Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide
Hurst, 1999 - 233 pages
Heavenly Serbia traces Serbia's expansionist impulses to Serbian national mythology. The dominant myth - that of "Heavenly Serbia" - appeared soon after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. It attributed the Serb's defeat by the Turks and the loss of the medieval Serbian state to the Serb's preference for moral salvation over military victory. By emphasizing their commitment to the heavenly kingdom and promising an eventual restoration of the Serbian empire, this myth helped the Serbs to bear their centuries-long domination by a foreign power. Though they ultimately shed the Turkish yoke and regained statehood in the nineteenth century, the Serbs, according to Anzulovic, retained this central myth in the form of feelings of superiority to their neighbors, and a sense of destiny ordaining them to become the dominant power in the Balkans. The myth has been perpetuated by political and religious leaders, historians, novelists, and artists, and has found acceptance abroad as well.
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Even in Eastern Europe, where poets have traditionally played a significantly
more important social role than in the West, the popularity of Pushkin's Eugene
Onegin with the Russians and NjegoS's Mountain Wreath with the Serbs and ...
These works played an 1mportant role in mobilizing Serbs for war. Poems,
novels, and plays were even more ... to whom I belong and about myself."90 f A
considerable number of Serb poets and writers of fiction took very active political
But the role of the Ustasas in prewar Croatian political life was so marginal that
they could not have come to power through their own efforts. They unleashed
their criminal activity for the sake of a Greater Croatia — "ethnically cleansed" of ...
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An independent scholar living in Washington, DC, Anzulovic interprets Serbia's violent history as a consequence of historical legacies: Saint Sava's mystical identification of the church and nation ... Read full review
The Encounter with the Turks
Dinaric Highlanders and Their Songs
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