Chapter III: Serbian National Epic Poetry
The Importance of the Ballads
That the Serbian people—as a distinct Slav and Christian nationality—did not succumb altogether to the Ottoman oppressor; that through nearly five centuries of subjection to the Turk the Southern Slavs retained a deep consciousness of their national ideals, is due in a very large measure to the Serbian national poetry, which has kept alive in the hearts of the Balkan Christians deep hatred of the Turk, and has given birth, among the oppressed Slavs, to the sentiment of a common misfortune and led to the possibility of a collective effort which issued in the defeat of the Turk on the battlefields of Koumanovo, Monastir, Prilip, Prizrend, Kirk-Kilisse, and Scutari.
Who has written those poems? We might as well ask, who is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey? If Homer be the collective pseudonym of an entire cycle of Hellenic national bards, ‘The Serbian people’ is that of the national bards who chanted those Serbian epic poems during the centuries, and to whom it was nothing that their names should be attached to them. The task of the learned Diascevastes of Pisistrate’s epoch, which they performed with such ability in the old Hellade, has been done in Serbia by a self-taught peasant, the famous Vouk Stephanovitch-Karadgitch, in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Vouk’s first collection of Serbian national poems, which he wrote down as he heard them from the lips of the gousslari (i.e. Serbian national bards), was published for the first time at Vienna in 1814, and was not only eagerly read throughout Serbia and in the literary circles of Austria and Germany, but also in other parts of Europe. Goethe himself translated one of the ballads, and his example was quickly followed by others.
Those poems—as may be seen from the examples given in this volume—dwell upon the glory of the Serbian mediæval empire, lost on the fatal field of Kossovo (1389). When the Turks conquered the Serbian lands and drove away the flower of the Serbian aristocracy, these men took refuge in the monasteries and villages, where the Turkish horsemen never came. There they remained through centuries undisturbed, inspired by the eloquence of the Serbian monks, who considered it their sacred duty to preserve for the nation behind their old walls the memory of ancient kings and tzars and of the glorious past in which they flourished.
Professional bards went from one village to another, chanting in an easy decasyllabic verse the exploits of Serbian heroes and Haïdooks (knight-brigands), who were the only check upon the Turkish atrocities. The bards carried news of political and other interesting events, often correct, sometimes more or less distorted, and the gifted Serbians—for gifted they were and still are—did not find it difficult to remember, and to repeat to others, the stories thus brought to them in poetic form. As the rhythm of the poems is easy, and as the national ballads have become interwoven with the spirit of every true Serbian, it is not rare that a peasant who has heard a poem but once can not only repeat it as he heard it, but also improvise passages; nay, he can at times even compose entire original ballads on the spur of inspirational moments.
In Serbian Hungary there are schools in which the blind learn these national ballads, and go from one fair to another to recite them before the peasants who come from all Serbian lands. But this is not the true method. In the mountains of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina there is no occasion to learn them mechanically: they are familiar to all from infancy. When, in the winter evening, the members of a Serbian family assemble around the fire, and the women are engaged with their spinning, poems are recited by those who happen to know them best.