Introduction

Babbling Room

”We will not humiliate education, and we will consider unreasonable and rude those who underestimate it. They would like everyone to be uneducated and rude like them, in order to avoid criticism of their ignorance and hide it.”
This could have been taken from today’s newspaper, but it wasn’t. Those are words of Gregory the Theologian, written already in the IV century. He, one of the Holy Three Hierarchs, and one of only three people in the history of Orthodox Christianity who carried the name ”Theologian”, school friend of Saint Basil the Great and Julian the Apostate, knew what he was saying. Karel Chapek knew as well: ”Imagine the silence in the world if people spoke only what they know.”
While preparing this issue of National Review, the first in its seventeenth year, we sent scouts to Ponor, the biggest sinkhole in mount Stara Planina. Walking the First Furrow Street, we entered deep into Milovan Glišić’s Valjevo. In faraway Namibia, we researched the encounter of the desert and the ocean. We reminded of writer Mihailo Lalić and painter Slava Bogojević. We visited the Institute of Serbian Culture in Kosovo and Zurabi Datunashvili, the best athlete in Serbia in 2022.
We stayed away from farse and spinning. Fear was neither our companion nor whisperer. May it not be yours either.