Serbia: A Sketch

by Helen Leah Reed

II. SERBIA: SINGING

Serbia, in the hands of a cruel conqueror, stripped of most of her possessions, bereft of happiness, forgotten by her sister nations, had little left but hope. She still clung to her ideals of brotherhood and freedom, and she held close her great treasure, a gift inherited from her remote northern ancestors—her gift of song. Her songs—virile, yet somewhat softened by contact with her southern neighbors—cheered and strengthened her. She sang and sang, in a minor key, and her mountains reëchoed with the deeds of her happier days, with the stories of her heroes, now seeming more splendid because she herself had become so poor and unhappy. For centuries she was like one stunned; she had never been aggressive—now she could not fight against the aggressor who had all the weapons in his own hands.

A younger sister—and poor at that!—a younger sister, who had set out to be perfectly independent—what could she expect? She must work out her own salvation. Besides, she lived so far away from the centers of culture she was almost a barbarian. Yet she was not wholly uncouth. She had been courteous to the Crusaders traversing Europe to crush their common enemy—the Turk; and now the Turk had captured her! Of course it was a pity! It was a busy time in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the nations had enough to do to keep their own houses in order,—and when they had leisure they must keep in touch with new life, with the renaissance of Art and Learning. They were enchanted with the discovery that they were not mere parvenus like distant Serbia, but descendants of that grand old house that had once conquered the world. The beauty of Paganism—ah, that was something worth contemplating! But Serbia—well, the Crusades were over, and the Turk was no longer threatening Western Europe; besides, Serbia had not even belonged to their Church—so what matter if the Turk crushed her?

But Serbia was not crushed. Had the nations listened, they could have heard her singing. There was little else she could do, except wait and hope—wait like her Marko for the signal to rise.

Through five centuries of subjection to the Turks, the guslars, singing the heroic pesmas, were hardly second in influence to the priests in fortifying the spirits of the suffering Serbs. The intense patriotism of the Serb was kept alive, indeed was often kindled, by the folk songs he had heard even in his cradle. Through all his troubles he has cherished the divine fire of Nationality, even as the Vestals conserved the sacred flame.

The Serb, belonging to the most poetical of nations, has the most melodious of all Slav tongues—identical with that of the Croats and yet used as the language of literature a comparatively short time. Even little more than a hundred years ago people were still arguing whether ancient Slavonic or the Serbian vernacular should be the language of literature. But for Dossitie Obradovitch this result might have been reached less quickly. He, "the great sower," a notable educator, applied the language of the people to literature, publishing an autobiography, besides poems and treatises, in the common tongue. Before his death, in 1811, the "Write as you speak" party had won, and literature became the property of the masses. Yet a further improvement in the language was undertaken by Vuk Karadgitch, a self-taught cripple, whose grammar, published in 1814, was epochal. He it was who devised the alphabet of thirty letters, each one representing a complete sound, and he published a dictionary and a collection of the pesmas which he took down from the mouths of the guslars who sang them. Then, when various translations appeared, Europe remembered vaguely that diplomats and travelers generations before had brought back accounts of Serbian poetry heard almost as often in those days in foreign countries as in Serbia itself.

Goethe was one of the first to translate them and call attention to those pesmas. He praised their humor and philosophy, their high heroism mingled with certain spiritual qualities. Soon Sir John Bowring, a skilled linguist, made a translation into English verse which is nearer the original in spirit and letter than any that has been made since.

There have also been many fine prose translations of the Kossovo cycle and of other pesmas, and all readers agree that in them is, as one critic says, "a clear and inborn poetry, such as can scarcely be found in any other modern people."

"Serbian song," wrote Schafferik, "resembles the tone of the violin; old Slavonian, that of the organ; Polish, that of the guitar. The old Slavonian in the Psalms sounds like the loud rush of the mountain stream; the Polish like the sparkling and bubbling of a fountain; and the Serbian like the quiet murmuring of a streamlet in a valley."

The Serb loves to sing; every young countryman carries his gusle, and is ready to use it—a one-stringed violin, shaped something like a mandolin, played on the knee with a bow, like a violoncello. Men and women—peasants and townsmen—all sing. When two or more sing together, it is unison and not part-singing. The national Serb music is rich in melodies. The traveler to-day hears the Serb singing a ballad of the days of Stephen Dushan of Kossovo, of the Bulgar War, of Karageorges (the William Tell of the mountains). The gusle wails monotonously, with an occasional trill on one or two minor notes. Some find its music plaintive, others call it tiresome, and travelers as long ago as the beginning of the eighteenth century have written of seeing numbers of people in a crowd silently weeping as they listened to an old blind man chanting the national songs.

There are two great epic cycles—one centering around Tsar Lazar, the other around Marko—and both have to do with the Battle of Kossovo. Fragments of other cycles show that Dushan, Milos Obilich, and other heroes have been each a chief figure in them.

No matter how unlearned, from one point of view, a Serb may be, he can always talk about Stephen Nemanya, or St. Sava, or Marko, and the other great men of his race. Moreover, he is continually creating new songs, new folk lore. In the great mills of this country he lightens his work with his simple melodies. Sometimes the words of his song form a clear narration of the events that brought him to America, even of happenings since his arrival. His own sorrows, his own joys, are woven in his epic. After their recent war with Bulgaria, everywhere at village festivals, the Serbs began to sing of their victories, and to-day they are undoubtedly singing of the sorrows of the past two years.

Mr. Miatovich says that when as Cabinet Minister he had been defeated, forty years ago, the next day he heard the people singing this event in the streets.

Whatever the subject—whether it deals with ancient times or with the present; whether it is an epic or one of the so-called women's songs—the Serbian pesma is anonymous. No single writer or composer claims it. It is the work of the people, all of whom have had a chance to modify it as it has passed through the ages.

Among all the heroes of the guslars the favorite has always been Prince Marko. Although much of the career of the Marko of the pesmas was fabulous, this prince had a real existence in the latter part of the fourteenth century—the son of Vukashin, who tried to usurp the throne of young Urosh after the death of Stephen Dushan, and Queen Helen, unless one prefers to account for Marko's glittering qualities by making him the offspring of a dragon and a fairy queen. The real Marko was not a great man, as the world counts greatness. He ruled a small territory in Macedonia, and Prilip was his capital. He is said to have been friendly with the Turks and to have died fighting for the Sultan. This was after Kossovo, when Serbia was sleeping. Yet he must have had qualities that made him rise above this in popular estimation, for his local reputation grew with time and became national. Certainly for five centuries he has been a living personality, not only in Serbian but in Croatian, Bulgarian, and Roumanian tradition.

It is worth considering—this theory that in Prince Marko the Serbian nation projects itself; that his sufferings and successes are the sufferings and successes of the whole nation; that it beholds its own virtues and weaknesses in his; its own individuality in his popular personality; its own doom in his tragic fate.

Athletic, keen-minded, quickly reading the designs of his foes, he, as an individual, was what Serbia would like to have been as a political entity. Even as he triumphed over Magyar, Venetian or Turk, so would the Serb have triumphed. When Serbia was sunk in poverty the guslar brought before his hearers visions of splendid things they could never hope to see, but whose beauties satisfied their imagination.

Marko is the knight without fear, without reproach—the lover of justice, the hater of all oppression. He is kind and dutiful, the protector of the poor and abused. His pity extends even to animals, who in turn often helped him. "He feared no one but God." Courteous to all women, tender and dutiful to his mother, Marko could be savage and cruel beyond belief toward the Turks.

Human weapons never harmed him, and he wielded a war club weighing one hundred pounds, composed of sixty pounds of steel, thirty pounds of silver, and ten pounds of gold. One touch of this mace beheaded a foe, as one stroke of his saber ripped him open.

Marko's horse, Sharaz, his constant companion and helper, was the strongest and swiftest horse ever known. He knew just when to kneel down and save his master from the adversary's lance. He knew how to rear and strike the enemy's charger with his forefeet. When roused he would spring up three lance lengths forward. Glittering sparks flashed from beneath his hoof, blue flame from his nostrils. He has been known to bite off the ears of the enemy's horse; sometimes he trampled Turkish soldiers to death. Marko fed him bread and wine from his own dishes. Sharaz kept guard over Marko while he slept. He always shared the glory of victory.

Yet, whether or not Marko personifies Serbia, in the life of Marko the current of Serbian medieval life is reflected as in a mirror.

In these poems Turks are always unreliable and cruel; Venetians are crafty; the faithless wife is usually lured away by a Turk. In one vivid tale, Marko's own bride, as he is taking her home from Bulgaria, is stolen by a Doge of Venice, who, with three hundred attendants, had been invited by her father to be part of her bridal procession. His designs do not succeed, and when Marko comprehends this treachery he does not hesitate. "He cleft the Doge's head in twain," and he struck another traitor with his saber "so neatly" that he fell to earth in two pieces.

The touch of exaggeration in all the stories is not one merely of incident but of detail—the kind of exaggeration a child loves. For example, when Marko was brought from the cell where the Sultan had imprisoned him for three years, his nails were so long that he could plow with them. The Serbs of those days, having few splendid things in their own surroundings, loved to endow Marko with grandeur. On his tent, for instance, was fixed a golden apple. "In the apple are fixed two large diamonds which shed a light so far and wide that the neighboring tents need no candle at night." In another instance a magnificent ring is described, "so richly studded with precious stones that the whole room was lighted up."

The ransom demanded by Marko and his friend Milosh from the Magyar General Voutchka was more than magnificent. He was to give three tovars of gold for each (a tovar was as much as a horse could carry on his back), and, among other things, a gilded coach harnessed with twelve Arabian coursers used by General Voutchka when visiting the Empress at Vienna. Voutchka's wife not only agrees to this, but adds one thousand ducats for each of the two. Even in a poem, it delighted the Serbs to have a Magyar in their power.

Sometimes Marko's adversary is a Moor—for example, the Moor who wishes to marry the Sultan's daughter and the other Moor who demanded a wedding tax from the maidens of Kossovo. He cut off the head of this Moor with one touch of his mace. At another time he is imprisoned by a Sultan whose daughter releases him. He has promised to marry her. But when they have started on their elopement, and she lifts her veil, he is horrified to see how black she is. There seemed nothing for him to do but to run away. Yet he knows that he has committed a sin in breaking his promise—and he confesses this sin to his mother:

"Then I sprang upon the back of Sharaz,
And I heard the maiden's lips address me—
'Thou in God my brother—thou—oh, Marko!
Leave me not! thus wretched do not leave me!'

Therefore, mother! wretched do I lowly penance:
Thus, my mother! have I gold o'erflowing,
Therefore seek I righteous deeds unceasing."

In these pesmas one has glimpses not only of all the neighbors who warred upon the Serbians, but of Christian malcontents going over to the Church of Rome or sowing dissensions at home. A careful reader can get an almost complete picture of the Serbian life after the Conquest, painted, to be sure, in high colors.

In most of the Serbian heroic pesmas there is little of that superstitious element that marks the ordinary life of the Serb to-day, except in the almost constant presence of the Vila. Marko's Vila never loses an opportunity to help him, to warn him, and even to scold him.

The Serbian Vila, so conspicuous in Serbian song and story, may be roughly defined as a guardian angel. She is a vaguely beautiful maiden born of the dew and nurtured in a mysterious mountain and seems to combine qualities of both classic and northern mythologies. She has qualities which are even essentially Christian, for sometimes she expresses her belief in God and St. John, and always she has a deadly hatred for the Turk. No higher compliment can be paid a lady than to say, "as fair as the mountain Vila," and a steed "swift as a Vila" means one of great value. Occasionally Marko reproves his Vila Rayviola and once when she has shot an arrow through the throat and another through the head of his friend Milosh, he pursues her among the clouds on his horse Sharaz and brings her to earth with his club, ungallantly adding: "Thou hadst better give him healing herbs lest thou shalt not carry longer thy head upon thy shoulders." But generally Marko's attitude is more affectionate: "Where art thou now, my sister-in-God, thou Vila?"

There are in existence about thirty-eight poems and twice as many prose legends detailing the thrilling exploits of Marko. In spite of certain accounts of his death, it is generally thought that he never died, but withdrew to a cave near the castle of Prilip and is still asleep there. At times he awakes and looks to see if a sword has come out of a rock where he thrust it to the hilt. When it is out of the rock, he will know that the time has come for him to appear among the Serbians once more to reestablish the Empire destroyed at Kossovo. Even now, on occasions, he may appear to help his disheartened country-men. An interesting story of the War of 1912-13 is told that bears directly on this belief. The Serbian forces were storming the fort at Prilip when their general ordered a delay. In spite of this, they pushed on and ran straight to the castle of the royal prince, Marko. The general trembled, believing that without the help of his artillery, for which he was waiting, these men of the infantry would be wholly destroyed. But even while dreading this, he saw the Serbian national colors flying from the donjon of Marko's castle. His Serbs had driven the Turks away and were victorious, as it proved, with little loss of life. When he reproved them for risking so much: "But we were ordered by Prince Marko, did you not see him on his Sharaz? Prince Marko commanded us all the time—'Forward! forward!'" They really believed that they had seen their hero.

Two passages from the heroic pesmas may serve to show Marko under different aspects. In the first he has been invited by the Grand Vizier to go hunting, in company with twelve Turks. He has obeyed the Vizier's command and has loosed his falcon.

Then the princely Marko loosed his falcon;
To the clouds of heaven aloft he mounted;
Then he sprung upon the gold-wing'd swimmer—
Seized him—rose, and down they fell together.
When the bird of Amurath sees the struggle,
He becomes indignant with vexation:
'Twas of old his custom to play falsely—
For himself alone to gripe his booty:
So he pounces down on Marko's falcon,
To deprive him of his well-earn'd trophy.
But the bird was valiant as his master;
Marko's falcon has the mind of Marko:
And his gold-wing'd prey he will not yield him.
Sharply turns he round on Amurath's falcon,
And he tears away his proudest feathers.

Soon as the Visir observes the contest,
He is fill'd with sorrow and with anger;
Rushes on the falcon of Prince Marko,
Flings him fiercely 'gainst a verdant fir-tree,
And he breaks the falcon's dexter pinion.
Marko's noble falcon groans in suffering,
As the serpent hisses from the cavern.
Marko flies to help his favourite falcon,
Binds with tenderness the wounded pinion,
And with stifled rage the bird addresses:
"Woe for thee, and woe for me, my falcon!
I have left my Servians—I have hunted
With the Turks—and all these wrongs have suffer'd."

But Marko did not content himself with words and the Grand Vizier had hardly time to warn his companions when Marko cleft his head asunder and proceeded to cut each of his twelve companions in two. After deliberation he went to the Sultan and told what he had done. The Sultan laughed, for he was afraid of the light in Marko's eyes and chose to dissemble: "If thou hadst not behaved thus I would no longer have called thee my son. Any Turk may become Grand Vizier, but there is no hero to equal Marko," and he dismissed Marko with presents.

In the second, "The Death of Marko," he has been warned by the Vila that his death is near, and he obeys her commands.

Marko did as counsell'd by the Vila.
When he came upon the mountain summit,
To the right and left he look'd around him;
Then he saw two tall and slender fir-trees;
Fir-trees towering high above the forest,
Covered all with verdant leaves and branches.
Then he rein'd his faithful Sharaz backwards,
Then dismounted—tied him to the fir-tree;
Bent him down, and looked into the fountain,
Saw his face upon the water mirror'd,
Saw his death-day written on the water.

Tears rush'd down the visage of the hero:
"O thou faithless world!—thou lovely flow'ret!
Thou wert lovely—a short pilgrim's journey—
Short—though I have seen three centuries over—
And 'tis time that I should end my journey!"

Then he drew his sharp and shining sabre,
Drew it forth—and loosed the sabre-girdle;
And he hasten'd to his faithful Sharaz:
With one stroke he cleft his head asunder,
That he never should by Turk be mounted,
Never be disgraced in Turkish service,
Water draw, or drag a Moslem's Jugum.
Soon as he had cleaved his head asunder,
Graced a grave he for his faithful Sharaz,
Nobler grave than that which held his brother.
Then he broke in four his trusty sabre,
That it might not be a Moslem's portion,
That it might not be a Moslem's triumph,
That it might not be a wreck of Marko,
Which the curse of Christendom should follow.
Soon as he in four had broke his sabre,
Next he broke his trusty lance in seven;
Threw the fragments to the fir-trees' branches.
Then he took his club, so terror-striking,
In his strong right hand, and swiftly flung it,
Flung it from the mountain of Urvina,
Far into the azure, gloomy ocean.
To his club thus spake the hero Marko:
"When my club returneth from the ocean,
Shall a hero come to equal Marko."

When he thus had scatter'd all his weapons,
From his breast he drew a golden tablet;
From his pocket drew unwritten paper,
And the princely Marko thus inscribed it:
"He who visits the Urvina mountain,
He who seeks the fountain 'neath the fir-trees,
And there finds the hero Marko's body,
Let him know that Marko is departed.
When he died, he had three well-fill'd purses:

How well fill'd? Well fill'd with golden ducats.
One shall be his portion, and my blessing,
Who shall dig a grave for Marko's body:
Let the second be the church's portion;
Let the third be given to blind and maim'd ones,
That the blind through earth in peace may wander,
And with hymns laud Marko's deeds of glory."

And when Marko had inscribed the letter,
Lo! he stuck it on the fir-tree's branches,
That it might be seen by passing travellers.
In the front he threw his golden tablets,
Doff'd his vest of green, and spread it calmly
On the grass, beneath a sheltering fir-tree;
Cross'd him, and lay down upon his garment;
O'er his eyes he drew his samur-kalpak,
Laid him down,—yes! laid him down for ever.

By the fountain lay the clay-cold Marko
Day and night; a long, long week he lay there.
Many travellers pass'd, and saw the hero,—
Saw him lying by the public path-way;
And while passing said, "The hero slumbers!"
Then they kept a more than common distance,
Fearing that they might disturb the hero.

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