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                 HERO TALES AND LEGENDS OF THE SERBIANS

                                   By

                         WOISLAV M. PETROVITCH

  Late attache to the Serbian Royal Legation to the Court of St. James

                           With a preface by
                            CHEDO MIYATOVICH
          Formerly Serbian Minister to the Court of St. James

                      And thirty-two illustrations
                              In colour by
                     WILLIAM SEWELL & GILBERT JAMES







                      To that most Eminent Serbian
                         Patriot and Statesman

                             His Excellency
                          Nicholas P. Pashitch

                              This book is
                         respectfully inscribed
                             by the author







PREFACE


Serbians attach the utmost value and importance to the sympathies of
such a highly cultured, great, and therefore legitimately influential
people as is the British nation. Since the beginning of the twentieth
century there have been two critical occasions [1]--the annexation of
Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria and the war against the Turks--when
we have had opportunities to note how British sympathies, even when
apparently only platonic, can be of great practical importance for
our nation. It is quite natural that we should desire to retain and
if possible deepen and increase those sympathies. We are proud of our
army, but we flatter ourselves that our nation may win sympathy and
respect by other than military features of its national character. We
wish that our British friends should know our nation such as it is. We
wish them to be acquainted with our national psychology. And nothing
could give a better insight into the very soul of the Serbian nation
than this book.

The Serbians belong ethnologically to the great family of the
Slavonic nations. They are first cousins to the Russians, Poles,
Czechs, Slovaks, and Bulgars, and they are brothers to the Croats
and Slovenes. Since the Church has ceased to be the discordant and
disuniting element in the life of the nations, the Orthodox Serbians
and the Roman Catholic Croats are practically one and the same
people. But of all Slavonic nations the Serbians can legitimately
claim to be the most poetical one. Their language is the richest and
the most musical among all the Slavonic languages. The late Professor
Morfill, a man who was something of a Panslavist, repeatedly said to
me: "I wish you Serbians, as well as all other Slavonic nations, to
join Russia in a political union, but I do not wish you to surrender
your beautiful and well-developed language to be exchanged for the
Russian!" On one occasion he went even so far as to suggest that the
future United States of the Slavs should adopt as their literary and
official language the Serbian, as by far the finest and most musical
of all the Slavonic tongues.

When our ancestors occupied the western part of the Balkan
Peninsula, they found there numerous Latin colonies and Greek towns
and settlements. In the course of twelve centuries we have through
intermarriage absorbed much Greek and Latin blood. That influence, and
the influence of the commercial and political intercourse with Italy,
has softened our language and our manners and intensified our original
Slavonic love of what is beautiful, poetical, and noble. We are a
special Slavonic type, modified by Latin and Greek influences. The
Bulgars are a Slavonic nation of a quite different type, created by
the circulation of Tartar blood in Slavonian veins. This simple fact
throws much light on the conflicts between the Serbians and Bulgarians
during the Middle Ages, and even in our own days.

Now what are the Serbian national songs? They are not songs made by
cultured or highly educated poets--songs which, becoming popular,
are sung by common people. They are songs made by the common people
themselves. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century the Serbian
peasantry lived mostly in agricultural and family associations called
Zadrooga. As M. Petrovitch has stated, the sons of a peasant did
not leave their father's house when they got married, but built a
wooden cottage on the land surrounding the father's house. Very often
a large settlement arose around the original home, with often more
than a hundred persons, men and women, working together, considering
the land and houses as their common property, enjoying the fruits of
their work as the common property too.