Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide

4. The Dilemmas of Modern Serbian National Identity

69 4 The Dilemmas of Modern Serbian National Identity The Legacy of the Enlightenment and Romanticism The cultural history of Serbia, like that of Russia and other Eastern European Orthodox countries, followed a development different from that of Catholic and Protestant Europe. In Orthodox countries, the equivalent of the Middle Ages—the period during which the church was the dominant bearer of cultural heritage—lasted until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries . Strong ties were then established with the West, at the time when the Enlightenment had laid the foundation for modern secular culture. This contact, uninterrupted since, has led to a large-scale assimilation of Western culture by the Serbs. However, the anti-Western attitude, nourished primarily by the Serbian Orthodox Church and by the old pagan-tribal ethos, did not disappear but has reasserted itself as a lasting and powerful current in Serbian culture. The elevation of an old pagan war god to the patron saint of the nation is the most conspicuous manifestation of the reaffirmation of tribal attitudes in the era of Westernization . The Western ideology of Romanticism, with its cult of supposedly pure primitive cultures, aided the revival of Serbian pagan-heroic culture, which is indifferent or even hostile to a social order based on the rights of the individual citizen. Another Romanticist idea—that vernacular language and folk art represent the purest expressions of the soul of a nation and the most important criterion for its identity—has served as the foundation for the modern concept of a Greater Serbia (as well as for 70 | Modern Serbian National Dilemmas the Yugoslav idea). The desire to achieve that Greater Serbia, as opposed to a smaller Serbia based on the rule of law, represents another dilemma of modern Serbian history. While the Westernization of Russia was suddenly launched by Tsar Peter the Great, the Serbs’ Westernization started more gradually , from below, with the Serbian community in the Habsburg territory north of the Sava and Danube Rivers. Serbs started settling in those Hungarian and Croatian lands in the fifteenth century, during the last stage of Serbian resistance to the Turkish advance. Next came the Serbs who served in the Ottoman army, and were given land that had become vacant owing to Turkish raids. The expulsion of the Turks in the late seventeenth century again provided a lot of vacant land that attracted more settlers from the south as well as from all Habsburg lands. Serbian nineteenth-century historiography, however, depicted the Serbs’ settlement in the Pannonian plain principally as a result of an allegedly cataclysmic exodus in 1690, called the Great Migration. Among the consequences of that migration, according to the legend, was the transformation of Kosovo from a purely Serbian into a predominantly Albanian-inhabited area. The actual exodus, which was of relatively modest proportions, was caused by a reversal of military fortunes. In a series of victories over Ottoman forces in 1689, the Austrian army advanced as far south as Skopje. Some local inhabitants joined it as auxiliary troops. The next year the Ottoman forces and their Tatar auxiliaries pushed the Austrians back and committed large-scale atrocities as a punishment for the revolt. Some Serbs fled to the mountains. The number of those who fled to Habsburg territory, led by the patriarch of Peć, Arsenije III Čarnojević, appears to have been less than forty thousand, about one-fourth of them from Kosovo.1 The most significant result of the 1690 wave of settlers was that it brought the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church to Habsburg territory. The arrival of Patriarch Arsenije led to the establishment of the Serbian Orthodox metropolinate in the city of Karlovci in the Slavonian Military Frontier in 1713. The Austrians, who wanted to weaken the power of the Hungarian nobility, offered the Serbian Modern Serbian National Dilemmas | 71 church a status not very different from the one it enjoyed in the Ottoman Empire. There was no millet system in the Habsburg lands, but the Viennese court granted a series of special privileges to the Serbian church, so that, in a predominantly Catholic empire, Serbian Orthodox metropolitans exercised a higher degree of political authority than did the Catholic prelates. As the situation of the Ottoman Serbs worsened with the abolition of the patriarchate of Peć and the subordination of the Serbian Orthodox Church to the patriarchate in Istanbul in 1766, the Serb diaspora in...