I ought to add that there is also a theory that the Serbian nation, so to say, projected itself in the Royal Prince Marko, depicting its own tragic fate, its own virtues and weaknesses, in the popular yet tragic personality of Marko. No doubt Marko must have been in some way the representative type of a noble Serbian, otherwise he could not have found the way to the soul and heart of his people. Yet that theory is hardly modest, for my taste.
It may interest our British friends to know that a relation of the dynasty of which Marko was the last representative, a certain Prince John Mussachi, in a historical memoir stated that Marko’s father, King Voukashin, was the descendant of a certain nobleman named Britanius or Britanicus![2] We should be proud if it could be proved that the ancestors of our national hero were in some way connected with the Britons.
Chedo Miyatovich
Member of the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences
[1] This was written one month before an even more critical situation confronted the Serbian nation.
[2] Mussachi’s memoir in Karl Hopf’s Chroniques Græco-Romaines.