Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians

The boy had not forgotten his father's injunction to have nothing to do with beardless millers, but as he saw no way out of it, he accepted the proposal. So Beardless now took a...

Once upon a time when a certain hunter went to the mountains to hunt, there came toward him a ram with golden fleece. The hunter took his rifle to shoot it, but the ram rushed a...

Marko was, as we have already seen, the son of King Voukashin; and his mother was Queen Helen, whom the Serbian troubadours called by the pleasing and poetic name Yevrossima (Eu...

A townsman went one day to the country to hunt and came at noon to the house of a peasant whom he knew. The man asked him to share his dinner, and while they were eating, the to...

The Serbians inhabiting the present kingdom of Serbia, having been mixed with the ancient indigenous population of the Balkan Peninsula, have not conserved their true national t...

King Michael of Ledyen had a beautiful daughter, Roksanda, and when Tsar Doushan asked her hand in marriage the king immediately consented. The betrothal was arranged by means o...

This ballad from which the King of Montenegro--Nicholas Petrovitch--drew inspiration for his drama The Empress of the Balkans is undoubtedly the finest Serbian national poem eve...

The following poems are reprinted here from Sir John Bowring's Servian Popular Poetry, London, 1827. These translations will serve to give to English readers some idea of the fo...

Prior to their incursion into the Balkan Peninsula during the seventh century, the Serbians [6] lived as a patriarchal people in the country now known as Galicia. Ptolemy, the a...

The ballad relating to Banovitch Strahinya is one of the finest and most famous which the anonymous Serbian bards composed during the Middle Ages. The author was probably a depe...

King Voukashin [63] of Skadar on Boyana [64] wrote a book [65] and dispatched it to Herzegovina, to the white city of Pirlitor [66] opposite the mountain Dourmitor. He wrote it...

Dawn had not appeared, neither had Danitza [57] yet shown her face when from the heights of the mountain Avala by Belgrade a veela called aloud upon Demitrius and Stephan, the t...

As they sat at supper together one evening the Tsarina Militza spoke thus unto Tsar Lazarus: "O Lazarus, thou Serbian Golden Crown! Thou art to go to-morrow to the battlefield o...

That the Serbian people--as a distinct Slav and Christian nationality--did not succumb altogether to the Ottoman oppressor; that through nearly five centuries of subjection to t...

"O thou one and indivisible God! Mayest thou be glorified!".... Tsar Lazar sat at supper, and with him sat the Tsarina Militza, sorrowful and depressed. This unusual aspect of h...

carry their golden fleeces down to the river and to wash the blood well out of them. But whilst the servant held them under the water, they slipped, in some way or other, out of...

Lo! the saints are dividing among themselves the treasures of Heaven, of Earth and of Sea: Saint Peter and St. Nicholas, St. John and St. Elias; with them, too, is St. Panthelias.