifically the invasion of Egypt in 1798. Descriptions of the battles, the people, lifestyle, and terrain were transmitted to a public eager to hear of French victories as they both bolstered patriotism and provided an escape from the challenges of their contemporary reality, while often reinforcing an appealing fantasy of the East. Publications by par-ticipants in the campaigns, such as Vivant Denon’s 1802 Voyage dans la Basse et la haute-Egypte pendant les campaigns du General Bonaparte, pro-vided extensive information and insight into a remote world.4 Throughout these campaigns, artists, many of whom were employed by the state to travel with the armies, provided site drawings and, most importantly, paintings of major Napoleonic battles and events. Publically exhibited and replicated, they were easily accessible.

In addition, and ultimately of greater significance than opportunities for the aggrandizing of Napoleon and his military prowess, the Egyptian cam-paigns opened the doors for real and multifaceted scrutiny of a geographically expansive Orient. During the post-Napoleonic period of the Bourbon monar-chies of Louis XVIII and Charles X, the journeys that followed increasingly included artists, whether as members of official delegations, as artist record-ers, or as independent travelers. By the second decade they were making their way to Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine.5

3 Other European artists followed France’s lead in the nineteenth century. Most significantly, this was the case for English painters, who established the legitimacy and popularity of their interpretation of Orientalism by the end of the nineteenth century. 4 For a discussion of Vivant Denon’s role and influence, see Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 20–23. 5 Among them were Alexandre Gabriel Decamps, Adrien Dauzats, and Prosper Marilhat. Their travels date to 1828, 1829, and 1831 (Rosenthal, Orientalism, 34).

Orientalism through the Balkan Lens of Paja JovanoviÊ 275

Many of those who remained in France also addressed Orientalist sub-jects. Their works were informed by the words and images of direct observers as well as the exotic “collectibles” amassed in their studios.6

French Orientalism assumed two main approaches—Romantic and Real-ist, each with its own variants. Throughout the century in France these directions were sustained, and replicated, modified, and altered in other Western European countries. That the Oriental world held special appeal to the first generation of Romantics is undeniable and understandable. They were the inheritors of the events and aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the Napoleonic wars, and these mysterious lands repre-sented a new and different antiquity, an escape, a refuge from the challenges and complexities of a modernizing world in constant flux. The sights and sounds of this newly discovered world appealed to and nurtured the con-sciousness and emotions central to Romanticism. While the yearnings and heightened imaginations of some artists produced highly charged images of adventure and violence, such as hunts and battles, others satisfied voyeuristic appetites with glimpses of the hidden worlds of domestic, especially female, life. The latter—images of dancers, slaves, harem women—proved an enduring Salon staple. In both cases, the remote and unknown world was a type of escape, and the need for such refuge was repeated in verse and image. For example, in his discussion of a painting by Eugène Fromentin7 and other Orientalist works exhibited at the 1859 Salon,8 Charles Baudelaire wrote:

I myself am suffering to some extent from a nostalgia which drags me towards the sun; for I find an intoxicating mist arising from the lumi-nous canvases, which soon condenses into desires and regrets. I catch myself envying the lot of these men who are lying outstretched amidst these azure shades and whose eyes express if anything at all, only love of repose and a feeling of blissful happiness.9 Other artists, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century,

focused on documenting this new and strange world. Whether they were

6 A vast variety of exotic objects was readily available for purchase through dealers, shops, and, in the later part of the century, at various expositions. 7 The painting was his Bab-el-Ghaabi Street in Laghouat of 1859. 8 Dating back to the seventeenth century, the Salons were official, state-sponsored exhibitions held at various Parisian venues. Thousands of artists (French and non-French) submitted works to an official jury, and as many as 5,000 paintings could be exhibited. Receipt of coveted prizes was thought instrumental in securing future success. 9 As cited in Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 11.


traveling in an official capacity, accompanying officials and delegations, as recorders and travel companions of wealthy individuals, or as independent travelers, they attempted to more accurately define what they observed. Most frequently, they created drawings and watercolors on site, later replicating these images on canvas in their Paris studios.10

During the 1830s and 1840s there was an intensification of taste and growing demand for Orientalist paintings, viewed at the Salons that drew thousands of visitors. They were purchasable through the Salon and an esca-lating number of private galleries and dealers. While not equivalent, this type of expanded interest and demand was also making its appearance throughout Europe. Although the Eastern countries that had appealed to the earlier gener-ation continued to draw artists, there was now a greater focus on North Africa, specifically Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, whose conquest by the French began in the 1830s. By the next decade the French had solidified their control, and Algeria had become a “major center of French [economic, diplomatic, and] artistic activity.”11 For artists seeking new frontiers of Orientalism that were still unknown, less understood, more “primitive,” and seemingly inde-pendent of Western life, Algeria and Morocco, in particular, satisfied these requirements. In their search for the undiscovered, artists continued to expand their venues and definition of the Orient.12 Whether mysterious and imagina-tive or precise recordings of daily life, the Orientalist genre had immense popular appeal, while the search for new worlds untouched by Western mo-dernity intrigued and engaged the public. Highly marketable, this art had the official support of the state and organizations promoting Orientalism.13

New Frontiers of Orientalism

It is against this backdrop of European Orientalism, especially during the last three decades of the nineteenth century—at a time of still extensive produc-tion, official support, and audiences that had expanded to Central Europe—that Pavle Paja Jovanović (1859–1957) made his contribution to the Oriental-ist genre. The rise of the young Serb from recipient of the Vienna Academy’s

10 This was the typical practice, as evidenced, for example, in the Moroccan notebooks of Eugène Delacroix and the watercolors of Charles Gleyre. 11 Rosenthal, Orientalism, 41. 12 The search for additional still-untouched sites was prompted by, as in the case of Algeria, the artists’ realization that westernization was taking hold. 13 These included state sponsorship of World Expositions, travel support, commissions, and encouragement of organizations such as the Society of Orientalist Artists. For additional discussion, especially on the World Expositions, see Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 62–65.


first-place student prize for his Wounded Montenegrin (Fig. 1 following p. 287) in 1882 to an internationally recognized exemplar of Orientalism by 1889 could not have been anticipated. He was newly emerging from his five-year studies at the Academy without the credentials assumed necessary to make him competitive with the legions of established Western European painters. The public’s general familiarity with the Balkans and even more so his Serbian ethnicity was limited at best. Jovanović’s rapid ascent, which led to an international stature14 that was sustained throughout his long career, can be related to a number of circumstances. The unleashing of wars of independ-ence on the Balkan peninsula, especially that of the Serbs and Greeks against their Turkish occupiers, not only focused attention but elicited positive re-sponses from Western Europeans.15 More significantly, the Great Powers recognized anew and more emphatically the significance of this geographic area with respect to their own position and relations with the Ottoman Empire. Whether the Balkans were part of the Eastern or Western sphere of influence and under which dominant powers was of political and economic conse-quence. Ordinary citizens mirrored these pragmatic concerns, but they were also responding in support of ideals of liberty and Western heritage as well as fascination with a still remote world. For adventurous travelers, artists, and collectors of non-Western art and objects, a new opportunity presented itself, the discovery of a new Orient in the nearby Balkans.16 As indicated, the mania for all that was deemed “Oriental” had risen to unprecedented heights by mid-century. The range of artistic subjects included fantasy, history, portraits, landscape, hunts, and genre scenes. The public, from the informed collector to the casual bourgeois buyer, perused the state exhibitions, private galleries, and dealers’ shops to observe and purchase. They were also drawn to a vast vari-ety of collectibles—from furnishings to decorative objects—that defined their taste as fashionable and their homes as Orientalist in style. This was the po-litical, artistic, and social environment that proved so advantageous to Jovanović’s advancement. His training and artistic and personal situation provided the other necessary components.

14 He was the first Serbian painter to achieve international prominence. Potential commissions and the sale of his work were directed towards an international audience over three continents. 15 Serbia’s first insurrection was in 1806; Greece soon followed suit by 1821. Viewed as the bedrock of European civilization, the latter’s wars of liberation not only elicited support but assisted in sustaining the focus on the entire Balkan peninsula. 16 As might be expected, some travelers recorded their visits through sketches, especially of people and their costumes.


The Awakening of Paja JovanoviÊ’s Orientalism

A native of Vršac, Jovanović’s early training was in painting and photog-raphy, the former with Jovan Popović and Arsenije Teodorović and the latter with his father. In 1875 he traveled to Vienna, and after two years of instruction at a drawing school he was admitted into the prestigious Vienna Academy to undertake a rigorous academic course of study. His stylistic exposure in Vienna was primarily to Austrian and German interpretations of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism, and to a lesser degree, Proto-Impressionism and Impressionism.17 Jovanović’s rapid advancement culmi-nated in the 1882 prize for his Wounded Montenegrin. This event was pivotal in establishing his credentials and setting the stage for his full embrace of the Orientalist genre. Essential to his thematic orientation combined with a boldness of style was the influence of his teacher, Leopold Muller. He had advised Jovanović to focus on Balkan life and work directly from nature. That was surely a signal that his young protégée’s departure from the traditions of the Vienna Academy should be both thematic and stylistic. Indeed, Muller pointed specifically to the works of Eugène Fromentin as models to emulate. The French Orientalist painter, whose work was known in Central Europe, was acclaimed for his broad Romantic views of the exotic life and terrain of Algeria, as typified by The Arabs, his painting of 1871 (Fig. 2).18

Jovanović’s selection of a Balkan theme of the Wounded Montenegrin (Fig. 1) was not only testimony to Muller’s profound pedagogical influence but a fortuitous selection of the specific subject. It was exhibited at a time of growing European alertness to the events on the Balkan peninsula and the resolution of the “Balkan Question,” which was a matter of discourse and vested interest in Austria-Hungary, France, England, and Turkey. While the painting could be read, like Fromentin’s, as a non-specific rendering of an exotic place and a generalized observation of human conflict, Jovanović sug-gests far more.19 Although not a documentation of a particular event, his refer-ence is to the 1875 revolts in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro, who had

17 Although not initially, Jovanović was alerted to the more avant-garde technical approaches of painters working in Munich and Paris. The impact of both, and especially the latter, is apparent in many of Jovanović’s paintings, including those of the Orientalist genre. 18 He traveled to Algeria in 1846, from 1847 to 1848, and from 1852 to 1853. Along with his paintings, he published two travel narratives (Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 11–18). 19 While not painting a single identifiable event, Jovanović was “always in the focus of current events.” Dejan Ćorić, quoted in Momčilo Moša Todorović, ed., Pavle Paja Jovanović, 1859–1957 (Belgrade: “Radionica duše,” 2009), 179.


joined Serbia in a war against Turkey.20 Even though his Viennese audience may not have been informed on these specific revolts, they would have under-stood the allusion to the conflicts on the Balkan peninsula and the looming question of liberation from the Ottoman occupation and its consequences.

It is also important to note that even in this early work Jovanović was al-ready establishing his own approach to what would have been viewed as an Orientalist theme. Rather than providing an idealized or romanticized reading of the event, he was familiarizing his audience with the character and environment of a specific people. He accomplishes this by the details of hand-woven and sewn rough peasant garb and a humble interior, with its dusty dirt floor and sparse, crudely made furnishings. The young painter’s composi-tional expertise is in full evidence as he directs the viewer first to the scene in its entirety and then to the individual figures, their clothing, gestures, and fa-cial expressions. Jovanović was thus providing an insight into a world far re-moved from that of his urbane audience, with a subject that was readable on various levels.

The next step in Jovanović’s rapid advancement was made possible through Muller’s contacts with the French Gallery in London.21 In 1883 Jovanović entered into an agreement with the latter to produce a series of paintings made, at Muller’s urging, from on-site studies of Balkan life.22 These included scenes of Dalmatia, Herzegovina, and Serbia. The positive reception of his work led to a highly favorable contract for his paintings of contemporary life on the Balkan peninsula with the London gallery of Tooth and Sons in 1889.23 The young painter’s engagement with Orientalist subjects was especially timely, as this had become a highly collectable genre in Eng-land. However, what must be stressed is that while the general category of Orientalism is surely applicable to his work, Jovanović’s approach was dis-tinctly his own and easily distinguishable from those of other Western Euro-pean, especially French, Orientalists. Some provided fantasy, others romanti-cized their subjects, and still others strove for realist, even naturalist, ap-proaches. In general, Jovanović can be classified with those painters recording 20 For a discussion of these historical events, see Dušan Bataković, Nova istorija srpskog naroda (Belgrade: Naš Dom, 2000), 175–77. 21 As noted by Petar Petrović, the gallery focused on the sale of Orientalist paintings, and Muller’s contact was painter and dealer Henry Wallis. The latter provided Jovanović with a studio and other amenities in support of his continued execution of Orientalist subjects. Petar Petrović, Slike Balkana (Vršac: Gradski muzej, 2009), 10. 22 Jovanović’s Orientalist paintings continued to be informed by his travels and pictorial recordings in the Balkans. 23 Nikola Kusovac, Slike i crteži Paje Jovanovića: Povodom 125. godišnjice rođenja (Novi Sad: Galerija Matice srpske, 1984), 17.


a constructed reality. It is not possible to link him with either the painters of fantasy or of romantic imagination. Yet even when grouped with the realists, Jovanović’s approach is singular. What distinguished him and in large meas-ure explains the international appeal of his paintings is their authenticity. A comparison of salient examples of Jovanović’s paintings to a number of French Orientalist works provides evidence of their originality and that of his contribution to the Orientalist genre.

One constant of Jovanović’s Orientalism was the fact that officialdom played no role with respect to his pictorial content. Conversely, the works of numerous French Orientalists, especially those of the first generation, were linked to the state. Jean Antoine Gros’s 1804 painting of Napoleon Visiting the Pest House at Jaffa (Fig. 3) provides an excellent example. On the order of Napoleon, Gros painted an event he had not witnessed. He looked to ac-counts of Napoleon’s visit to his suffering, plague-stricken soldiers in a make-shift hospital in Jaffa. To an extent, i.e., through portraiture and accurate de-tails of attire and furnishings, Gros conveys a level of credibility.24 Typical of this early phase of officially sponsored Orientalism, this is a highly charged romanticized image. It is intended as a glorification of Napoleon, who, im-mune to horrific disease, assumes a Christ-like role of healer as he touches the plague-induced boil on a soldier’s chest. The heroic imagery in combination with a wide range of dramatic gestures, emotional responses, intense colora-tion, and abrupt contrasts against a highly contrived Moorish-inspired archi-tectural setting25 establishes a level of exoticism that met with immense popu-lar success and, expectedly, Napoleon’s approval. The painting was shown at the Salon of 1804.

Jovanović’s Orientalism does not rely on fulfillment of official commis-sions or lend itself to either romanticizing or fantasy. While he was clearly selective in subject and concerned with content and mood, his approach can be best described as a type of descriptive realism. This is apparent when his Blood Revenge (1889–1912) is compared to Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 Death of Sardanapalus (Figs. 4 and 5).26 Neither painter was witness to the scene he 24 In addition, he had looked to Denon’s illustrations for characteristics defining race and ethnicity (Peltre, Orientalism in Art, 70). 25 The actual event took place in an ordinary building converted to a temporary hospital to house the dead and dying. Most were stricken by the bubonic plague, while others by temporary climate-induced blindness, both of which Gros emphasizes in remarkable detail. 26 The event marked the end of the Assyrian kingdom in the seventh century BC. As the Medes and Persians advanced to destroy his kingdom, Sardanapalus, king of the Assyrians, ordered his favorite slaves and horses killed and all, including himself, set afire. The subject provided Delacroix an opportunity to focus on the historical past of the exotic East that so captivated his youthful but extreme Romantic nature.


depicts. Although he was painting a historical personality, Delacroix did not reference historical texts but based his depiction on the 1821 French transla-tion of Lord Byron’s play Sardanapalus.27 For his subject Jovanović looked to Montenegrin folk history. He depicts what had been a traditional mode of re-solving conflict by a rugged and independent people. Here families, long-term adversaries, are determined for revenge. Undeterred by the women and chil-dren around them, their weapons are at the ready. They are poised for a deadly confrontation. Both subjects invite heightening of emotion by exaggeration of expression and gesture, rapid movement, dramatic contrasts, and strong coloration. To produce a veritable cornucopia of Romanticism, Delacroix brings together all the devices—dark-skinned, ferocious killers of sensuous soft-skinned females, beautiful horses amidst the splendor of gold and jewels, enveloped in a haze of smoke. Although he too paints a world deemed exotic by his Western audiences, Jovanović does not succumb to such an approach. His scene is built on contemporary reality and not exaggeration. He had scrutinized and recorded the forbidding rocky terrain and the rugged, determined inhabitants in his sketchbooks. Unlike Delacroix, who had yet to travel to the Orient,28 Jovanović knew the land and the people personally, even intimately; he was familiar with the lives and character of his subjects. He did not build his images on traditional prototypes,29 fantasy, or imagination.

A subject inevitably featured at most major exhibitions throughout the nineteenth century was that of the Turkish harem girl—the odalisque.30 Sepa-rated by a span of 56 years, two versions of the subject in two distinctly dif-ferent styles31 testify to the continuity of a particular perception and approach to this image. They are Jean Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque of 1814 and Pierre Auguste Renoir’s Odalisque of 1870 (Figs. 6 and 7). Neither was the result of direct observation of an odalisque or even a native of the East. Ingres did not travel beyond Italy, and although Renoir visited Algeria, it was eleven years subsequent to the execution of this painting. Both artists based their scenes on travel accounts, pictorial and written. Their odalisques are se-

27 Peltre, Orientalism in Art, 89. 28 In his case it was to Algeria and Morocco. 29 The centrality of Baroque art, especially the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, is evident in Delacroix’s rendering of forms, poses, palette, and application of paint. 30 Derived from the Turkish word odalik, “odalisque” originally referred to a servant in the harem. It was expanded to mean a female of the harem, or more specifically, a concubine. 31 Ingres’s idealization, linearism, and polished surfaces define his style as Neoclassical. Renoir’s realism of form, bright coloration, and loose brushwork align him with Early Impressionism.


ductively posed models whose exoticism is conveyed through details of clothing, exotic objects, and sumptuousness of setting. They are “customed Europeans,”32 and the end result is a type of popular “Studio Orientalism”33 practiced with various levels of expertise throughout the century by Western European painters.

There is no equivalent correspondence to the odalisque image in the work of Jovanović. The closest may be his Woman in Oriental Costume of 1885–88 (Fig. 8), in which he, like his French counterparts, also posed a model in the studio. However, what distinguishes his painting is its veracity on every level. The woman’s features suggest that she is a not a Parisian model but a woman of the Balkans. To a Western European public and the growing number of collectors of Jovanović’s work, she was undeniably foreign, part of an unfa-miliar world. Her clothing, the kilim, patterned cushions, table, and other de-tails are convincingly real. While objects such as the Turkish-style table were authentic to the Balkans and thus exotic to Jovanović’s patrons, they are not contrived studio props but actually serve a utilitarian purpose in a domestic setting. The distinctiveness of Jovanović’s approach is further underlined when compared to another interpretation of the subject, Orientalist Interior: Nude in a Harem of 1850–52 (Fig. 9) by Théodore Chassériau, an artist who had twice traveled to Algeria. Despite the title, it is highly unlikely that Chassériau ever had access to a harem. At best, the interior may have been derived from a compilation of his studies of the Algerian homes he had vis-ited. While their roles are unspecified,34 the two male figures, albeit somewhat exaggerated to satisfy European racial and ethnic conceptions, are taken from life studies. Conversely, the highly idealized women assume almost theatrical poses intended to appeal to Western imagination and satisfy a yearning for the unknown—the forbidden world of the harem. More naked than nude, her soft flesh fully exposed, the central figure is clearly seductive, her undulating form advances invitingly but inexplicably. It is not clear whether she is in the pro-cess of dressing, although that is suggested by her hand action and that of her female attendant. Regardless of these uncertainties, it is undeniable that Chassériau offers a tantalizing, voyeuristic glimpse into a forbidden world.

Jovanović’s young woman is not idealized. Her somewhat broad waist, generously sized hips, and small breasts speak to reality rather than the anatomical perfection of an artificial ideal. She is a woman of flesh and sub- 32 Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics, 34. 33 Ibid. 34 The old man appears to be a spectator, and the dark-skinned youth may well be Chassériau’s inclusion of a detail his audience expected—a eunuch whose task in a harem was to work as a guard or servant.


stance. While there is a seductive quality in her pose, it can be understood as more than seductiveness for its own sake. Jovanović has captured her in motion, at a moment in time. Unlike Chassériau’s harem girl, she is not self-regarding, contemplating her own nudity. Her clothing is both authentic and modest. Unlike those of her counterpart in Chassériau’s painting, the details of her breasts are concealed by a soft gauze-like material, and her abdomen is fully covered. Similarly, there is no pretense in the setting. It is a simple and functional room, devoid of superfluous details intended to heighten imagina-tion or incite desire. Jovanović’s spontaneous and seemingly effortless han-dling of natural coloration, warm light, and impressionistic brushwork further reinforce the actuality of the scene, qualities that distinguish the Serb Orientalist’s approach and help explain the appeal of his brand of refreshingly original Orientalism.

Far more typical of Jovanović’s focus with respect to his portrayal of Bal-kan women is his Spinner of 1889 (Fig. 10). He does not engage with the sen-suous side of her nature. He presents the young woman without artifice and in the context of her everyday existence, comfortably executing a familiar task. His goal was to capture honestly a type of person and life at first-hand. The appeal of such a distinctly different Orientalism is understandable for a public which by 1889 must have been satiated with contrived images intended to satisfy a perceived public taste. The fact that by 1889 the young Serb had en-tered into yet a second and even more lucrative contract to execute additional scenes of the Balkan Orient provides evidence of the continued demand for his brand of Orientalism.35

This type of representation does find counterparts in the studies of other Orientalist painters, as exemplified by Charles Gleyre’s Turkish Woman (Annetta) of 1834 (Fig. 11). There is no question that Gleyre painted this woman from Smyrna on site. However, this is a study, a rapidly executed watercolor and not a finished oil painting intended for purchase or exhibition. In this highly effective rendering of features and intricate details of costume, Gleyre was providing documentation—a typical function of many artistic journeys that by the 1830s typically included territories from the Aegean to the Mediterranean. Gleyre’s watercolor was one of some 150 studies the artist made as the traveling companion and commissioned recorder of the journey 35 See the previous discussion in this article of his commercial contracts, p. 279. Over the course of a career that ended in 1957 Jovanović was alert to a succession of modernist themes and styles. Although he had a broad repertoire of subjects and was receptive to new ideas, there was a constant in his oeuvre. He continued to produce Orientalist scenes for a receptive international public. In response to the latter, he frequently painted replicas of his most popular works. During WWII the demand for replicas intensified in Serbia as these native scenes took on a special patriotic meaning for a people who were once again in captivity.


of wealthy Bostonian John Lowell. At most, such a watercolor might have served Gleyre as a preparatory study for a later version in oil, but it was not intended for exhibition. It is part of a testimony of a trip for the private consumption of his employer.36

In contrast to other Orientalists, Jovanović’s consistent contribution was twofold in the exclusivity of his focus on Balkan life and the accuracy of his description. As was frequently the case, he recorded a society in which male authority, physical prowess, and engagement are central. Rooster Fight of 1897 (Fig. 12) is a case in point. Here the men, their weapons in evidence, are fully invested and absorbed in watching the unfolding of what promises to be a bloody battle. Their expressions are fixed and unyielding, devoid of any hint of unmanly empathy for the victims of the cruel sport. Battle, victory, defeat, and death are inevitable elements of the only existence known to them.

The singularity of Jovanović’s approach in its untarnished honest presen-tation of the realities of Balkan life and the persistence of its traditions in the modern age is even more apparent when Rooster Fight is compared to the 1847 Cock Fight (Fig. 13). Painted prior to his six voyages to the East, the painting garnered a gold medal for Jean Léon Gérôme at the Salon of 1847. His is an idealized, sentimental view of life in a distant, and for contemporary audiences, exotic Greek past. Jovanović’s powerful protagonists are countered by a somewhat insipid youth and his graceful female companion. They are the epitome of anatomical perfection and emotional restraint, echoing the artistic ideals of Greco-Roman antiquity. Unmarred by the hard life of the Balkan warrior peasants, they assume assigned studio poses37 and are startlingly disconnected from one another, while Jovanović’s vigorous males, clearly painted from life, are full participants. Gérôme’s setting, while obviously in-tended as that of the Greek islands, is generic, but Jovanović’s is specific and ethnographically accurate. Perhaps the explanation rests in the fact that, re-gardless of subject, Gérôme was not fully invested in that which to him was inherently unfamiliar. He is a remote observer, a sophisticated Frenchman considering a world he cannot know. Jovanović paints his own world.

Along with more intimate vignettes, both artists considered society at large. Although not the same subject, Gérôme’s Snake Charmer of 1880 and 36 On his return to France, Gleyre, like Delacroix and others, did produce a few oil paintings based on such figure studies. He had made two sets of studies, one for Lowell and the other for himself. Such studies were typically not exhibited but kept in portfolios. At present the sets are in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. 37 These theatrical poses are products of the youthful Gérôme’s academic training, specifically the required course at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on the rendering of set gestures intended to convey movement and emotion.


Jovanović’s Gusle Player38 address a community experience (Figs. 14 and 15). By 1880 Gérôme’s six trips had familiarized him with Greece, Turkey, and especially Egypt. He had established a formidable reputation and was es-pecially lauded for his technical skills, which he applied to such popular sub-jects as the snake charmer. This painting exemplifies the height of his Orien-talism in its clarity, precision, and amassing of almost microscopic details. Through such technical virtuosity Gérôme’s paintings assumed an effect of photographic reality. To those without personal cognizance of the East, his approach was seen as objective, providing assurances of Gérôme’s direct and intimate knowledge of the Islamic world and the accuracy of his depictions. Here he focuses on Egypt and a daring young snake charmer who performs before a group of seated elderly men. Jovanović depicts a scene familiar to generations of Balkan people, the gusle player surrounded by an audience of men, women, and children. One artist has chosen an image that plays to Western fantasy, while the other provides an insight into a long-standing tra-dition of the traveling gusle player who narrates and teaches the history of a people through singing and recitation of epic poetry. As noted, Gérôme’s ap-proach was viewed as objective and thus truthful. At first glance, Jovanović’s lack of precise detail, painterly rather than linear approach, built-up rather than clear and smooth surfaces suggest an opposite reading. However, further scrutiny of Gérôme’s seemingly ethnographic painting reveals extensive ar-tistic manipulations and deliberate inaccuracies. Gérôme imposes his own point of view. He intends a message and to that end manipulates and alters reality. The scene was meant to be accepted as the painter’s direct transcrip-tion of Egyptian life. Although this type of entertainment was popular in Egypt and the men are clothed in Egyptian attire, the event does not take place in Egypt or, as would have been typical, in an urban courtyard or street.39 It is set in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, as evidenced by the architecture and specifi-cally the characteristic decorative wall panels.40 It can be argued that by the juxtaposition of such a setting with this type of street performance, Gérôme deliberately “evokes the sensual eroticism … the snake and the boy engage in a voluptuous embrace.”41 The male audience is clearly riveted on the undulat-

38 The painting is a 1944 replica; the date of the original work is unknown. 39 Gérôme had viewed the performances of the snake charmers on the streets or in courtyards of Cairo, a city with whose appearance and life he was familiar. Sophie Makariou and Charlotte Maury, “The Paradox of Realism: Gérôme in the Orient,” in The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme: 1824–1904, ed. Laurence des Cars, Dominque de Font-Rélaux, and Édouard Papet (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 278. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.


ing body of a pubescent boy. Gérôme is a foreigner observing and depicting the world of “the Other” in a way that coincides with the expectations of his European audiences. He is a modern, sophisticated Frenchman, and for him and his public this was a mysterious world without the moral restraints of an advanced society.

Jovanović came to this scene with full familiarity. Like the villagers sur-rounding the old musician, he too had listened with rapt attention to strains of the gusle and the moving, melodious words. Although he was already fully ensconced in the life of both Serbia and Vienna, Jovanović did not view him-self as a modern cosmopolitan urbanite whose sophistication placed a distance between painter and subject.42 When he paints the people listening intently to the song of the gusle player, savoring the meaning of the history and legends he conveys, he does so in a manner that is both persuasive and direct. Devoid of excessive detail, tight contours, and polished surfaces, Jovanović’s painting is real not only in its parts but as a whole. The setting is easily identifiable, familiar to his countrymen and convincing of its veracity even to those unfa-miliar with the culture of the Balkans. His intention was not to draw contrasts between East and West, the sophistication of one and backwardness of the other.

Fascination with subject, appreciation of technical skill, and the effective-ness of his unassuming approach brought Jovanović early recognition and an international reputation. That appeal was also attributable in part to the fact that he was focusing on the Balkan peninsula rather than the Near and Middle East or Algeria, which by the last quarter of the century had been presented by a considerable number of Orientalists. Furthermore, rather than present the East through the remoteness of Western eyes and imagination, and at times an over-sophistication and even political considerations, Jovanović achieved a remarkable coupling of direct observation and empathetic response. He painted a world he saw in a way that was uniquely his own, but one that could easily be understood by his foreign audiences. While they may have been fas-cinated and even titillated by Gérôme’s highly biased revelations of a remote, mysterious world, they understood and accepted as credible Jovanović’s vi-gnettes and learned something of the society he presented. They were more than simply spectators. Jovanović’s paintings invite a level of engagement, understanding, and even identification with the very human responses of the painter’s subjects.

Jovanović did not accept a sentimental or highly romantic type of Orien-talism or a tedious ethnographic definition, nor did he infer any criticism of 42 In fact, for the remainder of his career he was a member of both societies, maintaining studios in Vienna and Belgrade.


“the Other.” In the process of departing from traditional and familiar thematic and stylistic modes of Orientalism, he was revealing the singular traits of the Balkan peoples and thus providing a level of timely knowledge essential to understanding an area of considerable and ultimately critical significance in determining a balance of power in contemporary Europe.

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Figure 8. Paja Jovanović, Woman in Oriental Costume, 1885–88

[Source: National Museum, Belgrade]

Figure 9. Théodore Chassériau, Orientalist Interior: Nude in a Harem,

1850–52 [Source: Private Collection]

Figure 10. Paja Jovanović, Spinner, 1889

[Source: Private Collection]

Figure 11. Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, Turkish Woman (Annetta),

1834 [Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]

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Duöan Pajin

DUŠAN PAJIN, who received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Sarajevo, has held faculty appointments in philosophy, aesthetics, and art at numerous academic institutions throughout Serbia. In those capacities he has lectured in both Serbian and English. Additionally, he has made frequent appearances as a lecturer on television and radio cultural programs. Pajin has served as editor in chief for the quarterly journal Eastern Cultures, as program editor for the Belgrade Youth Culture Center, and as an editor for the Belgrade publishing house Nolit. An exceedingly productive scholar, he has published 15 books on theory, most recently, Zen-Teachings: Practice and Contemporary Influences (2012), For a Better World: Important Cultural Figures of the 20th Century (2013), and Yoga—Mind and Body (2014); edited 12 books, including The Anthology of Yugoslav Poetry: 1950–1959 (also published in Chinese); and published over 500 studies, articles, critiques, and reviews in Yugoslav and foreign periodicals. Pajin’s creative talents also extend to the practice of art. His paintings have been exhibited at national as well as international venues.

306 Duöan Pajin

Dobrodoölica

Kako je blagodarna lepota Kad je samnom Tako daleko od kuće, Pa se pojavila nenadano i nenametljivo Na oknu mog prozora Velika zelena bogomoljka, Došla je kao da me vidi, Da mi iskaže svoju večernju molitvu. Kako je blagodarna lepota, Kad mi iznova otvara Kapiju mudrosti, Sa naznakom iznad— Ulaz slobodan, Kad je duh spreman.

Tajpej, leto 1993.

Duöan Pajin 307

Welcome

How gracious is beauty Being with me So far away from home Appearing suddenly and humbly On my window-pane A big green praying mantis Came, as if to see me, To deliver her evening prayer. How gracious is beauty, To open again The gates of wisdom, With a sign above— Entrance free When the mind is ready.

Taipei, summer 1993

308 Duöan Pajin

Zalazak sunca

Milost lepote Plavi me kao velika plima— Zagledan u suton, U odlazak dana, I dolazak večeri. U magnovenju slutim: Možda je to čas Poravnanja života i smrti? U spokoju, Širokom kao nebo, Dubokom kao okean, Sveobuhvatna čistina Otvara prolaz, Između sad i nikad, Sažimajući večnost U trenutak tišine, Dok zrikavci Smenjuju zriku dana, Zrikom noći.

Duöan Pajin 309

Sunset

By the grace of beauty Flooded as by a giant tide, Watching the twilight, The departure of the day, The arrival of the night, For a moment I have an inkling— Is this the equalizing moment Of life and death? With this solemn peace in mind, Vast as the sky, Deep as the ocean, While an encompassing purity Opens the passage Between now and never Compressing eternity Into a moment of silence, While the crickets Change their daily tune Into the evening tune.

310 Duöan Pajin

Nema viöe tajne

Pesme koje sam znao Ne čuju se više, Lica koja sam voleo Ne vidim više. Tamno crveni zalazak sunca Dugo nisam video. Jutro više nije obećanje, Nego presuda novog dana. Dani ne dodaju životu, Samo me guraju dalje U sledu ka kraju. Nema više tajne Jasno je zašto hoću Da zaustavim život. Odbijam da idem dalje U bol i starost, Neću da pokvarim dane Koji su već bili dati, Ili da žalim nad prošlim, Da budem dosadan starac Izgubljen u uspomenama, Koji stalno ponavlja svoje priče Koga podnose zbog godina, Kome se dive jer je još priseban, Ili ga ispomažu, kad je bespomoćan.

Duöan Pajin 311

No More Mystery

The songs I loved Are not sung anymore, The faces I loved Are not seen around, The deep purple sunset I haven’t seen for ages. The morning is not a promise But a sentence of a new day. The days do not add to life But only push me further In the queue towards the end. No more mystery— It is clear why I want To stop living. I refuse to go further Into pain and old age, I do not want to spoil the days I have already been given, Or to lament over the past, And be a boring old man Lost in memories, Always repeating his stories, Tolerated because of his age, Admired because he is still sensible, Or helped, when helpless.

312 Duöan Pajin

Vredelo je

Moja duša, otvorena Za nežnost neiscrpnu, Moja osećanja Napajaju beskrajnu sreću. Stojim zanet čuđenjem I posmatram zapanjeno Okean vremena. Sećanja mi na nebu Šta je njihov smisao? U tim trenucima vidim vremena Pre tebe, Vremena posle tebe. Prisustvo mojih osećanja Čini me svesnim Vremena odsustva— Kad nisi bila Kad nećeš biti Kad neću biti. Gledam ti lice i znam, Vredelo je Doći na sveti I primiti ovaj dar Stišanog srca. Moja lađa i ja Jedrimo s vetrovima neba Stremimo nebeskom staništu Da proslavimo zvezdano rođenje.

Duöan Pajin 313

It Was Worthwhile

My soul open For tenderness inexhaustible And my feelings Fuel for endless gladness. I stand lost in wonder And watch with awe The ocean of time. My memories in the sky What may be their meaning? In such moments I see times Before you, Times after you. The presence of my feelings Makes me aware Of times of absence— When you were not When you will be not When I will be not. I watch your face and know, It was worthwhile To visit the world And accept this gift Of the silenced heart. My boat and I With sky winds in the sails We are heading toward heavenly site To celebrate the sidereal birth.

314 Duöan Pajin

Okeansko oseÊanje

U to osećanje Kao u hram ulazim Gde se otvaraju prostori svečani Gde milje prebiva. Sećanja, stvari, ljudi, Svetlošću čudesnom zaodenuti, Snagom blagom ispunjeni, Dovoljnošću, toplinom, Okruženi. Srce mi se Od obilja preliva, U grudima Kliktaj prigušeni, Ozračje tirkizno, Koje dah oduzima, Kao da je život ceo, Moj, spremanje bio, Za to magnovenje Radosti nepobedive.

Duöan Pajin 315

The Oceanic Feeling

Into that feeling As into a temple I enter, Where solemn spaces open, And graciousness abides. Remembrances, persons, and things In delightful light clouded, With gentle power filled, By warmth and sufficiency Surrounded. My heart With plenty overflows, In my bosom A muffled cry, A turquoise air That takes my breath. As if my whole life A preparation were, For this moment Of joy invincible.

[email protected]


Mirjana N. Radovanov-MatariÊ

MIRJANA N. RADOVANOV-MATARIĆ holds an M.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in linguistics and world literature, fields in which she has taught for over 50 years. Matarić is a prolific bilingual writer and translator of mod-ern American, English, Irish, Indian, Swedish, and Serbian poetry and prose. Her creative work embraces memoirs, poetry, short stories, and other genres. Her 36 published books include Kadmus i druge pesme (1975), Memories, Bitter-Sweet Memories (1988), Legacy (2002), Engleska književnost u Srba 1900–1945 (2010), and Dobro jutro, gospođo M (2013). She is also published in numerous anthologies and literary publications. For her notable educational and cultural contributions, Matarić has received many awards, including five U.S. Presidential medals, the Arsenije Čarnojević Award from the govern-ment of Serbia (2005), a literary award from the Academy “Ivo Andrić” (2013), the Golden Medal from the government of Serbia for advancing culture, and the Sretenska povelja for promoting Serbian culture in the U.S. through translations (2008).

318 Mirjana N. Radovanov-MatariÊ

Dunav

Dunav je ljubavnik veran Dunav je učitelj smeran bajalica i uspavanka simfonija šuma i boja. Dunav je život večni i trajna ljubav moja. Od rane mladosti s njim sam drugovala šumove mu osluškivala smenu boja pratila miris peska, riba, školjki i istorije njegove udisala. I sada daleko Dunav u meni šumi i šapuće poverava mi tajne samo sada jasne dok sunce na zapadu gasne i ja s njim. Dunav teče.

Kalifornija, 2005.

Mirjana N. Radovanov-MatariÊ 319

The Danube

The Danube was a faithful lover a teacher and magic ally symphony of sounds and hues, a magic lullaby. The Danube is our life eternal an undying love of mine. I listened to his heart beat each change of his mood aroma of sand, fish, and shells, the history of our brood. I am not near but the Danube lives his secrets now clear. While the sun is dying in the West, so am I. The Danube still flows high, my last lullaby.

California, 2005


Rat i mir

Svuda oko mene nered, nemiri i nasilje. Mržnja. U mirnom centru vrtloga, sama. Nema nemira, konfuzije ni mržnje u srcu mome, samo tuga. Zašto ne mogu te zločinačke ruke milovati zlatastu dečju kosicu, svirati violinu i lepotu vajati? Usred ludila i zbrke daj mi da budem ćutljivo mudra kao drveće, tiha kao planine i reke, miroljubiva kao cveće.


War and Peace

Around me turbulence, hate, confusion, and violence. In the still center of that maelstrom I am alone. No turbulence, no confusion, no hate in my heart, only sadness and the question why. Why can’t those murdering hands caress babies’ curly hair, play the violin, create beauty? In the middle of turbulence and confusion, let me be quietly wise like trees, ageless rivers, and mountains, utterly nonviolent like flowers.


Dunav i rat

Dunav bešumno teče. Godina 1941. i ja sam dete. Drugi svetski rat počinje s treskom. Srušen je most preko Dunava između Novog Sada i Petrovaradina. Reka postaje granica između dva grada, sada dve države, Mađarske i Nezavisne države Hrvatske. Četiri godine ne možemo videti najbliže rođake sa sremske strane a kad ih, konačno, vidimo sve moje tetke i strine su u crnini, udovice do kraja života. Rat je okončan ali mrtvi se ne vraćaju.

Kalifornija, 2007.


The Danube and the War

The Danube quietly rolls 1941, I am a child. World War Two starts with the explosion of our bridge over the Danube between Novi Sad and Petrovaradin. The River becomes a border between two cities, now different countries, Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia. Four years we do not see our closest relatives on the other side when we do, all my aunts wear black, widows for life. The War ends the dead never come back.

California, 2007

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VeËni Dunav

Dete sam. Dunav struji kroz mene: jedrilice i teški šlepovi, dečji kikot zvoni iz plićaka. Srednjoškolka. Dunavski talasi me ljuljuškaju: „Na lepom plavom Dunavu.“ Mlada žena. Smejem se. Pevam i sviram. Pišem poeziju. Igram bečke valcere i sanjam stranstvovanja. A sada Dunav bešumno protiče i spira me dok ogromna narandža sunca polako tone.

Pasadena, 2011.


The Ageless Danube

A child the Danube gushes through me, sailboats and heavy barges, children’s laughter echoing in the shallows. A teenager the waves steadily lull me “On the Beautiful Blue Danube.” A young woman I laugh, write poetry, dance Viennese waltzes and dream of world travels. Now the Danube washes noiselessly through me while a huge orange sun slowly drowns.

Pasadena, 2011


Ko sam ja?

Emigrantkinja sam iz male zemlje na brdovitom Balkanu gde se stalno čuje Nema problema. Emigrirala sam u veliku zemlju gde ljudi kažu Baš me briga Ništa ne marim. Zbunjena sam lingvista i pisac koji osluškuje smisao i značenje reči. Majka i baka, zabrinuta građanka, pitam se kuda to vodi. Moja mala zemlja se nalazi pred ogromnim teškoćama. Kad se raspitujem kažu Nema problema. U velikoj, Baš me briga, šta to zaista znači?

2008.


Who Am I?

I am an emigrant from a small Balkan land where you constantly hear Nema problema—No problem. I have immigrated to a large powerful land where people constantly say I don’t care, couldn’t care less. I am confused a linguist and a writer listening to the meaning behind the words. A mother grandmother a concerned citizen worried where we are headed. My small land faces huge problems when asked, they say Nema problema, no problem. In the other land what does I don’t care really mean?

2008


Dijaspora

Mi smo, Srbi, kao lososi plivamo uzvodno dok se ne popnemo na visine tamo se mrestimo i ne vraćamo, ali naše potomstvo nastavlja životnu trku s preponama.

Kalifornija, 2006.


Diaspora

Serbs are like salmon swimming up the stream, climbing upward, not minding the effort then and there, we breed, even if we cannot come back our offspring continues life’s race with hurdles.

California, 2006

Serbian Local Government under the Rule of the Constitutionalists: 1842–58

Documents

Transcript of Serbian Local Government under the Rule of the Constitutionalists: 1842–58