Restoration of the original meaning of the cult of Knez Lazar

AT THE very beginning of the 1941 uprising, the first armed action was carried out on Vidovdan, under the leadership of priests and royal officers, with an attack on an Ustasha “unit” in Avtovac near Gack, in Herzegovina. The renegade Herzegovinians, from the village of Kazanci, were led by their priest Radojica Perišić.

The oath before the great attack on the Germans in Loznica, which was commanded by the abbot Georgije Bojić and the priest Vlada Zečević, in August 1941, was taken in the Tronoša monastery, the center of the Kosovo vow and the cult of Jug Bogdan and the Jugović brothers.

Heroism, however, has always had its price, which was paid not only in human sacrifices.

The holy relics of Prince Lazar, Emperor Uroš and Stevan Štiljanović were saved from the Croatian Ustasha, without any epic glory, with the help of the German Nazis; they were transferred from Srem to occupied Belgrade in 1942. In Kosmet, which belonged to the fascist Greater Albania, the systematic persecution of the Serbian population was renewed.

Even after 1945, the KPJ would condemn the “Greater Serbian” “Vidovdan idea” of Karađorđević. The Partisan army, however, consisted mostly of Serbs, recruited, among other things, with the help of the epic, heroic, fiddler’s understanding of Kosovo’s lore.

Literary critic Zoran Mišić, in the text “What is Kosovo’s determination” (1963), will notice the similarity of the slogan from the demonstrations on March 27, 1941, with “It is better for us in a feat to die, than to live with shame” and other statements from “Letters about to Prince Lazar” Danilo III. This, in his opinion, was the essence of Kosovo’s determination: “choosing the most difficult, most destructive path, which is the only right path”; “give up everything that is deceptive gain and easy glory, abandon what is attainable for the love of the unattainable, save Njegoševski from being what cannot be”. In the latter, socialist era, a whole series of Serbian writers will find inspiration in the Kosovo tradition.

In the SOCIALIST Yugoslav culture, Njegoš was given due attention, but as an artist and freedom fighter, born from an epic legacy; even Andrić was criticized for his “pro-regime” writing, on the occasion of Njegoš, about the Kosovo Covenant and the “Kosovo mystery”. The demolition of Njegoš’s chapel on Lovćen, which was rebuilt by King Aleksandar Karađorđević after the First World War, and the construction of Meštrović’s mausoleum (opened in 1974) followed in this direction. Together with the beginning of the Albanian rebellion in Kosovo in 1968, that event was one of the main incentives for the ever-widening dissatisfaction and political mobilization of the Serbs. This was also contributed to by historians’ later findings about the territorial promises made to the Albanian communists during the Second World War in order to create a common, Balkan, communist confederation.

The expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija continued in socialist Yugoslavia.

It turned out that, after decades of official atheism, Kosovo’s lore did not only inspire artists. The protests of the Kosovo Serbs from the 1980s, as a reaction to the new rebellion of the Albanians from 1981, quickly turned into a movement to change the unenviable constitutional position of Serbia within Yugoslavia, due to which it could not exercise power in Kosmet.

The Serbian Orthodox Church also played an important role in these processes. She warned for a long time about the expulsion of Serbs and the endangerment of the Serbian spiritual and cultural heritage in Kosmet. In her lap was preserved the interpretation of the Kosovo tradition as the Kosovo Covenant, close to the original meanings of the cult of Prince Lazar. In the 20th century, it was renovated especially by Nikolaj Velimirović and Justin Popović. Writing about “our Lazarev, our Vidovdan, our Kosovo gospel”, Justin Popović reasoned that it means “sacrificing temporarily for the sake of the eternal, earthly for the sake of the heavenly”…

The first stone that will start the avalanche of destruction of Yugoslavia was broken off in Kosovo. With the NATO aggression against FR Yugoslavia in 1999, followed by the most massive ethnic cleansing of the Serbs from Kosmet, the looting of property and the destruction of monuments of their culture, the Kosovo problem once again outgrew the borders of the Serbian-Albanian conflict. It caused a world crisis, the consequences of which will be felt in international relations for a long time.

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Identity based on church cults

THE DURABILITY OF THE KOSOVO tradition and its essential connection with the national identity of the Serbs can be largely explained by the theoretical model offered by the works of Anthony Smith. Not only Serbian historical sources, but also the works of Anthony Smith, Eric Hobsbawm and other writers, testify that the Serbs, similar to the English or Russians, already in the Middle Ages can find a “proto-national” identity, based on church cults of national saints and traditions. In the age of Prince Lazar and the Battle of Kosovo, the myth of the “origin” and the “golden age” was placed in the time of Saint Simeon and Saint Sava; in later times, the Serbs will look for their “origin” in the age of Prince Lazar and his exploits.

For Serbs, Kosovo is what Smit calls a “holy land”. A great, fateful battle was fought there; heroes, martyrs and prophets lived, died and were buried there. The cult of Prince Lazar, from its very beginnings, was the cult of the holy ruler – martyr. “Holy martyrs” and “sacrifices for faith and fatherland” were also all his fallen warriors.

Judging by the original material, the Serbs were already a covenanted community in the Middle Ages, while, without a doubt, in the spirit of the feudal era, they retained the characteristics of a hierarchical nation. The covenantal understanding of a common origin, followed by comparisons with the Old Testament leaders of the Jewish people and calling the Serbs the “New Israel”, was already associated with Saint Sava and Saint Simeon. Lazarev, the Kosovo Covenant, as a rejection of the Earthly Empire and commitment to the Heavenly Kingdom, would only be a confirmation of the older covenant of Saint Sava and the New Testament of Jesus Christ. And the legend about the downfall of the Serbian empire and Turkish slavery as a punishment for the sins of the ancestors corresponds to the typology of “covenant peoples” who, based on the Old Testament, believe in God’s punishment for abandoning the Covenant.

All the key motifs of the Kosovo Covenant were created already in the 14th and 15th centuries, and by the end of the 15th century they were joined by the slander, betrayal and heroism of Miloš Obilić. Since treason was linked to the name of Vuk Branković in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Covenant was fully formed.

The main stronghold of the Kosovo covenant in foreign empires was the Patriarchate of Peć. In the language of Anthony Smith, if in the Middle Ages covenantalism was associated with a hierarchical understanding of the nation, after the collapse of Serbian states and nobility, with the continuation of religious wars, as converts in the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Roman Catholic Habsburg Empire, the Serbs, guided by the church, remained primarily covenantal nation.

Front page (Radosav Stojanović and Sr. Wikipedia), Archive of the Serbian Orthodox Church, National Museum, Narona Library of Serbia, “News” and “Struggle” documentation Wikipedia…

In the following centuries, with the liberation of Montenegro and Serbia and the reform of Vuk Karadzic, the epic, heroic interpretation of the Kosovar tradition suppressed its Christian, church, covenant sense. Behind the covenant, the republican nation also stood up. In the spirit of the Enlightenment and romantic cult of science, in the 19th century, in the age of great polemics about the historical basis of the tradition about Kosovo, a third, historiographical interpretation arose, which searched for exact facts and rejected the tradition as completely useless. Within this tradition, there were also voices that called for a comparative study of traditions and historical facts.

The decisions made in the two world wars confirmed the strength of the Kosovo tradition, understood as a fight for the Kingdom of Heaven and Heavenly Justice, in which, due to the magnitude of the goal, no price is asked. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia tried to incorporate the Vidovdan idea into the foundations of its official cultural pattern. Socialist Yugoslavia also rested on an epic, heroic interpretation of Kosovo’s lore. At the same time, in the Serbian Church, there was an unbroken tradition of a covenantal understanding of the Kosovo tradition, which can be followed up to the present day.

The last decades of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st century confirmed the strength of the Kosovo tradition.

It remains to be seen what the impact of NATO’s attack on FR Yugoslavia and the occupation of Kosovo and Metohija will be on Kosovo’s tradition, but also on the destinies of the Balkan nations.