Serbia: A Sketch

by Helen Leah Reed

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.