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416 CHAPTER 25 184 Defining Serbia From the outset, the Serbian language and the Serbian Orthodox Church have been closely intertwined. This is partly because Orthodox Slavs are very conscious of the fact that the Cyrillic alphabet was created for the express purpose of bringing the word of God to Slavs; as such, it carries obvious religious significance for all Orthodox Slavs. This close connection is also due to a particular fact about the Serbian medieval state, to which Serbs trace their identity and with which they feel indelibly bound. This is that the state was connected with the church through family ties: the founder of the independent church (St. Sava) was the youngest son of Stefan Nemanja, the founder of the medieval Serbian dynasty. Serbs feel great pride in their medieval past, both for this reason and because of the many monuments of art, architecture, and literature which date to that time. Somewhat paradoxically, the strongest identification for nearly all Serbs is with the date June 28, 1389 – the day of their defeat at the Battle of Kosovo. Although most outsiders find it strange that a people should celebrate a military defeat, for Serbs the moral and spiritual importance of Kosovo is unparalleled in their history. To them, the physical defeat is transcended by the spiritual victory, by the knowledge that they did not flinch in the face of near certain defeat, and that one of their own managed to slay the enemy leader nonetheless. But if standing tall at Kosovo is one strand of their national myth, movement and migration is another. Many fled north and west as the Ottomans approached, and many more migrated purposely to the borderlands of Austria in the mid-16th century to settle in the newly created Militärgrenze (Military Border) where the Emperor offered them homesteads in return for army service. The Serb settlements in western Slavonia and (until 1995) in southeastern Croatia – the Krajina – date from this time. The largest movement of peoples, called by the Serbs their velika seoba (Great Migration), took place in 1690. The early stages of Ottoman rule had been relatively benign for Christian subjects , and the Serbs had been allowed to continue their religious practices more or less unhindered . But after the Ottoman military defeats of 1689, the Serbs feared massive reprisals and decided to emigrate. In response to a Habsburg offer to re-establish itself in southern Hungary, the entire Serbian church hierarchy, together with many of the faithful, took to the road and resettled the church headquarters north of the Danube, in what is now Sremski Karlovci. The promised religious tolerance soon evaporated, however, and in face of strong pressure to convert to Catholicism the Serbs sent urgent appeals to Russia for Orthodox teachers and churchmen. These teachers and churchmen arrived en masse in 1726, and by 1740 there was an entire generation of Serbs educated in a mix of the Russian and Serbian church languages. 185 Language standardization in the pre-Yugoslav Serbian lands Until that point, the language of literacy and instruction (to the extent that any existed) had been the relatively archaic Serbian church language; after the Russians arrived, there arose a strange blend of Russian and Serbian church languages mixed with the Serb vernacular, which CHAPTER 25 417 eventually became known as Slavo-Serbian (slaveno-serbski). Although literature was produced in this language, it had no set of rules; everyone wrote his own version of it. Two language reformers attempted to modernize this language and to shape it into what they felt a proper Serbian language should be. One was the well-loved Enlightenment figure Dositej Obradović (17411811 ), a relative moderate; and the other was the activist and rebel Vuk Karadžić, a decided radical (review [170a]). Both faced a highly conservative clergy who did not wish any changes in the traditions that had kept Serbs going for centuries. It is ironic that the Serb patriot Vuk, who became such a hero elsewhere during his lifetime (as well as after his death in his own land), was so reviled by the guardians of Serbian literacy. But both sides refused to compromise. The church would not allow any changes in the alphabet or the vocabulary; for his part Vuk would accept neither any alphabet letters that did not correspond to existing sounds, nor any words that were not part of the rural folkloric vocabulary. Vuk’s conflicts with his perceived enemies – the church hierarchy at Sremski Karlovci and the secular conservatives...

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