History & identity

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

History and identity: the shared knowledge behind the hints

In conversation you hear još pre Kosova (“even before Kosovo”), the neighbours' children have a školska slava on 27 January, and a passer-by's T-shirt shows a cross with four identical hooks in the corners. These are allusions: the speaker assumes you know what they refer to.

The dates people refer to

Eight lines explain almost any allusion; learn to recognise them, not to recite them.

Three dates of the year come up more than any others. Vidovdan, 28 June, is the day of the Battle of Kosovo. Sretenje, 15 February, is Dan državnosti, Statehood Day: on this feast in 1804 the First Uprising began in Orašac, and in 1835 the first constitution was adopted (see “Traditions & holidays”). Sveti Sava, 27 January, is the školska slava; more on it below.

Careful with rat (war): on its own it usually means the wars of the nineties, as Yugoslavia broke up, and pre rata means “before 1991”, as “before the war” once meant 1939 to older Britons. The world wars are called Prvi svetski rat (also Veliki rat, the Great War, as in English) and Drugi svetski rat. For Yugoslavia the Second World War began not in 1939 but on 6 April 1941.

The Kosovo covenant and the epic: where the quotations come from

On Vidovdan 1389 (15 June in the Church’s Julian calendar, which falls on 28 June today), near Priština, the army of Prince Lazar met that of Sultan Murad; both rulers were killed. Historians still debate how the battle itself ended; the Serbian state held out for another seventy years, until 1459. In memory the battle became a choice: in the song Lazar is offered carstvo zemaljsko (the earthly kingdom) or carstvo nebesko (the heavenly kingdom), and he chooses the heavenly one. That is the Kosovski zavet, the Kosovo covenant: the meaning that legend gave the battle.

The epic lives on in speech as images: carstvo nebesko stands for giving up gain for a principle, and izdajnik (traitor) is the heaviest word in an argument. The language of the songs is old, with a one-word past tense (pogibe “he fell”) that “The aorist” and “The imperfect” will cover; literature comes in “Arts, media & literature”.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

History and identity

Dates people refer to

Kosovo and the epic

Faith and the Church

Symbols

The language of tact