Prologue

MORE THAN ANNIVERSARY, PRAYER, INSCRIPTION
Njegoš and Us

Njegoš watches us, intently and silently. Quietly. He doesn’t wonder. He knows all the faces of evil, including the one today. He knows the extent of it coming upon us and the size of it coming through us.
This year will be the two-hundredth anniversary of Njegoš’s birth, and the public of the protectorate only sporadically mentions it. Well, it’s not convenient. The villain who took half of his seat mocks him by revealing his monument in the “mother of Russian cities”. If Njegoš is the benchmark, which he is, we are truly vulgar and small, just midgets.
He was the ancient Holy Sovereign, the last one of the Serbs, in a time more difficult, yet purer than this. He united within himself the figures of the first priest, statesman and first among knights. Figures of a holy poet and a holy warrior. Poeta sacer, with one foot in this and the other in higher realms. In the Serbian post-Kosovo refuge dug into heavens, called Montenegro, he was the lightning rod above the people. He took on the biggest strikes of the force of evil, so smaller and weaker shoulders wouldn’t get more than they can take. He continues taking the strikes, thus he is defamed so much today and buried seven times, thus he is the only bishop in the world on whose grave chants are not heard and candles are not burning.
His signature was “hermit of Cetinje”. Votaries know that he was clairvoyant. Andrić called him “the tragic hero of the Kosovo philosophy”. “Even if our entire nation would become extinct, he is the poet who’d clearly and gigantically save its image among nations”, wrote Crnjanski.
Mention us, Holy Bishop.
And forgive. Forgive.
May at least Your bones find peace, if we cannot.