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IN KOSOVO, OBSERVING THE 130TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE SERBIAN LITERARY COOPERATIVE
In the Votive Circle
A full Students’ Club in Mitrovica at the presenting of one of the two oldest and most important Serbian publishing institutions. Young and educated people, with Slavic beauty. The finest poets are speaking: Lakićević, Babić, Mihajlović, Matić, Rakočević, Popović… In Leposavić a thorough lecture held by Marija Jeftimijević Mihajlović, PhD, about Kosovo in the SKZ publications. In only two days, we heard a multitude of important names and titles, ideas and voices. We remembered the heavenly-earthly singing and glowing pictures. (…) A nation dealing with books and culture in such a way does not need to justify itself to anyone for being in its rightful place

By: Igor Davidović
Photo: Igor Davidović and ”Vuk Karadžić” Library

When setting foot on the land of Kosovo and Metohija, an alert Serbian being feels as if entering the internal circle of its holy tradition. Everything marginal and accidental, such as current historical and political circumstances, falls into the background. It disassembles like a cheap set of a traveling theater; it disappears from the horizon. A big nervous metropolis is fading away somewhere in the back, with its colorful billboards and lead covers. The facts that you have traveled almost nine hours, that you have waited more than two hours at the non-existing border, that some of you have almost been smuggled across Jarinje (because entrance is sometimes banned to the unvaccinated), are all unimportant.
You are entering the votive circle and only things of crucial importance dive out before you.
”Look at those hills and those rocks. That is the color of Kosovo”, says poet Dragan Lakićević while we are driving along the Ibar towards Mitrovica. ”They say that pigment was drawn out from those rocks and color made for some of the most beautiful frescoes in Kosovo.”
This time, we are in Kosovo for observing the 130th anniversary of the founding of the Serbian Literary Cooperative (SKZ), one of the two oldest and most important Serbian publishing institutions and one of the pillars of Serbian culture. Poet Duško Babić, PhD, manager of SKZ, is with us, as well as Dragan Lakićević, editor in chief of SKZ and Cooperative’s author Branislav Matić, editor of National Review ”Serbia”. Milan Mihajlović is waiting for us in Mitrovica. He is one of the most important Serbian poets in Kosovo, director of the ”Vuk Karadžić” City Library in Mitrovica, also author of SKZ and its representative for the southern Serbian province. The hall in the ”Priština” Students’ Center university campus in Mitrovica is waiting for us, full of young and educated people, with Slavic beauty.
Reputable poets from Kosovo and Metohija have also gathered to participate and support: Ratko Popović, Živojin Rakočević, Marija Miljković, Vidosava Arsenijević, Nenad Radenković Jero… And the young forces of local Serbian literature, such as Sara Jekić, Nevena Milosavljević, Elma Selimi, Jovana Micić… Jelena Spirić is offering her heavenly-earthly vocal, and there is also the expert hand of young gusle player Stanko Adžić. (…)
Many things were heard from the living root of Serbian culture in Kosovo and Metohija, plenty of poetry and music. Guests from Belgrade have spoken. And in the center of attention is the Serbian Literary Cooperative and its astonishing 130 years.

OUR HARDBOUND VALUABLES

This is how Dragan Lakićević, poet, narrator, editor in chief of SKZ, spoke on March 22 in Kosovska Mitrovica:
– When the Serbian Literary Cooperative was founded, Serbs already had an enormous literature. Mostly folk literature – Vuk’s collections were published and poems from the unpublished legacy were prepared and sent to printing by one of the founders of SKZ, great philologist Ljubomir Stojanović, the man entrusted by the king to print in Vienna Miroslav’s Gospel, which had just been brought from Chilandar … Furthermore, we had old Serbian literature, hagiographic and poetic-religious, Dubrovnik literature, XIX century literature, with great pre-romanticists and romanticists – Dositej, Sterija, Njegoš, Branko, Zmaj, Jakšić, Laza Kostić…
The founders of SKZ began systematically and analytically organizing, interpreting and publishing the works of Serbian and international, old and new, especially Slavic writers, with the emphasis on Serbian folk and classical literature, trying at the same time to organize readers and subscribers through the institution of ”increasing the number of members” and commissioners. More members of SKZ were outside of the Principality of Serbia, especially in the northern lands.
Perhaps founders of SKZ were only anticipating that a great Ivo Andrić will be born that same year of 1892, and only a few years later Crnjanski and Desanka, then Ćopić, Selimović, Ćosić, Desnica, Popa and other great writers and translators from the 20th century: Nušić, Kočić, Isidora, Bora Stanković, Sremac, Dučić, Šantić, Rakić… In that century of wars and suffering, the Cooperative undertook many grand endeavors in cooperation with Matica Srpska (”Serbian Literature in 100 Books”) and ”Prosveta” ”Old Serbian Literature” in 24 books)…
Up to World War II, 300 titles were published in the SKZ ”Kolo” edition. During and after the war, many emigrants from Yugoslavia took with them to the world the ”Kolo” Library as their greatest treasure and only movable property.
I remember that (in 2002) Dr Carićević came to my lecture observing 110 years of SKZ in our church in Montreal and started talking. He was a stomatologist who moved from Belgrade immediately after World War II. He left four radio sets and other valuables in his big apartment in Terazije, and took with him only the blue ”Kolo” books as his greatest treasure. He brought one of the books, number 1, Dositej’s Life and Travels from 1892 to my lecture, to show it to the present editor of SKZ, saying that he was sorry because he couldn’t read anymore at his age and that his grandson, unfortunately, does not speak Serbian.
”We imagine you people from the Serbian Literary Cooperative with sticks and hats” said a visitor at a literary evening dedicated to the Serbian Literary Cooperative in Stockholm.
”I have several editions of the Bible, but my favorite is the one from the Cooperative’s ‘Kolo’”, told me a visitor of a literary evening in Goteborg.
”But the Cooperative has never published the Bible in ‘Kolo’” – I said. The man, however, insisted that he had it.
When sitting at the big table in the Cooperative, we always have our predecessors before our eyes – officials, poets, professors, scientists. It is always about them – mostly about books, but also about lives and portraits. We speak about Andrić, Desanka, Ćopić, Skender Kulenović, Radovan Samardžić, Raičković, Ivo Tartalja, Brana Petrović, Metropolitan Amfilohije, Dobrica Erić, Miodrag Bulatović, Manojlo Gavrilović, Novica Tadić, Rakitić… When speaking about them, ideas come without invitation. Old books create a new obligation…
We know where each one used to sit. Memories line up, anecdotes, legends.
One of the most reputable members of SKZ, already since his days in Prizren, was Patriarch Pavle. We remember that he called personally by phone every January to ask about his obligations regarding the membership fee and about taking over books from ”Kolo”. Bishop Jovan (Purić), author of SKZ, remembers coming as a student to bring the subscription for the History of the Serbian Nation on behalf of Patriarch German.

A VERTICAL THROUGH THREE CENTURIES

Thus spoke Duško Babić, PhD, manager of SKZ, poet, scientist:
– (...) The Serbian Literary Cooperative was founded in 1892, with the objective to publish and spread books among people – old and new, from Serbian and world heritage; to educate, spiritually rise and bring together Serbian people, wherever they were living. After the ”resurrection of the Serbian state”, our literature and culture needed such an institution, designed to preserve the highest values of national tradition – alphabet, language, collective memory, always open to the highest values of world literary and cultural heritage. That is why the jubilee – 130 years of its founding, observed this year, is an important date in the calendar of Serbian culture.
The achievements of a national culture are also measured by its ability to preserve and strengthen the continuity of its fundamental ideas, values, institutions. The one hundred and thirty years of existence of the Serbian Literary Cooperative is one of the most important continuities in our cultural history, a spiritual vertical connecting three centuries. When something is living for 130 years in a culture, faithful to its original idea, it is a clear indicator of its importance in preserving the name and identity of the national community.
In the year of the jubilee, we planned to visit many places and institutions in Serbia and the surrounding, with the objective to strengthen the idea of the Cooperative in the time of ”crisis of books” and general confusion of values. We want as many people as possible, especially the young – school and university students – to hear our story about the history, mission and importance of the Serbian Literary Cooperative in Serbian culture. That is why we came to Kosovo and Metohija, among our people, convinced that this is the most wonderful place in the world to speak about the Cooperative. There is a deep spiritual harmony between Kosovo and Metohija and the Cooperative, important for our collective memory and self-preservation. The ”definition” of the Cooperative includes cherishing and extending the national idea, based on the votive – St. Sava’s and Kosovo notion. The historical and symbolic importance of Kosovo is inseparable from the values preserved and personified by the Cooperative. That is why I cannot even imagine one without the other.
The Cooperative was founded to protect us from ignorance, arrogance, self-oblivion… It will continue protecting us, only if we protect it.

A BRIGHT DIRECTORY OF SERBIAN CULTURE

Branislav Matić, writer, author of the SKZ:
– In order to describe the importance of the Serbian Literary Cooperative, it would probably be sufficient only to mention names. Names of authors and successors, writers on the cover pages of its books, names of officials and members. The sum of the importance and meaning of those names would demonstrate us everything we need. It would be one of the brightest directories which could be organized in new age Serbiandom.
In order to truly understand the role of the Serbian Literary Cooperative in the nation it belongs to, we should just listen well and understand completely each of the three words in its name. It lasts so long and holds such a high position because it is SERBIAN, because it is LITERARY and because its is a COOPERATIVE. Co-operation.
The Cooperative is not just an institution of books and culture, a publishing house, a bountiful association. In contains within itself, its work and its manuscripts, one of the best national programs Serbs have got. (Principles of the internal organization of the Cooperative could be a model for structuring a credible Serbian state.)
In the Cooperative’s biography, we read sentences-programs:
”To the entire Serbian nation.” ”Unity of the Serbian cultural space as precondition for survival and advancement.” ”The merge of common people and the elite, without patches, organic and harmonious; folk elite and elite folk.” ”Leaving aside everything that separates us, searching strongly for what can bring us closer together.” ”Christian culture and economy, solidarity and ethics – that is our policy.” ”Supreme cultural, artistic and spiritual values belong to and should be available to all of us.” ”Spirit of tradition and spirit of contemporariness.” ”Spiritual and cultural continuity of the Serbian nation.” ”Culture and education are the most solid safest anchor of modern society, the basic condition of spiritual unity and advancement of the Serbian nation, wherever they live.” ”We are responsible for whether we will have anyone to leave our Holy Tradition to.” ”When everything else sinks into dust and darkness, keep this light, my son, as a votive candle. This seed from which everything will sprout again.”
After Andrić or Samardžić, Popa or Raičković, Pavlović or Rakitić, one should speak about the Serbian Literary Cooperative only by reading. Here, in Kosovo, even more, and ever earlier.

KOSOVO IN THE SKZ PUBLICATIONS

That same day, on March 22 morning, in Leposavić, at the Teacher Education Faculty, organized by that institution and the Institute of Serbian Culture, Marija Jeftimijević Mihajlović, PhD, held a very interesting lecture: Kosovo and Metohija in the Publications of the Serbian Literary Cooperative. She guided us through the rich history and voluminous bibliography of the Cooperative’s publications concerning Kosovo. ”There was not a single period in the Cooperative’s work when the ideas of the ‘Kosovo concept’ (I. Andrić) or the ‘Kosovo Determination’ (Z. Mišić) was betrayed”, she stated.
Already in 1878, before the Cooperative was founded, Stojan Novaković published Folk Legends about the Battle of Kosovo and Serbian Folk Poems about the Battle of Kosovo. Critics and Studies. The first important work on this subject in the SKZ was Lazarica or the Battle of Kosovo from 1906, a folk epopee in twenty-four poems, edited by Sreta J. Stojković, who also wrote the afterword. (…) In 1926, Stories written by Grigorije Božović, ”Andrić of Kosovo”, the greatest storywriter in Old Serbia, forbidden for a long time in communist Yugoslavia, were published in the famous ”Kolo” edition.
”As many as one hundred years had passed since the first Božović’s book in ‘Kolo’ to the next writer from Kosovo and Metohija who published his work in the prestigious edition. One of the reasons for it were Certain social and political circumstances after World War II, when there was a ruling tendency to classify everything created in the southern Serbian province in the corpus of the so-called ‘Kosovo literature’” told Marija Jeftimijević Mihajlović. ”In the year 2008, the greatest living writer from Kosovo and Metohija – Petar Sarić, published Sara, one of his best novels, in ‘Kolo’. It should, however, also be noted that Sarić published his earlier novels in the Serbian Literary Cooperative as well (Boy from Lastva, Petruša and Miluša and The Master is Arriving Tomorrow) and last year, in 2021, he published his latest novel Bubble. (…)
Certainly, between Božović’s books of stories and Sarić’s novels dozens of literary and historical works were published, anthologies, collections, individual publications of authors from Kosovo and Metohija (such as Danilo Nikolić, Alek Vukadinović) or those who lived and created in Kosovo (Radosav Stojanović, Darinka Jevrić, Ratko Popović), however in the past decades, representative works appeared in SKZ, which greatly moved the borders of understanding and comprehension of history, art and culture of Kosovo and Metohija, the Battle of Kosovo, the myth of Kosovo and the Kosovo determination.”
Zoran Mišić’ essay ”What is the Kosovo Determination?”, from the book Criticism of the Poetic Experience (1976) has a special place in it. That text greatly changed the understanding of the Kosovo determination concept. ”The significance of the Kosovo myth has surpassed the borders of national myth long ago; with itsessence, ‘it joined the highest accomplishments of human spirit, collected in the Imaginary Museum of a unified European culture’…”
Before observing the six-hundredth anniversary of the great event from 1389, numerous and diverse works appeared, shedding new light on the Kosovo myth and giving a wider (sur)historic contextualization of the Battle of Kosovo in the history of the Serbian nation.
”However, the Serbian Literary Cooperative has done much more than others in this context, by publishing several capital publications summarizing the up to then collected scientific and historical knowledge, literary and artistic values, and created great syntheses in the form of important and capital editions”, emphasized Marija Jeftimijević Mihajlović.

UNDERSTANDING THE MYTH

”Already in 1988, a chrestomathy of texts Contemporaries about Kosovo and Metohija 1852–1912 appeared, edited by Dušan Bataković, who also wrote the foreword. This selection of texts about Kosovo and Metohija, written by Hadzi Serafim Ristić, Sava of Dečani, Branislav Nušić, Zarija Popović, Janićije Popović and others, with the excellent foreword of the editor, is significant mostly because it presented the genuine picture of the situation of the Serbian population in the area of Old Serbia, which the wider public did not know much about. (…) In the period from 1989 to 1994, several anthologies of poetry and prose from Kosovo and Metohija, as well as poems and stories about Kosovo and Metohija, collections of poetry inspired by the Battle of Kosovo and the Kosovo vow, etc. appeared in SKZ. The most important among them are certainly the following works: A Word Remains (Serbian folk sayings from Metohija), 1988, poems, short sayings, stories, customs, beliefs, vows, curses, blessings, etc. edited by Milorad Radunović; Foundations (selection of new Serbian poetry about Kosovo), 1989, edited by Pavle Zorić; Ljubomir Simović published his famous drama Battle of Kosovo in 1989; Radovan Samardžić’ The Kosovo Determination (1990), about the historical and the legendary in the Kosovo determination, the way of St. Sava and the Kosovo vow, historical character of Serbs, Kosovo and Metohija, its historical rise and fall; Danilo Nikolić published a collection of chosen stories Return to Metohija in 1991; the following year, the book St. Sava and the Kosovo Vow written by Atanasije Jevtić appeared; a selection of texts from old literature Manuscripts about Kosovo was published in 1993, as well as Collected Scripts of Patriarch Pajsije (1993), known as Pajsije Janjevac; the following year (1994), Vladimir Cvetanović published an important Anthology of Kosovo and Metohija Narrators (1871–1941), including the following authors: Manojlo Đorđević Prizrenac, Nikodim Savić, Zarija Popović, Janićije Popović, Grigorije Božović, etc.)…”
Mrs. Jeftimijević Mihajlović, PhD, puts particular emphasis, with a reason, on the Cooperative’s edition Kosovo Memorial 1389–1989, unique in Serbian culture.
”The Kosovo Memorial (1389–1989) includes the following books: 1) Battle of Kosovo in Serbian History (1989), written by Radovan Samardžić, Sima Ćirković, Olga Zirojević, Radmila Tričković, Dušan Bataković, Veselin Đuretić, Kosta Čavoški and Atanasije Jevtić; 2) Battle of Kosovo in Serbian Literature by Vojislav Đurić (1990), excellent collection in more than 650 pages, including all relevant literary texts and critics about the Battle of Kosovo, since the middle ages to the day of publishing this significant book (…); 3) Battle of Kosovo in Visual Arts by Dejan Medaković (1990) is also one of the capital achievements (…); 4) Battle of Kosovo in European Literature…”
As a crown of all SKZ editions about Kosovo and Metohija, Mrs. Jeftimijević Mihajlović, PhD sees The Book of Kosovo by Dimitrije Bogdanović from 2006 (first edition in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1986), probably the most important synthesis of historical, scientific and artistic knowledge about the southern Serbian province. (…)

WE WILL CERTAINLY RETURN

In only two days, we heard many important names and titles, ideas and voices. We remembered the heavenly-earthly singing and the glowing pictures. Faces of beautiful young people who are learning and reading. And know who they are. ”We are always amazed by how alive we are”, jokes Matić.
A nation dealing with books and culture in such a way does not need to justify itself to anyone for being in its rightful place.
It is the second day of spring. Snow is sparkling in Kopaonik.
The whiteness is restorative, salutary.
We are leaving, but we will return. The time will come.
Now everyone who needs to know already knows it.

***

New Names
For this occasion, the trusteeship of the Serbian Literary Cooperative was founded in Kosovska Mitrovica, led by poet Milan Mihajlović, director of the ”Vuk Karadžić” City Library. New institutions were already enrolled in the Serbian Literary Cooperative, such as Medical School from Mitrovica and Faculty of Arts at the University of Priština (temporarily seated in Zvečan). There are about thirty new individual members, mostly young people from the University.

***

Library
The main organizer of presenting SKZ in Kosovo was the ”Vuk Karadžić” City Library in Kosovska Mitrovica. This institution has been keeping the library tradition since 1920 (reading room of the ”Fraternity” Association). It was officially founded in 1945, with an original fund of 1.700 books. Up to 1999, after many migrations, it settled in the beautiful building of the former ”Jadran” hotel, on over 800 square meters, and reached a fund of 114.000 books. Then, with the arrival of ”international forces”, peacekeepers as people thought, everything broke down. They practically had to start from the beginning, in the northern part of the city. Advancing in a good direction is evident.