The Popular Image of Hajduks in Serbia

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Graduate School of Humanities

The Popular Image of Hajduks in Serbia

Student: Biljana Marković Student number: 0430641

Supervisor: dhr. dr. A.J. (Alex) Drace-Francis Second Reader: dr. Guido Snel

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INTRODUCTION

At the opening of the exhibition named “Art and the Idea of Statehood” in the Serbian National Museum in Belgrade, for the occasion of celebrating two hundred years from the beginning of the First Serbian Uprising, the current Minister of Culture Ivan Tasovac emphasized the importance of culture in the forming of the Serbian nation state. He said that “the Serbian cultural rise and growing thirst for enlightenment which lasted throughout the nineteenth century gave a final form to the idea of the Serbian state. The Serbian state was built on kubura and džebana1_{of the rebels as}

much as it was created by the pens of its intellectuals”2_{The Minister further stated that without the}

cultural revival the participants of the Serbian Revolution would stay “only rebels and hajduks instead of becoming the founders of the restored Serbian state”.3_{At the beginning of the}

twenty-first century, minister Tasovac as a representative of the official state view on the subject, clearly traces the origin of the Serbian state back to the hajduk and rebel movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

By making his argument Tasovac used the same argumentation as the famous Hungarian patriot of the 1848, Lajos Kossuth, who accused Serbs of thinking they were a nation while they were in reality “nothing but a pack of hajduks”4_{. It might look as if those two statements are the}

complete opposites but though they are coming from different times and a different value systems, Tasovac and Kossuth both agree on one crucial point and that is that the hajduks are closely associated with the Serbian national image, both from the inside (Tasovac's view) as much as from the outside (Kossuth). While Lajos Kossuth rests his case without giving any glimpse of hope for a change in the national image of Serbs, Tasovac comes up with an actual formula which can be presented as following: hajduks plus culture (work of the intellectuals and writers of the 19th

century) is equal to the Serbian national identity. Though it is clearly a simplification, this way of 1 _{The meaning is guns and ammunition. The words come from the Turkish language and are commonly associated}

with the times of the First Serbian Uprising.

2 _{“Izložba i ideja državnosti” exhibition [Art and the Idea of Statehood] , 13.02.2014.}

http://www.rts.rs/page/stories/sr/story/16/Kultura/1521351/Izlo%C5%BEba+%22Umetnost+i+ideja+dr %C5%BEavnosti%22+.html, (accessed on 26.06.2014).

3 _Ibid

4 _{W. Bracewell, 'The Proud Name of Hajduks', in Yugoslavia and Its Historians – Understanding the Balkan Wars of}

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looking at the Serbian national identity raises many interesting questions which are either closely connected or identical to the research questions of my master thesis and its main topic, the popular image of hajduks. If we take into account the statement of the Minister of Culture as the official state view, we can ask ourselves what is the status of hajduks in contemporary Serbian culture? What is this added artistic value which can promote a rebel to the status of a founder of the national state or a national hero?

In my thesis I will deal with the popular image of hajduks in Serbian literature and culture. I will focus mostly on the epic origin of this image and the contemporary use of the same. According to Eric Hobsbauwm's Bandits, which is the starting point of any research on outlaws, the positive image of hajduks as heros has a specific political character in the Balkans. This political significance in the case of Serbian hajduks, is due to the fact that their image was built in opposition to the image of the Ottoman invaders. It was strongly associated with the time of the Serbian uprising and the building of the nation state at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Serbian national narratives, hajduks have a central position as Wendy Bracewell pointed out. “The hajduk tradition was put at the centre of the Serbian national mission: the preservation of the Serbian nation, the overthrow of foreign rule, the establishment of an independent state, and the unification of all Serbs.”5_{This tradition is twofold, from one side we have hajduks who took part in the First}

Serbian Uprising of 1804, where even the leader of the resurrection Petar Karađorđević – Karađorđe had a suspicious hajduk background. From the other side we have the popular representations of hajduks from oral epic poetry, the proto-image of hajduk, on which I argue in this thesis the popular image of hajduks is based on. In my thesis I am focusing on this second, literary representation, while also taking into account the importance of the patriotic sentiments sparked by the national revolution.

The first part of my thesis will be outlining the most important characteristics of the popular image of hajduks while examining different sources – encyclopedia, dictionaries, literary criticism and historical sources. In my research I have marked that in many cases when a Serbian author needs to present and explain the nature of hajduk movements, there is an extra national value which needs to be brought to attention and which tends to undermine the criminal bandit aspects of hajduk practice. I will try to show that this extra value which is in most cases an explanation of why hajduks had to be bandits and why their criminal behaviour needs to be favourably looked upon, is in the essence of the construction of their popular image. I will be illustrating this by giving various examples of the same argumentation. In the first chapter I will emphasize the issues concerning the 5 _{W. Bracewell, 'The Proud Name of Hajduks', in Yugoslavia and Its Historians – Understanding the Balkan}

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popular image of hajduks, outline their position in Serbian history and literature and question their status as national heroes. I will also introduce Vuk Stefanović Karadzić's6_{Srpski Rječnik [Serbian} Dictionary] from 1852 and focus especially on his depiction of “the real hajduk”, which in my

opinion, is one of the starting points for analysing the popular image of hajduks.

The second chapter of my work is mainly my original contribution to the research of the image of hajduks. It is essentially comparative analysis of hajduk epic poetry from different literary sources. More specifically I will be comparing one of the most important early sources of the oral epic hajduk poetry – the famous collection The Erlangen Manuscript from the first half of the eighteenth century (dated around 1720) with the third book of Srpske narodne pjesme [The Serbian

Epic Poems] by Vuk Stefanović Karadzić from the nineteenth century. By doing so I am following

the advice of many influential scholars7_{who proposed this way of comparative analysing as the}

way of understanding how much the Serbian Uprising from 1804 influenced the positive image of hajduks. The methodology I am using is mainly comparative intertextual analysis while also taking into account certain elements of Joep Leerssen's Imagology.8_{The main research questions here are}

the following:

 What changes can be noted by comparing Vuk's hajduk epic poetry with the earlier versions of the same hajduk poems from the Erlangen manuscript?

 Which tendencies can be traced in the general depiction of hajduks ?

 Has the depiction of the criminal nature of hajduks been changed in any way in Vuk's collection?

 Which elements have been emphasized and which omitted?

In addressing these questions I will be tracing the tendencies of idealization, de-historisation, and the changes in the positive/negative depiction of hajduks. I will also be focusing on the way the Ottomans have been depicted since the popular image of hajduk is based on the opposition to the image of the Turk traditionally found in the epic poetry.

Nevertheless, in order to contextualise my findings I will also present more information 6_{V. Stefanović Karadzić (7 November 1787 – 7 February 1864) was the most famous and influential Serbian}

intellectual at the beginning of the nineteenth century, considered to be the father of the nation. He is famous for his work in the field of philology, linguistics, history, ethnology as well as a collector of Serbian oral literature.

7 _{H. Sundhaussen, contemporary German historian and Boško Suvajdzić, famous Serbian literary scholar in the field of}

oral literature share this view.

8 _{The best depiction of this method is given in Joep Leerssen's article “Imagology: History and Method” published in J.}

Leerssen, Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, Amsterdam – New York, Rodopi, 2007.

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about the publication of Vuk's third book of oral epic poetry. I will dedicate special attention to the role Vuk Stefanović Karadzić had as a collector and editor of Serbian epic poetry and the question of his objectivity when it comes to the 'political' and national aspects of hajduk poetry.

The third chapter of my thesis is dealing with the contemporary use of the popular hajduk image in Serbian culture and everyday life. In this part I will talk about the modern-day popular oral epic singing in Serbia and the new 'hajduk poetry' mostly promoting ultra nationalist figures while using hajduk symbolism from the epic poetry. With this part of my work I will emphasize the fact that the hajduk image is very much alive and influential in Serbia even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the same way it was actual at the time of the state building.

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CHAPTER I - Introducing the Popular Image of Hajduks

Background

The first mentioning of 'hajduks' corresponded with the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans and most probably originated from the Turkish 'haydud', meaning outlaw or bandit. The Ottomans have used the term 'hajduk' for outlaws, regardless of their cause. Another possibility is that the term comes from the Hungarian word 'hajto' ('hajtok' in plural), which could be translated as a herder of oxen. In addition to these etymologies it is interesting to mention the theory which proposes that the word comes from the Sanskrit form of 'Aydh', meaning 'to fight, to resist' which may have led to the form “ayduh”, with the meaning of warrior or enemy.9 _{This last interpretation of the origin of the term is}

the closest to what hajduks came to mean in Serbian culture and was possibly influenced by the same.

According to Vojna enciklopedija [The Military Encyclopedia], “on the territory of Hungary and Austria, the term ‘hajduk’ was used for the paid infantry in charge of border control at the end of XVI and beginning of XVII century and later for the armed guards in towns and provinces and farms; furthermore, the term was also used for soldiers of infantry in Serbia and Banat during the Austro-Turkish war 1716-1718 […] Venetians also used the term for ‘uskoks’ famous for infiltrating into their territory in XVII century and joining paramilitary troops involved in attacks on the Ottoman territories”.10_{According to this source, hajduks had various reasons and causes for}

their actions. These included road robbery, numerous examples of criminal brigandage in the phase of the tribal social structure, a form of class struggle causing peasant rebellions and further on the initial stage of the national resurgence. All these causes which describe different aspects of the hajduk movement on the Balkans are summarized and interpreted as the struggle for national survival and revival. The conclusion of the entrance in The Military Encyclopedia describing hajduks states:

“Since Islamization failed, the Turks were applying special measures in Serbia. That forced Serbian folk to fight back and survive by joining hajduks which is why this struggle gained the 9 _{J. Leerssen, 'The Rural Outlaws of East-Central Europe', in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.}

Junctures and disjunctures in teh 19th_{and 20}th_{centuries. Volume 4: Types and stereotypes, ed. By Marcel}

Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, page 413.

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character of a national struggle for survival, and in the right moment, for liberation, while robbery was just an example of economic activity.”11

I have deliberately chosen this article as the first description of hajduks. Though it attempts to objectively deal with its subject, it emphasizes the importance of hajduk movements as leading to national liberation and undermines the criminal aspects by interpreting them only as forms of 'economic activities'.12 _{Nevertheless, the description given is attributed to Serbian hajduks, the}

liberators and they are consequently by contrast compared to Macedonian hajduks. In Macedonia “hajdukery was not a mass movement since Macedonians, in the Ottoman times, were not religiously and nationally united.”13_{It is very interesting to note that the claim that the Macedonians}

were not religiously and nationally united is presented in contrast to the assumed Serbian national unity during the Ottoman times, long before the nation-state of the nineteenth century. This touches upon another important characteristic of the way hajduks are understood, their national importance. What we have here is an example of a primordialist view of the Serbian nation in which, not by accident, hajduks play a very significant role14_{. In this understanding hajduks are seen as the symbol}

of continuity of the national resistance (however only if the nation is understood in a fixed and ancient context). It is this way of looking at the Serbian national history that enables hajduks to act as national heroes. Wendy Bracewell summarizes this by presenting all the aspects of hajduk heroism in Serbian national narratives:

“Serbian hajduks were heroes: they had played the role of a national elite when Ottoman conquest had left the Serb people leaderless; they had defended the Serbs against Ottoman oppression; they had kept alive a sense of national consciousness under foreign rule they had not only set the stage for national liberation but had also contributed to it in the Serbian Revolt of 1804.”15

This portrait of hajduks presents most of the important elements which contribute to their status as Serbian national heroes. As we can see the bandit side of their biography needs to be omitted or undermined for them to be able to resume their heroic role. Even in the sources which claim objectivity we can trace the tendency of understating criminal aspects of the hajduk 11 _{Vojna enciklopedija [The Military Encyclopedia], Belgrade, Izdanje Redakcije Vojne Enciklopedija, 1967, page 384.}

12_{It is important to note that The Military Encyclopedia was published in Belgrade in 1972 and one could assume that} the use of 'Us' and 'People' refers to the Yugoslav nationality.

13 _{Ibid, page 384.}

14_{For example, when the minister of culture Tasovac talked about the rebels as the founders of the nation state at the} times of the Serbian Revolution in the 19th century, he used the word “restoring” instead of creating the national state.

15 _{W. Bracewell, 'The Proud Name of Hajduks', in Yugoslavia and Its Historians – Understanding the Balkan}

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movement. For example, we can approach the lexeme 'hajduk' in Rečnik Matice Srpske [The

Dictionary of Matica Srpska]. In this dictionary, under ‘hajduk’ the following is stated: “rebel

against the Turkish rule and member of hajduk bands which protected people against the Turkish injustice”.16_{The same focus on the Turkish injustice is stated in Mala prosvetina enciklopedija} [ Prosveta's Little Encyclopedia ] where hajduks are described as “one of the titles given to outlaws

and fighters against Turkish rule across the Balkans; particularly active as of XVI century. Even though the reasons for joining outlaws were typically based on robbery and monetary gain, in general the hajduk movement was a form of resistance against the Turkish rule. Hajduks were conspiring with the local population and were provided support and shelter by some of them (yataks); Turkish authorities were brutally pursuing hajduks, while the people were glorifying them in poems.”17_{According to this description again we have a situation where the focus is on}

resistance to Turkish rule and occupation, while robbery and monetary gain are clearly mentioned but put aside by a suggestive description of hajduks acceptance by the local population and them being brutally pursued by the Ottomans.

This understanding of hajduks as freedom fighters, liberators and national heroes is recognized in the view of some foreign historians dealing with this subject. For example, the contemporary German historian Holm Sundhaussen, in his History of Serbia Between XIX and XXI

Century, dedicates a special chapter to hajduks, titled: 'Outlaws: freedom fighters or bandits'.

Sundhaussen says: “Amongst the most interesting and controversial developments in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire in its final phase are those outlaws who found their origin in the South Slavic and Greek epic traditions as ‘hajduks’, ‘uskoks’ and ‘klefts’ where they were glorified and celebrated in numerous poems. In the Balkan historiography they are primarily being respected and celebrated as representatives of the anti-feudal movement and freedom fighters. In the popular science articles, as well as in the ‘historical memory’ of the majority of the population, they are even nowadays being represented as heroes and freedom fighters, as the representatives of the ‘common people resistance movement’, as the symbol of masculinity, honour, sacrifice and heroism.18

The dictionary and encyclopedia examples which were discussed may not be sufficiently illustrative of what Sundhaussen sees as the popular image of hajduks since they still note the criminal aspect of the movement even if they consider it less important. An even more relevant example of this glorification is in the field of literary criticism which heavily influenced the official

16_Rečnik_{srpskohrvatskog}_književnog_jezika_._Matica_{srpska, Novi Sad, 1976, page 705.} 17_{Mala prosvetina enciklopedija, BIGZ, Beograd, 1976, page 402.}

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educational strategy. Srpsko-hrvatska narodna epika [Serbo-Croatian National Epic] by Vojislav Đurić19_{is a much better illustration of this very subjective and idealized understanding of hajduks.}

Đurić narrates:

“Our forefathers joined hajduks because they could not accept slavery. For centuries they have been looking for and expecting help from the unconquered European lands, firstly Austria and then the Venetian Republic, and whenever those countries would start a war against the Turks, our people would rise and shed blood for them. Still the Austrian and Venetian Republic would always form a truce with the Turks without too much thought for the future of our people who had nothing left but to continue the infinite battle and claim its right to live. The barriers of that constant struggle were hajduks.”20

Though Vojislav Đurić does not neglect the negative sides of hajduks, he always finds a proper explanation for them. For example, he continues: “they were responding to force by using force. The Turks were robbing, taking food from our people, cattle, money, abducting women, children and selling them as slaves; hajduks were waiting in ambush for Turkish travellers and soldiers (even for the merchants who were in business relations with the Turks), they would claim the treasure, take them as prisoners or even kill them.”21_{This representation of hajduks fits what}

Eric Hobsbawm's defines as the noble bandit. Đurić goes as far as to claim that merchants were attacked only if they had business with the Turks, and this leads to a very idealised image even compared to examples we will discuss found in the epic poetry. In another place Đurić discusses hajduks' cruelty and says “in the constant fight for life or death hajduks could be very cruel. But they could not be anything else since they were fighting against the soulless enemy. Against the bullies they needed to be bullies themselves.”22_{This is another claim that brings Đurić's depiction of}

hajduks closer to Hobsbawm's classification of bandits. This time Đurić is presenting the hajduk avenger as close to what Hobsbawm defines as the bandit avenger. ” They are not so much men who right wrongs, but avengers, and exerters of power; their appeal is not that of the agents of justice, but of men who prove that even the poor and weak can be terrible.“23_{This terror of the weak}

is explained by their need to defend themselves and that is why it is not morally questionable. According to Hobsbawm: “the moral world to which they belong (i.e. which finds expression in the 19 _{Vojislav Đurić (1912 – 2006) view on this subject is presented as relevant since he is an expert in the field of}

Serbian oral literature but also one of the most influential literary scholars active in the period after the World War II. His views were particularly important since he was one of the founders of the world literature department at the University of Belgrade and the founder of the Institute for Art and Literature. I believe that Vojislav Đurić's authority on the subject of oral literature had a great influence on the official state educational programme.

20 _{V. Đurić, Srpskohrvatska narodna epika, Sarajevo, Narodna Prosvjeta, 1955, page 73.} 21 _{Ibid, page 73.}

22 _{Ibid, page 76.}

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songs, poems and chapbooks about them) contains the values of the “noble robber” as well as those of the monster.”24_{This is why bandits in his understanding are a social phenomena since the “}

same men that do monstrosities are and remain “heroes” to the local population”25_{. Hajduks, for}

Hobsbawm are a good example of this phenomena.

Vuk Stefanović Karadzić's Description of Hajduks

Vuk Stefanović Karadzić as the most influential Serbian intellectual of the nineteenth century, considered to be the father of the nation, was well aware of the ambivalent and controversial position hajduks had at the time of the building of the nation. He introduces 'aiduk' as a lexeme to his Srpski rječnik [Serbian Dictionary] from 1818. Nevertheless, it is his second, more detailed edition from 1852 where he gives his most famous depiction of hajduks. Vuk presents hajduks by explaining the way they are understood in Serbia in the nineteenth century, and their popular image is in the essence of his description.

“Our people think and sing in their songs that men became hajduks in Serbia as the result of Turkish terror and misrule. It should be said that some went off to be hajduks without being forced to it, in order to wear what clothes and carry what weapons they liked or to take revenge on someone; but the full truth is that the milder was the Turkish Government, the less hajduks where were in the land, and the worse and more arbitrary it was, the more hajduks there were. Thus among the hajduks there were at times some most honourable men – at the beginning of Turkish rule a very great many of them came from the first lords and nobles. The truth is that many became hajduks without thought of doing evil; but when men, and particularly simple folk, are once cut off from human society and take their leave of all authority, they begin – especially when banded together – to do wrong. So the hajduks do wrong to their own people who still love and pity them in comparison with the Turks; and even now it is the greatest shame and reproach for a hajduk to be called a thief and 'scourge of women'.

In the old times, as is sung in the songs, the hajduks liked best to lie in wait for the Turks when they were carrying tax-money. That has rarely happened in our time; they lie in wait rather for merchants and other travellers, and sometimes attack the houses of people who are thought to have money or fine clothes and weapons. When they attack a house and do not find money, but think that there is some, they find a son or brother of the owner, take him off and keep him with them until the 24 _{E.J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1985, page 58.}

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ransom is paid. A proper hajduk will never kill a man who has done him no harm, unless he is persuaded to it by some friend or 'fence'.”26

This depiction can be taken as a starting point for understanding the popular image of hajduks. The particularly important element is the construction of the popular image of hajduks against the image of 'the Turks'. Vuk emphasises that the people love and pity hajduks in comparison to 'the Turks' though they do damage to them as well. But Vuk goes further to say that, 'the real hajduk' would never kill without reason. We can argue that in this 'real hajduk' lies the origin of the popular positive image of hajduks. The real hajduk does not kill the ones who are not guilty since he has a sense of justice and honour. This element is as crucial for the hajduk as much as his cruelty and strength. He does not only show that the 'weak can be terrible' as Eric Hobsbawm claimed, but that the poor and weak can have honour and dispense justice if the state fails to do so.

When discussing the rural outlaws of East-Central Europe, Joep Leerssen takes into account the questions of the honour and virtue of the rural bandit. “The nineteenth century witnessed in all of Europe, albeit at different moments and at different speeds of development, a transition from an aristocratic social ethos (predicated on honour) towards a civic social ethos predicated on civic virtue (obedience to the law and acknowledgement of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence)”27_{Hajduks can be understood as an example of one of the phases of this transition, they}

inherited the concept of honour from the Medieval times and from the morality still present in the epic poetry.

Vuk's depiction of hajduks in the Serbian Dictionary is still very objective and informative of all aspects of this phenomenon and does not focus only of this aspect of hajduks. Nevertheless, before this dictionary Vuk gave another depiction of hajduks in his “Geographical and Statistical description of Serbia” (“Geografiscesto-staticestko opisanije Srbije”), an article published in

Danica magazine in 1827. The description is almost the same as the one given in the Dictionary

except for the introduction where he describes life under the Ottomans with more compassion and subjectivity. He says:

“The Turkish rule and their treatment of raya are the main reason why in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the whole Turkey there are many hajduks (aiduk). When a man knows that

26_{V. Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1852), Prosveta, Beograd, 1986, page 1085 - 1086}

27 _{J. Leerssen, 'The Rural Outlaws of East-Central Europe', in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.}

Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th_{and 20}th_{centuries. Volume 4: Types and stereotypes, ed. By Marcel}

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the court and the law does not protect him from force and injustice he has to protect himself and look for justice on his own. A Serb can live as a peaceful man only far away from the Turks; but not everyone can keep this distance (…) It is common for the Turks to pick on somebody so he has to run to the forest not to get killed; and many have been robbed by the Turks or done some other injustice so they joins hajduks to get revenge; and many become hajduks only to wear beautiful clothes and guns according to their own will. That is why hajduks are mostly the best of men and they are regarded more as heroes then evil men. Bajo Pivljanin and Limun can be named hajduks in Serbian but the German would rather name them helden (heroes) then räuber” 28

Vuk contextualises hajduks by describing the conditions under the Ottomans which influences their understanding in Serbia. Still he understands that their local character needs an international reference and this is where he uses the German word 'helden' as his conclusion of this article. By choosing 'helden' instead of 'räuber' Vuk emphasises the positive national aspects and puts aside hajduk's bandit background. As we have seen this method is constantly repeated in Serbian national narratives and Vuk's decision to name hajduks 'helden' instead of 'räuber' is the first example of this argumentation. Compared with this the depiction of hajduks in the Serbian

Dictionary is more objective and less positive. In the Dictionary Vuk talks about hajduks who, apart

from the Turks rob other travellers, yet this is not mentioned at all in Danica's article. Did the character of the hajduks change from 1827 until the time of his writing of the Dictionary or did Vuk's attitude towards them change? One of the many possible answers to this is the fact that hajduks after the First Serbian Uprising had no political function, after the Ottomans and the creation of the nation state they could not be the same heroes they once were.

Heroes of the Nation

In the second edition of The Serbian Revolution (Die Serbische Revolution) written in 1844 Leopold Ranke says: “ And then if the poem is told to glorify the heroism then this poem cannot be any other poem – since no other heroism is known – but a poem about hajduks”29_{Ranke does not}

question his statement and does not leave any uncertainty, the heroes of the Serbian epic poetry are hajduks and therefore hajduks are Serbian heroes. This statement corresponds to Vuk's definition of hajduks by the German word 'helden' in Danica magazine. But Ranke goes even further and makes an intriguing statement, he concludes that this heroic poetry presents “a man on that developmental

28 _{V. Stefanović Karadžić, Geografičesko-statističesko opisanije Srbije. Danica, zabavnik za 1827 godinu, page 91}_. 29 _{Quoted from H. Sundhaussen, Istorija Srbije of 19. do 21. veka, Beograd, Clio, 2008. page 61.}

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stage, a member of the tribe ; the hero who is equal to the bard himself”30_{What I find very}

interesting in this statement is that Ranke draws a parallel between the member of the tribe, the bard who performs the heroic poetry and the hero of the tribe himself. Those three are equal in Ranke's history inspired by the ideas of Romanticism. Ranke is the first one to identify the newly constructed Serbian nation with hajduks. Here we have a case of using the epic depiction of reality as a historical source, which we will encounter again while talking about historical sources. Hajduks played an important role in the First Serbian Uprising but still the sources for Ranke's statement are the fictionalized heroic depictions from the epic poetry. This identification of the Serbian nation with hajduks and bandits has been a constant motif in history, media and literature since the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century we have Ranke's land of hajduks heroes which is an extremely positive depiction, and at the beginning of the 20th century we have the same understanding of the Serbian nation as the nation of bandits. This time however Serbian bandits are associated with a particular 'bandit' Gavrilo Princip and the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of the Great War.

This relation between the Serbian national image and hajduks as national heroes is very important even today. In Joep Leerssen's Imagology Pavle Sekeruš presents the recognizable tropes of the Serbian ethnotype where hajduks take an honourable position between raki and vampire. Sekarus explains that these tropes have for the Serbian national image the same function that

torrero, corrida and flamenco have for the Spanish and goes further to claim that they are “in

essence clichés and fossilized signs whose function is to create an atmosphere in which the reader can quickly trace the typical Serbian element”31_.

In order to understand the position hajduks have in Serbian nationalism we would need to understand the role of national heroes in nationalism. According to Linas Eriksonas ‘regardless of the political views held by the scholars of nationalism, all parties regard national heroes as the flesh and blood of national identities. The only difference in their views is qualitative. For the perennialist, national heroes possess an intrinsic value. For the constructivist, national heroes are a value-added commodity traded across the centuries. For the rest, at best they are images in people’s heads.’32_{Linas Eriksonas takes the words of Anthony D. Smith as the unquestioned consensus on}

the role national heroes play in modern societies:

31 _{J. Leerssen, Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters, Amsterdam –}

New York, Rodopi, 2007, page 235.

32 _{L. Eriksonas, National Heroes and National Identities – Scotland, Norway and Lithuania, P.I.E.-Peter Lang S.A.,}

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“While definitions of grandeur and glory vary, every nationalism requires a touchstone of virtue and heroism, to guide and give meaning to the tasks of regeneration. The future of the ethnic community can only derive meaning and achieve its form from the pristine ‘golden age’ when men were ‘heroes’. Heroes provide models of virtuous conduct, their deeds of valour inspire faith and courage in their oppressed and decadent descendants” 33

National heroes having the role of an image of the nation described by Anthony D. Smith were particularly important at the time of the beginning of Serbian nationalism. During this time the use of this function of national heroes peaked. A good example was the calling for the First Serbian Uprising. When Vladika Jovan Jovanovic calls for Serbs to rise against the Turks he uses national heroes from Kosovo times until the famous outlaw Sibinjanin Janko and paraphrases the national epics as an example of the heroic epic tradition. When one of the leaders of the Uprising Radić Petrović calls for the army to rise against the Turks he simply says “let them be knights as their forefathers and fear nothing.”34_{Hajduks as a specific type of national hero experience this kind of}

actualization during any periods of rising Serbian nationalism.

The image of hajduks is difficult to understand outside of this position and function in the pantheon of Serbian nationalism. Marija Todorova in her study about the Bulgarian national hero Vasil Levski talks about national heroes as one of the brand names of nationalism. For her nationalism is “the metaphoric glue (shorthand for cohesive processes of ideologies) that keeps nations together, in a word, national symbology”35_{and national heroes are touchstones of the}

symbolic repertoire of nationalism. 36_{The study on how a nation chooses its national heroes is}

closely connected to the way the nation understands and constructs its own image.

Historical Sources

This almost mythological extra value of the hajduk image makes it very difficult to study the origins of their historical appearance. While looking for the historical image of hajduk in the Balkans we encounter on every step of the way the issues of ideological stylization and interpretation and canonisation (as we have seen in many earlier examples). All of this works in favour of the popular

33 _{L. Eriksonas, National Heroes and National Identities – Scotland, Norway and Lithuania, P.I.E.-Peter Lang S.A.,}

Presses Interuniversitaires Europeenes, Brussels, 2004, page 16.

34 _{M. Maticki, Epika ustanka, Tršić/Beograd, 1982, page 64.}

35 _{M. Todorova, Bones of Contention: the Living Archive of Vasil Lenski and Making of Bulgaria’s National Hero,}

Budapest, Central European University Press, 2009, page X

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hajduk image but makes the search for its historical origins very difficult. When we talk about the old Medieval sources it is very difficult to decide in which level they are based on real events and in which the events were taken out of the epics and appropriated. Holm Sundhaussen discusses this situation and states that certain authors take the hero epics as the source of information about hajduks since those epics are the “archive of people” and therefore valuable. Sundhaussen accuses his compatriot Ranke who was too subjective and who counted on” the epic poems given to him (by Vuk) during the times of his Vienna archive investigation”37_{The problematic relation between the}

oral poetry and the written sources is also important for Miodrag Popović, famous Serbian literary historian. He claims that “what looks today as the interpolation of the oral legend into written source in past centuries could be the way of thinking and expression of educated people. The motifs which were in the XV century incorporated as parts of the epic formula might actually originate from the creative and literary inspired chronicles depicting the same events as the epic poem. Their understanding and interpretation of historical events, regularly well tuned to the ideological and political needs, did not differ in essence or style a lot from the heroic poems from the feudo-military circles.”38_{Miodrag Popovic is questioning the objective depiction of hajduks in both written and}

oral sources, and the possibility of reaching an authentic and historically accurate portrait. Popović's theory is mostly applied to the Medieval chronicles and the oral tradition and their relation to each other.

Even when we talk about documentary sources from the archives in Venice, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Zadar and Kotor, looking for the original image of hajduks does not get any easier. If we accept them to be authentic and objective we are still faced with two strongly opposing sides of the same story: one about the magnificent achievements, heroism and mostly heroic deaths and the opposite, robbery, devastation, slave trade and occasional cooperation with the Muslim heroes. Therefore, there is enough space for interpretation and misinterpretation which is another challenge in itself. Archive sources describe many events in which hajduks are both good and bad characters and vary from one extreme to the other.

For example Boško Suvajdžić concludes that the historical archives give mostly negative views on hajduks, especially if compared with the epic poetry (Vuk's collections). A completely opposite analysis is given by Radovan Samardzić, famous literary critic, who claims. “New archival research in Kotor, Dubrovnik, Zadar and Venice, has brought to light a large number of documents, written in Cyrillic alphabet and in folk language, written by the local people from the wider area of Dalmatia, the Dubrovnik region and Boka Kotorska. Among these documents the majority are 37 _{H. Sundhaussen, Istorija Srbije of 19. do 21. veka, Beograd, Clio, 2008. page 60.}

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testimonials about the same world which is described in the heroic epic poems of the “middle times”, and it has to be emphasised that this world, as seen in the archives is not significantly different than the world presented in the oral tradition.”39_{The existence of many documents}

describing robberies and slave trade Samardzić interprets by saying that the positive image in the epic poetry and negative one in historical documents is “the consequence of the poetical demands of the oral epics, starting from the occasional submission of the material to the idea, the needs of the metrics, figures of speech and other elements of literary expression, all the way to external influences: confusions in the epic memory caused by external turmoils.” 40_{This interpretation is}

very interesting since it is one of many examples of a very popular approach to this subject when whatever suits ones argumentation is taken out of context and used for painting an appropriate picture. Samardzić undermines the negative aspect of hajduks and explains this by the demands of the poetics of the epic poetry and external reasons which are not clearly explained but are left aside while hajduks are presented in a very positive way as national liberators. Ironically, this interpretation was based on the research of the archives and historical documents but still cannot be taken as an objective approach.

Though we have described the difficulties one can encounter when looking for the historical hajduks, there are certain facts which can be used as a starting point. It is a fact that the bandits who fought in the Balkans in the fifteenth century were called gusari and the deed itself gusa.

Hajduks were mentioned for the first time with the Ottoman invasion. Boško Suvajdžić agrees that

the history of hajduks starts with the Turks but claims that the origin of their movements should be found among the Christian mercenaries in the Ottoman army. He points to the armatoloi, whose unit structure was very similar to the organisation of the hajduk group (cheta). “The difference between hajduks and mercenaries was very small, one could say that he went to join hajduks, when he cannot get work as mercenary.“41_{The example of this tradition is one of the hajduk prototypes}

vojvoda Momčilo, who as a “common hajduk commander” ruled in the 14th_{century. Here we have}

an early example of hajduks fighting side by side with the Ottomans which is depicted in early examples of the epic poetry. Especially interesting is the fact that this tradition was slowly evaporating from the national memory leading to the lack of any literary depiction in Vuk's collections since at the time of the Serbian revolution Christian collaborators with the Turks were not worth remembering.42

39 _{R. Samardzić, Usmena narodna hronika, Novi Sad, Matica srpska, 1978, page 73.} 40 _{Ibid, page 73.}

41 _{Boško Suvajdžić, “Hajduci i uskoci u narodnoj poeziji,” in Epske pesme o hajducima I uskocima: Antologija,}

Gutembergova galaksija, Beograd, 2003, quoted from http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/usmena/bsuvajdzic-uskoci_c.html (accessed on 27.06.2014)

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From the Ottoman invasion until the second half of the sixteenth century hajduks were not that common in the Balkans. A certain report from 1528 by an anonymous Frenchman says: “The country (The Ottoman Empire) is safe and one should not be scared of rebels and bandits on the wide roads … Sultan has no mercy for bandits and robbers”.43_{The period in question is the early}

Ottoman invasion, the times of peace and prosperity - Pax Ottomanica. The position of the Christians in this period was, when it comes to taxes better then in the times prior to the invasion. There was no forceful Islamization, and apart from the practice of taking young boys for the janissaries (famous danak u krvi), according to many historians there was no real need for any rebellion. While discussing this period Holm Sundhaussen quotes Voltaire who is admiring the Turkish people who “peacefully rule among twenty nations with different religions; and from whom Christians can learn how to practice restraint in peace and high-mindedness in victory” 44_{But soon}

after the death of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1566) the first cracks of an internal crisis become visible. Not long after that, at the end of the sixteenth century, peasant taxation was six times higher and with increasing turmoil in the empire, the hajduk movement began to grow significantly stronger. This is where Vuk's description of hajduks follows the official historical consensus. Vuk says “ it is the whole truth that whenever the Turkish rule is better and more human there are less hajduks in the country, and when the ruling is worse there are more hajduks”.45 _{In the}

protocols of the sharia court in Monastir in Macedonia in the first half of the seventeenth century it is stated that hajduks are the origin of great rebellions. In the same time in Turkish sources we can see “many orders to fight hajduks from Temishoara on the North to Peloponesus in the South, from Skadre in the West to Edrene in the East46_{From that time on hajduks are a constant presence in the}

Balkans. “The foreigners who travel across Serbia in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, especially via the old Roman road from Belgrade to Konstantinopol are testifying about the uncertainty of the travel, temporary fortresses built along the road for protection against hajduks”47

The drumming guards are warning travellers against the danger of hajduk attack from the sixteenth century onwards. In the seventeenth century there are horrifying testaments about freshly displayed hajduk heads left on the walls of cities as a warring to other bandits while the English ambassador is welcomed to Niš by hajduk heads filled with straw.

In Serbia hajduk movements achieved an absolute high point just prior to the time of the 43 _{H. Sundhaussen, Istorija Srbije of 19. do 21. veka, Beograd, Clio, 2008. page 43.}

45_{Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1852), Prosveta, Beograd, 1986, page 1085.} 46 _{H. Sundhaussen, Istorija Srbije of 19. do 21. veka, Beograd, Clio, 2008, page 64.}

47 _{B. Suvajdžić, “Hajduci i uskoci u narodnoj poeziji,” in Epske pesme o hajducima I uskocima: Antologija,}

Gutembergova galaksija, Beograd, 2003, quoted from http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/usmena/bsuvajdzic-uskoci_c.html (accessed on 27.06.2014)

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First Serbian Uprising in 1804. Since the murder of Mustafa Paša, the Turkish governor of Belgrade in 1801, the Serbian relation to the Turkish authorities was going from bad to worse. Vuk testified:

“However poor was the reputation of hajduks in Serbia under the wise and just rule of Mustafa Paša, now as the result of so much force and terror, a tenth of the population became hajduks.”48

In a way the Uprising could be named the hajduk revolution with the leader Petar Petrović Karađorđe being a hajduk himself. Not only did he have a hajduk background but this was one of the reasons why he was chosen as a leader of the Uprising. The reasoning was as follows:

“The Turks know him as a hajduk anyhow. Then if a Turkish army comes into Serbia and the Turks rule again, he can run off to the woods with his hajduks and we can appear before the Turks and throw all the blame on him and the rest of them, and afterwards we can easily get a special guarantee for him and hand him over as a hajduk”49

The real events that followed were close to this scenario, the Uprising failed and Karađorđe fled the country to Russia and consequently got murdered on his attempt to come back to Serbia in 1813. The more pragmatic and cunning Miloš Obrenović sent Karađorđe's head to Istanbul and using his diplomatic skills, lead the creation of the Serbian state (at the beginning restricted to the wider Belgrade area.) Other hajduk rebels of the time of the Serbian revolution shared Karađorđe's fate this way or another. The state which was establishing itself did not need any unruly and unreliable outlaws, like many times before the paramilitary had served its purpose and was a nuisance after the revolution. As Wendy Bracewell put it:

“Ultimately, the only certain hero was a dead hero – preferably one who had been safely martyred in the defence of the nation. Problems arose when the same sort of men continued to carry out precisely the same sort of bandit action after independence, though now defying not Ottoman authority but the authority of the newly independent national state.”50

This is one of the reasons why the reputation of hajduks in the following years and toward the end of the nineteenth century went from national hero to once again being depicted as robber and bandit. The band of criminals who were referred to as hajduks were famously on trial in Čačak

48 _{D. Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadzić, London, Oxford University Press, 1970, page 37.} 49 _{Ibid, page 39.}

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in 1896. These hajduks made Pera Todorović, famous journalist and Radical party member, exclaim with grief that they only use the “proud and holy title 'hajduk' on which the Serb prided himself”51

Still, they are nothing but “outlaws, who claim the proud name of hajduks, take necklaces from the necks of women ...Today's outlaws are unjustly given the name hajduk!”52_{The positive image of}

hajduk as a national hero will continue to live in literature and culture culminating with Janko Veselinovic's novel Hajduk Stanko 1896, an example of romantic realism in Serbian literature, but it will soon be contrasted by another work of art, the naturalist novel Gorski car 1897 by Svetolik Ranković dealing with the reality of a robbers life. The two will continue living next to each other, the honourable hajduk of the epic poetry and literature and the real bandit and criminal using the popular image of hajduk as a mask.

Wars of the 1990s, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2003, page 26.

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CHAPTER II - Comparative Analysis of the Image of Hajduks

Vuk's Third Book of Serbian Folk Songs in Comparison to The Erlangen Manuscript

-Background

In his article “Outlaws: Freedom Fighters or Bandits” contemporary German historian Holm Sundhaussen focusses on the oral origin of the popular image of hajduks in Serbia and rightfully points at the crucial role Vuk Stefanović Karadžić played in establishing their image since he collected and published almost all of the famous epic poems about hajduks. Nevertheless, Sundhaussen clearly states the need for further research and comparative analysis which will establish “in which level the poems collected in the nineteenth century correspond to the previous versions”53_{. His main focus is authenticity and truthfulness of the epic poetry which gives additional}

insight into the historical figure of hajduks. In this chapter I will use the proposed comparative research but with a different focus: to trace the tendency of idealisation and gradual achieving of the national hero status of Serbian hajduks and the influence of the patriotic feelings sparked by the First Serbian Uprising on their popular image. In order to do so I will compare Vuk's collection of hajduk poetry with The Erlangen Manuscript a collection of epic poetry collected around 1720.

One of the starting hypotheses of my work is that the origins of hajduks popular image as well as their importance as national heroes can be traced back to Vuk's collections of Serbian epic poems. Vuk Stefanović Karadzić published four volumes of Serbian folk songs (Srpske narodne

pjesme) in Leipzig between 1823 and 1833 which he later expanded and reissued in Vienna between

1841 and 1862. Among the four volumes of Serbian folk poetry it is the third volume, the famous third book that deals with hajduks and uskoks and which Vuk titled „the third book, containing the heroic poems of the middle times“.54_{The middle times in this formulation refers to Vuk's division of}

the Serbian epic poetry to poems before the Kosovo battle, the ones after the battle depicting times under the Ottoman rule and poems dealing with the struggle for liberation with a short historical distance from the publication of Vuk's collections.

The chronological order of Vuk's collections corresponds to the interpretation of Jovan

53_{H. Sundhaussen, Istorija Srbije of 19. do 21. veka, Beograd, Clio, 2008. page 63.}

54_{The edition used and quoted in my thesis is the second edition of Vuk's third book of collected epic poems - Vuk} Stefanović Karadzić, Srpske narodne pjesme, knjiga treća u kojoj su pjesme junačke srednjijeh vremena, Štamparija jermenskog manastira, Beč, 1946. Further on in the text this collection will be referred to as the third book or Vuk's collection.

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Deretić who rightfully pointed at „the unity of classic, Vuk's epics which is based on the unity of the (historical) vision“55_{. This historical vision which, according to Deretić, is in essence „ the epic,}

poetic history of Serbian people“56_{plays an important role in the creation of hajduk popular image.}

This specific context of a historical vision is by itself a problematic field. The chronological order in which poems are organised in Vuk's collections leads to the notion of the great grounding national narrative and can be understood as a proto-national way of looking at the national history. The position hajduk poems take, after the Ottoman conquest and before the Serbian revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century, emphasizes their importance as the precursors of the national awakening and the epitome of the national resistance and furthermore they are seen as the carriers of the early national consciousness. By comparing Vuk's third book of epic poetry with the early depictions of hajduks present in The Erlangen Manuscript I will trace the beginning of this process of building of the “epic, poetic history of Serbian people” and positioning hajduks in the pantheon of Serbian nationalism by the process of idealisation and de-historisation which can be traced by comparing these two collection.

The Third Book of Epic Poetry

The third book was ready for publishing and only waiting for Jernej Kopitar’s censorship approval when the Court Office in Vienna concluded that it could not allow the publication to go on “for political reasons”57_{. The explanation for this that Ljubomir Stojanović, the writer of the biggest}

monography on Vuk, offered was that “ the Holy Alliance was already suffering because of Greek rebellion and these poems, celebrating the past and rebels were motivating Serbs for the new uprising.”58_{Since the political climate was not right for publication in Vienna, Vuk managed to}

publish the book in Leipzig in 1823. Nevertheless, upon his next visit to Vienna he had to deal with heavy accusations that the book which was officially forbidden was still being sold containing poems which “glorified the deeds of Serbian heroes from Tzar Lazar to Black George (Karađorđe) and inspire the hatred against Turks and provoke resistance and revenge, especially among young people …”59_{Vuk’s loyal friend and supporter Kopitar reacted to these accusations and the situation}

was again restored. (Not sure what you mean here – do you mean to say that Kopitar reacted and the problem was resolved? )

55 _{J. Deretić, Kratka istorija srpske književnosti, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 2001, page 71.} 56 _{Ibid, page 44.}

57 _{R. Samardžić, “Treća knjiga Srpskih narodnih pjesama Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića”, in Vuk Stefanović Karadžić,}

Srpske narodne pjesme III , Beograd: Prosveta, 1988, page 495.

58 _{Ibid, page 495.} 59 _{Ibid, page 503.}

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Nevertheless, there are a few important elements which contribute to the understanding of hajduks and which can be drawn from this story of the publishing of the third book. First is the acknowledgement of the heavy political value by the authorities and the second is the fact that the poems about hajduks are understood as glorification of their deeds. It is an open question how much did this 'official' interpretation influence the way Vuk understood the importance of hajduks? Was Vuk aware of the political value of his collection at the time he was selecting the poems? Vuk's understanding of this dimension of his work is very important since his influence on the collected material is crucial for the image of hajduks.

The Question of Vuk's Authorship

Duncan Wilson paid special attention to this aspect of Vuk's work as a collector and editor of collected material. He concludes:

“Vuk was of course no dispassionate and scientifically accurate recorder of folk-lore, and his standards were different from those of the ethnographer today. In the first place, he had a profound sense of the political value of what he was collecting, and of the importance which it possessed as an embodiment of the Serb national spirit (though this did not prevent him from publishing songs which could well have been considered barbarous and detrimental to Serbian prestige). Secondly – and this is a connected point which it is easy to forget – Vuk was an anthologist, not an indiscriminate collector, of popular material; and thirdly, his work as a selector and editor was determined, no less than his work as a collector, by the way in which he knew his material, so to speak, from the inside.”60

Duncan Wilson stated all the aspects of the important question of Vuk's influence on the material he presented. The first one is the political dimension which according to Duncan was recognized by Vuk by understanding the epic poetry as the embodiment of the Serbian national spirit. Vuk not only understood Serbian oral poetry as the embodiment of national spirit but he understood his own position as a position of an intellectual who was presenting his nation to an educated Europe and the world. Vuk himself states „ and with pride I can say that almost everything which world now has worthy of respect about our people today came from me and through me“61

This statement itself puts under a question mark the objectivity and the method Vuk used in order to compose his collections. Did Vuk's understanding of what is worthy of respect influence what is 60 _{D. Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1970, page 318.} 61 _{Quoted from Vojislav Đurić, Vukovi portreti ustanika, Istočnik, Beograd 2002, page 136.}

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presented and the way it is presented in his collection? Duncan Wilson says that Vuk included the poems which are not flattering to the national image as well but only the close analysis of the collection and the excluded versions can give an answer to the previous question. The second point Duncan makes is the fact that Vuk worked as an anthologist, which by itself means that he chose the poems of the greatest value but this again leaves much space and freedom to organise the anthology in accordance with ones own views and preferences. The third point takes the same issue to an even deeper level. Wilson says that Vuk's way of collecting the material was influenced from 'the inside' by the way he himself knew the poems. For this final point it is important to remember that the first collection of oral poetry Vuk published he did not collect (Mala prostonarodna slaveno-serbska

pesmarica, 1814), it was the collection he produced from his own memory that was the only

baggage he brought with him to Vienna when he was escaping the break of the First Serbian Uprising. We cannot know the extent to which Vuk's excellent knowledge of Serbian epic poetry influenced the poems about hajduks, but there are a few facts which need to be noted and which influence the way hajduks are presented in Vuk's collection.

It is very important to note that young the Vuk worked as a transcriber for a well known hajduk harambaša Đorđe Ćurčija during the first years of the Serbian uprising62_{. He was further a}

close friend and a biographer of a famous hajduk Veljko Petrović whose bravery and courage he depicted in his biography, The Life of 'Ajduk Veljko Petrović published in Danica magazine for 1826. Both of these two biographical facts from Vuk's life may have influenced the way Vuk presented hajduks in his collections and should be taken into account at the beginning of this analysis.

Hajduk Perspective of Vuk's Bards

It is very important to note that most of Vuk's noted bards were hajduks themselves. Novak Kilibarda states in his article about the image of hajduks in Vuk's epic poetry that “in his comments about hajduks and hajduk poetry Vuk emphasized facts according to which we can conclude that the epic image about hajduks was created primarily by hajduks themselves.”63_{In the introduction of the}

epic poems published in Lajpzig in 1823 Vuk states that “hajduks spent winters days in yatak's houses hiding, and for the whole night they sang with gusle and most of all poems about hajduks”64

62 _{The First Serbian Uprising was the first unsuccessful stage of The Serbian Revolution, Serbian rebellion against the}

Turks which lasted from 1804 to 1813.

63 _{N. Kilibarda, “Slika hajduštva u vukovskoj narodnoj epici”, published in Starina Novak i njegovo doba – zbornik}

radova, Srpska akademija nauka ii umetnosti, Beograd, 1988, page 148.

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“Heroic poems are mostly sung by blind bards and hajduks"65_{Vuk emphasises when he discusses}

the origin of the Serbian epic singing. If we consider Vuk's most famous singers we can see that all of them have a personal experience of hajduk life and conflict with the Ottomans which influenced their poems. “The epic pilgrimage of Filip Višnjić, the most popular of all these singers, began when the uncle with whom the boy lived was hanged for having killed in blood-vengeance some Turks who raped one of the women in the family. Old Milija – the singer of “Banović Strahinja” , the most fully developed and the best single epic poem in Karadzić’s collection – was also uprooted from his native Herzegovina by conflicts with the Turks; Karadžić records that all his head was scarred with vivid memories of these encounters. And Karadžić’s best poet Tešan Podrugović was at first a merchant in Bosnia and Herzegovina until he “killed a Turk who had tried to kill him and so dispersed his home and became an outlaw”66_{”From one side this brings out the documentary value}

of the hajduk poetry and leads us to believe that a depiction of their way of life is close to reality. From the other side the objectivity? in depicting their subject cannot be denied and needs to be noted as the origin of the positive description of hajduks. Svetozar Koljević blames this hajduk origin of some poems for the fact that many of those poems are very violent. “The singer’s imagination – and the singers were often outlaws themselves – is obsessed by such hatred of the enemy that the song ends up by glorifying the hero who can match up the enemy in cunning, cruelty, and devising ingenious forms of torture.”67_{This is also very important for the fact that the}

hajduk''s image, as previously discussed is constructed in contrast to the image of the Turk. If we remember Ranke's statement that the singer himself truly represents the world he describes we can conclude that hajduks project their understanding of the world to their artistic vision in the epic poetry they create.

The second point important for the authorship position of Vuk's bards is that they were influenced by the times of the First Serbian Uprising and the patriotic feelings which it inspired. All Vuk's bards are witnesses of the Serbian Revolution. Jovan Deretić says that this is what was crucial for the unity of the historical vision of the Serbian epic poetry. All of Vuk's bards “experienced the Uprising, sang about the Uprising and their poems are told after the Uprising (some of them as refugees in Srem). Their experience of the uprising is the basis on which they built their vision of the national history. 68_{The First Serbian Uprising is crucial for the ideological}

background of Vuk's hajduk poetry and it is in the essence of the epic historical vision presented in Vuk's collections. Even in the poems which are not directly dealing with the uprising (the third book 65 _{The introduction to the first book of Leipzig editions, quoted from Vuk Stefanović. Karadžić, O srpskoj narodnoj}

poeziji, prir. Borivoje Marinković, Prosveta, Beograd 1964, page 97.

66 _{S. Koljević, The Epic in the Making, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, page 216.} 67 _{Ibid, page 227.}

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of epic poetry which I will discuss) the influence of the birth of a national feeling is crucial for the creation of hajduk's popular image. Nevertheless, the changes which have appeared are more a tendency towards the creation of hajduks' popular image and less a full clearly stated ideological interpretation.

The Erlangen Manuscript

The second collection I will use in this comparative analysis is The Erlangen Manuscript, the older collection of hajduk epic poetry which will be used for comparative analysis. The story of The

Erlangen Manuscript is shrouded in mystery. A previously unknown manuscript was presented in

1914 by a German professor of Slavic Philology? Erich Bernecker in a lecture for the Bavarian Academy of Science. The manuscript was originally discovered in the office of the Erlangen University librarian who remembered vaguely how it was donated to the University Library by an unknown contributor. The questions about the identity of the donator and the identity of the collector have not been given any conclusive answers. Nevertheless, most of the scholars starting with Gerhard Gesemann who published this collection in 1925 agree on the dating of the manuscript (between 1716 and 1733) and the fact that it most probably covers the area of the military border between Rijeka and Srem.

I have chosen The Erlangen Manuscript as the second primary source for three main reasons. The most important being the fact that there are many hajduk epic poems present in this manuscript. The manuscript consists of two hundred poems from which around forty deal with the motifs from the hajduk life or characters known to be hajduks or acting as hajduks. The definition of hajduks songs by Boško Suvajdžić, a Serbian expert on this subject, that „not all the poems which deal with hajduks are hajduk poems“69_{is not going to be taken into account in this case since}

the main subject of this study is not the hajduk poetry itself but the image of hajduks. Therefore, I will take into account all the poems dealing with this subject and even the ones mentioning famous hajduks outside of the typical mountain setting. The hajduk poems which I will be analysing have both very old motifs such as unfaithful wife or having a fairy as a helper but they also present typical hajduk motifs which are according to Suvajdžić the following: “gathering of the band, brigandage, ambushing, robbery as a way of producing, kidnapping, chasing, band division, the motif of 'hajduk's luck', singing through the mountain.”70

69 _{B. Suvajdžić, “Hajduci i uskoci u narodnoj poeziji,” in Epske pesme o hajducima I uskocima: Antologija,}

Gutembergova galaksija, Beograd, 2003, quoted from http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/usmena/bsuvajdzic-uskoci_c.html (accessed on 27. 06. 2014)

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The second reason for deciding on The Erlangen Manuscript as the second main source is the fact that this collection in comparison to Vuk's collection does not offer one unifying view on its subject. The leading view on the question of authorship of this collection is that the collector most probably of German origin collected these poems from many bards from different religious, ethnic and language groups. As Lidija Delić concluded, the authorship position is not stable and there is no prevailing ideology which influenced all the poems. “Therefore this collection is marked by a complex, incoherent “position of the author”: the poems were sung from different perspectives defined before anything else by the feeling of belonging and affection to one of the religious groups”71_{This position offers an interesting ground for comparison with Vuk's collection which is}

dominated by strong anti-Turkish sentiment.

The third important argument in choosing The Erlangen Manuscript concerns the times of its creation. The Erlangen Manuscript poems are much closer to the times of the events they are depicting which may lead to a more historically accurate depiction of hajduks. From the other side

The Erlangen Manuscript poems distance from the times of the Serbian uprising is useful for this

analysis since it offers a more neutral and less ideological view on the subject.

The Method

In this research I will primarily focus on the famous hajduk figures, one of the most prominent being Starina Novak. Starina Novak and the members of his band are crucial for this analysis since they are presented in a very positive way in Vuk's collections. Next to Starina Novak I will focus on other famous hajduks who appear in both collections. I will try to confront 'the Erlangen hajduk' with the hajduk of Vuk's times and trace the tendency in the way hajduks in general are depicted and the changes that are present. Since hajduks are mostly presented in relation to the depiction of the Turk I will also pay special attention to how the Turks have been presented in both collections. How much did the change in the intensity of anti-Turkish sentiment influence the image of hajduks?

The main method for my research is a close comparative research of the way hajduks have been depicted in both poems. The main guide for this analysis is Joep Leerssen's imagological approach to literary analysis. Though I have not followed all the principles of this approach I have paid special attention to the use of stereotypes, the image of the other (in this case the Turk) and I 71 _{L. Delić, “Slika o hajducima Ii uskocima u ranim beleženjima: Erlangenski rukopis”, Godišnjak katedre za srpsku}

The Popular Image of Hajduks in Serbia