Through the Land of the Serb

by M. E. Durham

CORONATION CHURCH, KRALJEVO.

Kraljevo still figures on most of the maps as Karanovatz, and has only recently been re-named. Zhitza, the monastery church where the kings of the Nemanja line were crowned, is once again Servias coronation-place. A melancholy monument of former greatness, it stands upon rising ground about a mile and a half from the town, and a long straight avenue, fit background for a royal procession, leads up to it. The church itself, built in 1210 by St. Sava, still stands. Here he crowned his eldest brother and announced him as Prvovenchani, the "First Crowned." Of the monastery founded some years later by the said Stefan nothing now exists but a few rocky masses of wall. The Turks wrecked the royal building, the richest monastery in Servia, and left the church in ruins.

The church is Byzantine in character, with a large cupola and two smaller ones (all three restorations), and a round apse. It is barrel-vaulted, and has two tiny chapels. The walls are still covered with old frescoes, for fortunately the monastery is too poor to afford re-decorating. It has been frescoed twice. The upper layer, which shows strong Italian influence and might indeed be by an Italian hand, dates from the sixteenth century—an interesting fact, as it shows that though under Turkish rule, the monastery must then have still been fairly rich. The lower layer, which is visible where the upper is broken away, I believe to be contemporaneous with the church, but could get no information at all about it. Half the building has been restored and roofed. The other end is entirely in ruins; its tall tower only is well preserved.

In the side walls of the ruins are blocked-up openings. I was told they were doors, they looked like windows. Where the blocking stones are loose, you can see the fresco that clings to the sides and sills—fresco of the earlier kind, showing that the openings were blocked previous to the re-painting of the walls. One of these openings was built up at each coronation, I was told—a curious custom that requires explanation. All that I could learn was that the "doorways" proved the "fact," and the "fact" accounted for the "doorways." Six kings of the old days were crowned here, it is said. The first was Stefan Prvovenchani; who the others were I have failed to learn. The personages of Servian history are apt to loom large through a fog of uncertainty and to elude all attempts at exact information. The tradition of coronation has been revived, and Alexander Obrenovich was here crowned king. It was just a week before the day appointed for the coronation of Edward VII. when I stood in the roofless ruins of the hall of Servia's kings, and I felt glad that we were at the other end of Europe when the Turks came. In the archway under the tower are some fairly preserved frescoes, and a crowned figure, said to be a portrait of Stefan Prvovenchani himself, stares from the ruins of the building raised to glorify his line. The likeness, I take it, is a purely fancy one.

These were the last old frescoes I saw in Servia. All of them tell the same tale, namely, that judging by the architecture, the costume, furniture, and various articles for domestic use that appear in them, the Servians of those days were not behind Europe in general civilisation. My guide, a friendly young monk, knew naught of architecture, and his ideas of history were but vague.

As we came out of the church, up came a second monk, a young man with a dark flat face, coal-black hair, and a strange Eastern cast of countenance that seemed oddly familiar to me. He greeted me at once, and began a long tale of how he had met me at Ostrog, in Montenegro, the year before. The other monk and my Servian companion cried, naturally astounded, "This gentleman says that he knows you!" It turned out that he was a pupil of the monk at the chapel of Our Lady among the rocks, by Podgoritza. "You too," said he to me, "know him"; and he spoke of him with great affection and reverence, and accounted him holy. I was deeply interested to find that the gentle ascetic of the Albanian frontier was revered in Central Servia. That I, a Londoner, should be the one to bring news of him seemed to me not a little strange. But to the black monk there was nothing strange about it. "He said that God guided your footsteps," said he, and he added, as an explanation to the others, "She is the friend of the Montenegrins." After this, I had to go and take jam and water and coffee with the Archimandrite, and tell how I had been to the little chapel that very Easter and had received the hermit's Easter greeting. I said good-bye to the kindly, simple-minded monastery, and I returned to the worldly suspicions of civic life.

The Nachelnik never appeared in the afternoon, and I determined not to say anything about it. But when my friend and champion reappeared, he asked me point-blank as to how the Nachelnik had behaved on the afternoon's drive, and there was no help for it. He flew off in a rage to attack the Nachelnik. He came back even more angry. The Nachelnik had said that he had decided he would not be mixed up with the affair and had then turned the tables on him and questioned him as to all I had done in the morning. "What did she do? Where did she go? With whom did she speak? What did she draw? Did she talk politics, and what did you tell her?" "I told her," he said furiously, "that the Servians are fools and that it is a waste of her time to come and see them. And she shall stay if she wishes, and draw anything she likes!" He begged me not to think that they were all so ignorant. The Nachelnik of Kraljevo was in fact the only official in Servia who was unpleasant to me, and even he succumbed more or less to a British passport.

I left Kraljevo pleasantly enough, for the last person I saw as I rattled out of the town was the young black monk smiling and waving his hand.