Death and Images of Womanhood and Manhood: The Case of Serbian Epic Poetry

Mira Crouch

The past is another country, it has been said. From a “Western” standpoint, medieval Serbia is another country in more ways than one: another culture, and long ago. Yet persons living in today’s world – the so-called “civilised” part of the world - may have much in common with the people in that other country. Then as now, we all die, and we all know about death, both our own and that of others. We know that it will come to pass and we recognise when it has taken place. Everywhere and at all times death casts a long shadow over human existence, not because it ends life, but rather because our lives matter only by virtue of their impermanence. The major premise of this paper is that death is an universal signifier. Awareness of mortality renders human action consequential; faced with human finitude, we seek to comprehend life’s meaning. It is therefore reasonable to expect that death, and all of its vicissitudes, will have a telling part in a culture’s imagery of its own morality, as every death questions the value of the life ended by it. In the medieval Serbian poetry discussed here, heroism and death are intertwined core threads around which the poets weave their images. While these images project many aspects of our complex human existence, I shall focus specifically on the ways in which the poets of the past have shown men and women to stand delineated from one another through death. As is the case with much poetry in the oral or folk tradition, the exact origins of Serbian epic poems are unknown. Since most of these poems concern events and circumstances associated with combat in medieval times, one view has it that this poetry is the creation of the military aristocracy and its courtly way of life. On the other hand, equally plausible is the suggestion that the poems spring from the profound effects historical events and the major actors in them have had on common folk.1 These two processes could also have overlapped significantly, since the social distance between the aristocracy and common folk among the Serbian people at that time would have been negligible. One great battle has been the focus of much of this poetry. On the 15th day of June 1389, Sultan Murat’s advancing army met and was engaged by the defenders of the lands threatened by it. Serbian princes, 42 Death and Images of Womanhood and Manhood ______dukes and sundry other clan-leaders assembled under the supreme command of Prince Lazar, acknowledged Tsar and leader of all the Serbs for the purposes of the occasion. The battle took place at Kosovo, a wind- swept undulating valley surrounded by medieval monasteries, many of them reminders of the Serbian empire, a powerful Balkan state during the two previous centuries. At the end of that day most of the warriors were dead. Sultan Murat had been assassinated in his tent just before the battle; according to legend, he was knifed by a Serb disguised in Turkish clothing.2 Nonetheless the Turks won, and their scant remaining forces managed to establish supremacy over the Serbs. Other Turkish armies followed Murat’s and a few more battles were fought before all of the Serbian territory and people were completely subjected. But Kosovo was the decisive mortal blow for the Serbs; the battle had wiped out most of the able-bodied men of the generation, including almost all men of the patrician military families and clans. By the end of the 14th century only the peasants were still alive, wrote the Serbian 19th century historian Svetozar Markovich.3 The court was wiped out and gone, too, were all the sons of the great warrior families of the sovereign “Old State” governed by the Nemanja dynasty. These dead men are the legendary heroes of the “Kosovo cyclus” poems which have been recited, chanted and passed on from generation to generation through 500 years of Turkish rule, and thereafter, too. Much lauded by the whole populace for both their beauty and their meaning, the poetry’s stories and images have come to constitute a major component of the people’s common stock of knowledge within which the identity of the emerging nation has been formed. During the last two centuries or so the poetry has become enshrined in print as “cultural capital” of the increasingly educated elites. Yet for the best part of their existence, these free-flowing verses were most commonly sung and recited by folk poets of “the people” – the poor, illiterate, backward, starving and diseased, cruel and suspicious peasants, constantly under threat by pestilence and famine, oppressed by the Turks and often despised in the more civilised parts of the world. In the sweep of the 19th century Romantic movement in Western European literature that revived the interest in folk-stories and poetry, many writers of the period began translating Serbian folk poems and commenting on their beauty and expressiveness. Among these were Goethe, Mickievicz, Prosper Merimèe, Sir Walter Scott, and later H. M. Chadwick. Perhaps the greatest champion of the poetry was Jacob Grimm who pointed to its effectiveness in conveying the outlook of a “patriarchal civilization which rests on man’s deeply felt affinity with nature and