Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide

3. Dinaric Highlanders and Their Songs

45 3 Dinaric Highlanders and Their Songs The Violent Balkan Highlands The idolatry of state and nation, nourished by their fusion with a national church, is an important source of violence in the Balkans, but not the only one. A high level of endemic violence can be found among the inhabitants of the Dinaric Mountains (covering the hinterland of Dalmatian Croatia, Herzegovina, Montenegro , and parts of Bosnia and Serbia) and throughout the mountain chain that extends, under different names, through Albania and Greece. A patriarchal-heroic culture as violent as that in Montenegro developed on the Mani Peninsula at the southern end of the Peloponnesus, a part of ancient Sparta.1 The tendency toward violence is not limited to any particular church or religion: Catholics and Muslims in this area share it with the Orthodox.2 What has distinguished the Orthodox Dinaric culture was the combination of traditional endemic violence with the highest degree of union between church and state. A result of this combination was a literary work that glorifies mass violence. By becoming the most popular book in Serbia and Montenegro, it spread the cult of violence far beyond the Dinaric area. Sociologists regard the way of life of mountain herdsmen—in contrast to that of the more pacific land tillers in the plain—as an important source of violence among Balkan highlanders. The poverty of the people fighting for survival on the barren soil of these mountains, the absence of cities, the isolation, and the preservation 46 | Dinaric Highlanders and Their Songs of a tribal social structure are important additional factors that contributed to the high level of endemic violence in the area.3 No higher civilization—Byzantine, Islamic, or Western—fully replaced the pagan-tribal culture of the inhabitants of the Dinaric Mountains. Illiteracy, still widespread among the highlanders in the first half of the twentieth century, reinforced their isolation and contributed to their preservation of heroic oral folk songs—an artistic expression of tribal-heroic culture—long after those exposed to urban culture had lost interest in it. Among highlanders, folk songs were an essential instrument of education. Illiteracy, the soil in which folk songs flourished, was not uncommon even among clergymen, especially the Orthodox. As a result of their isolation and lack of education, clergymen identified with their congregations to such a degree that they accepted the community’s existing moral standards instead of imposing higher ones based on religious precepts . Violence in the Dinaric areas has been directed not only at different ethnic and religious groups but also at members of the same community. Montenegrin clans, for example, frequently engaged in mutual conflicts, and even called on the Turks to help them fight against fellow Montenegrins. The blood feud, widely practiced by the Montenegrins and Albanians until recently, is another example of violence aimed at members of the same ethnic or religious community.4 There were numerous cases of Christian Montenegrins fleeing to Turkish territory from vendetta-seeking coreligionists and killing fellow Christians with the same ardor with which they had been killing Muslims.5 Collaboration with an external enemy against domestic enemies also occurred under the Austrian occupation during the First World War, as Milovan Djilas relates: We Montenegrins did not hold a grudge against the enemy alone, but against one another as well. Indeed, our enemy—the Austrians and their minions—were called to intervene and to help in these quarrels. Two notable clans entered into a blood feud. No one really knew what it was all about. While one side did their shooting as guerrillas, the other side joined the Austrians. The Austrian shadow Dinaric Highlanders and Their Songs | 47 hovered over all these crimes. But the root was in ourselves, in Montenegro.6 The blood feud made life miserable and weakened the defense against external enemies, but as an integral part of daily life, it also contributed to social order, as an American anthropologist noted: As in Albania, the blood feud had important functions as a social sanction, in spite of the obvious immediate disruption it brought. Threat of vendetta helped to hold individuals within the marriage pattern. It heightened the degree of group integration within the brastvo, and ensured that the brastvo would attempt to control behavior of its members. It checked the raiding pattern, especially within the tribe but also in the immediate area; and it extended the protection of the...