Category: Blogs

The American holiday (praznik) of Thanksgiving (Dan zahvalnosti) is celebrated every year on the fourth Thursday in November. The holiday is during autumn – the main season for harvesting crops (žetva useva). Thanksgiving is an autumn harvest festival like those found in many cultures around the world (širom sveta).

On this day (na ovaj dan), most Americans gather with friends and family. Many take time to think about what they are thankful for, cook up a storm, and eat.

The star (zvezda) of most Thanksgiving dinners is a roasted turkey (pečena ćurka). Turkeys are large birds native to North America.

The turkey is cooked in an oven for many hours, often with a mix of celery, bread, onions and spices inside the bird. This mix becomes stuffing (nadev) – another star of the Thanksgiving dinner table.
After the bird is cooked, the stuffing is taken out and served as a side dish (prilog).

One of many side dishes. Families often make other foods like mashed potatoes (krompir pire), sweet potatoes (slatki krompiri), cranberry sauce (sos od brusnica) and vegetable casseroles (kaserole od povrća). A casserole (kaserola) is a dish that cooks slowly in an oven.

And do not forget about the gravy (preliv). This rich sauce is made from the fatty liquid that comes off the turkey as it cooks. People cover their turkey meat (ćuretina), stuffing and mashed potatoes with gravy.

The meal (obrok) does not end with the turkey, stuffing, and side dishes, though. For some people, the best part of the meal is dessert (desert).

Typical Thanksgiving dessert is pie (pita). Pumpkin, cherry, apple or pecan pie are all great ways to finish off a Thanksgiving meal…if you are not too full of food by that point!

Glossary:
Thanksgiving – Dan zahvalnosti
turkey (animal) – ćurka
turkey (food) – ćuretina

Arrival of the Slavs

Early Slavs, especially Sclaveni and Antae, including the White Serbs, invaded and settled Southeastern Europe in the 6th and 7th century. Up until the late 560s their activity was raiding, crossing from the Danube, though with limited Slavic settlement mainly through Byzantine foederati colonies. The Danube and Sava frontier was overwhelmed by large-scale Slavic settlement in the late 6th and early 7th century. What is today central Serbia was an important geo-strategical province, through which the Via Militaris crossed. This area was frequently intruded by barbarians in the 5th and 6th centuries. The numerous Slavs mixed with and assimilated the descendants of the indigenous population (Illyrians, Thracians, Dacians, Romans, Celts). White Serbs from White Serbia came to an area near Thessaloniki and then they settled area between Dinaric Alps and Adriatic coast. The region of “Rascia” (Raška) was the center of Serb settlement and Serb tribes also occupied parts of modern-day Herzegovina and Montenegro. Prior to their arrival to the Balkans, Serbs were predominantly involved in agriculture, which is why they settled in areas which were cultivated even during Roman times.

Middle Ages

The first Serb states, Raška and Duklja (825–1120), were formed chiefly under the Vlastimirović and Vojislavljević dynasties respectively. The other Serb-inhabited lands, or principalities, that were mentioned included the “countries” of Paganija, Zahumlje, Travunija. With the decline of the Serbian state of Duklja in the late 11th century, Raška separated from it and replaced it as the most powerful Serbian state. Prince Stefan Nemanja (r. 1169–96) conquered the neighbouring territories of Kosovo, Duklja and Zahumlje. The Nemanjić dynasty ruled over Serbia until the 14th century. Nemanja’s older son, Stefan Nemanjić, became Serbia’s first recognized king, while his younger son, Rastko, founded the Serbian Orthodox Church in the year 1219, and became known as Saint Sava (Sveti Sava) after his death. Parts of modern-day Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and central Serbia would come under the control of Nemanjić.

Over the next 140 years, Serbia expanded its borders, from numerous smaller principalities, reaching to a unified Serbian Empire. Its cultural model remained Byzantine, despite political ambitions directed against the empire. The medieval power and influence of Serbia culminated in the reign of Stefan Dušan, who ruled the state from 1331 until his death in 1355. Ruling as Emperor from 1346, his territory included Macedonia, northern Greece, Montenegro, and almost all of modern Albania. When Dušan died, his son Stephen Uroš V became Emperor.

With Turkish invaders beginning their conquest of the Balkans in the 1350s, a major conflict ensued between them and the Serbs, the first major battle was the Battle of Maritsa (1371), in which the Serbs were defeated. With the death of two important Serb leaders in the battle, and with the death of Stephen Uroš that same year, the Serbian Empire broke up into several small Serbian domains. These states were ruled by feudal lords, with Zeta controlled by the Balšić family, Raška, Kosovo and northern Macedonia held by the Branković family and Lazar Hrebeljanović holding today’s Central Serbia and a portion of Kosovo. Hrebeljanović was subsequently accepted as the titular leader of the Serbs because he was married to a member of the Nemanjić dynasty. In 1389, the Serbs faced the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo on the plain of Kosovo Polje, near the town of Priština. Both Lazar and Sultan Murat I were killed in the fighting. The battle most likely ended in a stalemate, and afterwards Serbia enjoyed a short period of prosperity under despot Stefan Lazarević and resisted falling to the Turks until 1459.

Early modern period

The Serbs had taken an active part in the wars fought in the Balkans against the Ottoman Empire, and also organized uprisings; because of this, they suffered persecution and their territories were devastated – major migrations from Serbia into Habsburg territory ensued. After allied Christian forces had captured Buda from the Ottoman Empire in 1686 during the Great Turkish War, Serbs from Pannonian Plain (present-day Hungary, Slavonia region in present-day Croatia, Bačka and Banat regions in present-day Serbia) joined the troops of the Habsburg monarchy as separate units known as Serbian Militia. Serbs, as volunteers, massively joined the Austrian side.

Many Serbs were recruited during the devshirme system, a form of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, in which boys from Balkan Christian families were forcibly converted to Islam and trained for infantry units of the Ottoman army known as the Janissaries. A number of Serbs who converted to Islam occupied high-ranking positions within the Ottoman Empire, such as Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and Minister of War field marshal Omar Pasha Latas.

In 1688, the Habsburg army took Belgrade and entered the territory of present-day Central Serbia. Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden called Serbian Patriarch Arsenije III Čarnojević to raise arms against the Turks; the Patriarch accepted and returned to the liberated Peć. As Serbia fell under Habsburg control, Leopold I granted Arsenije nobility and the title of duke. In early November, Arsenije III met with Habsburg commander-in-chief, General Enea Silvio Piccolomini in Prizren; after this talk he sent a note to all Serb bishops to come to him and collaborate only with Habsburg forces.

A Great Migration of the Serbs (1690) to Habsburg lands was undertaken by Patriarch Arsenije III. The large community of Serbs concentrated in Banat, southern Hungary and the Military Frontier included merchants and craftsmen in the cities, but mainly refugees that were peasants. Smaller groups of Serbs also migrated to the Russian Empire, where they occupied high positions in the military circles.

The Serbian Revolution for independence from the Ottoman Empire lasted eleven years, from 1804 until 1815. The revolution comprised two separate uprisings which gained autonomy from the Ottoman Empire that eventually evolved towards full independence (1835–1867). During the First Serbian Uprising, led by Duke Karađorđe Petrović, Serbia was independent for almost a decade before the Ottoman army was able to reoccupy the country. Shortly after this, the Second Serbian Uprising began. Led by Miloš Obrenović, it ended in 1815 with a compromise between Serbian revolutionaries and Ottoman authorities. Likewise, Serbia was one of the first nations in the Balkans to abolish feudalism. Serbs are among the first ethnic groups in Europe to form a nation and a clear sense of national identity.

Modern period

In the early 1830s, Serbia gained autonomy and its borders were recognized, with Miloš Obrenović being recognized as its ruler. Serbia is the fourth modern-day European country, after France, Austria and the Netherlands, to have a codified legal system, as of 1844. The last Ottoman troops withdrew from Serbia in 1867, although Serbia’s and Montenegro’s independence was not recognized internationally until the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

Serbia fought in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, which forced the Ottomans out of the Balkans and doubled the territory and population of the Kingdom of Serbia. In 1914, a young Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which directly contributed to the outbreak of World War I. In the fighting that ensued, Serbia was invaded by Austria-Hungary. Despite being outnumbered, the Serbs defeated the Austro-Hungarians at the Battle of Cer, which marked the first Allied victory over the Central Powers in the war. Further victories at the battles of Kolubara and the Drina meant that Serbia remained unconquered as the war entered its second year. However, an invasion by the forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria overwhelmed the Serbs in the winter of 1915, and a subsequent withdrawal by the Serbian Army through Albania took the lives of more than 240,000 Serbs. Serb forces spent the remaining years of the war fighting on the Salonika front in Greece, before liberating Serbia from Austro-Hungarian occupation in November 1918. Serbia suffered the biggest casualty rate in World War I.

Following the victory in WWI Serbs subsequently formed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with other South Slavic peoples. The country was later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and was led from 1921 to 1934 by King Alexander I of the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty. During World War II, Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers in April 1941. The country was subsequently divided into many pieces, with Serbia being directly occupied by the Germans. Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) were targeted for extermination as part of genocide by the Croatian ultra-nationalist, fascist Ustaše.

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The Ustaše view of national and racial identity, as well as the theory of Serbs as an inferior race, was under the influence of Croatian nationalists and intellectuals from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Jasenovac camp was notorious for the barbaric practices which occurred in it. Sisak and Jastrebarsko concentration camp were specially formed for children. Serbs in the NDH suffered among the highest casualty rates in Europe during the World War II, while the NDH was one of the most lethal regimes in the 20th century. Diana Budisavljević, a humanitarian of Austrian descent, carried out rescue operations from Ustaše camps and saved more than 15,000 children, mostly Serbs.

More than half a million Serbs were killed in the territory of Yugoslavia during World War II. Serbs in occupied Yugoslavia subsequently formed a resistance movement known as the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, or the Chetniks. The Chetniks had the official support of the Allies until 1943, when Allied support shifted to the Communist Yugoslav Partisans, a multi-ethnic force, formed in 1941, which also had a large majority of Serbs in its ranks in the first two years of war. Over the entirety of the war, the ethnic composition of the Partisans was 53 percent Serb. During the entire course of the WWII in Yugoslavia, 64.1% of all Bosnian Partisans were Serbs. Later, after the fall of Italy in September 1943, other ethnic groups joined Partisans in larger numbers.

At the end of the war, the Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito, emerged victorious. Yugoslavia subsequently became a Communist state. Tito died in 1980, and his death saw Yugoslavia plunge into economic turmoil. Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, and a series of wars resulted in the creation of five new states. The heaviest fighting occurred in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose Serb populations rebelled and declared independence. The war in Croatia ended in August 1995, with a Croatian military offensive known as Operation Storm put a stop to the Croatian Serb rebellion and causing as many as 200,000 Serbs to flee the country. The Bosnian War ended that same year, with the Dayton Agreement dividing the country along ethnic lines. In 1998–99, a conflict in Kosovo between the Yugoslav Army and Albanians seeking independence erupted into full-out war, resulting in a 78-day-long NATO bombing campaign which effectively drove Yugoslav security forces from Kosovo. Subsequently, more than 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians fled the province. On 5 October 2000, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosević was overthrown in a bloodless revolt after he refused to admit defeat in the 2000 Yugoslav general election.

A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighborhoods which they inhabited while they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today’s gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century. Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world; the term vampire was popularized in Western Europe after reports of an 18th-century mass hysteria of a pre-existing folk belief in Southeastern and Eastern Europe that in some cases resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism. Local variants in Southeastern Europe were also known by different names, such as vrikolak in Greece and strigoj in Romania.

In modern times, the vampire is generally held to be a fictitious entity, although belief in similar vampiric creatures (such as the chupacabra) still persists in some cultures. Early folk belief in vampires has sometimes been ascribed to the ignorance of the body’s process of decomposition after death and how people in pre-industrial societies tried to rationalize this, creating the figure of the vampire to explain the mysteries of death. Porphyria was linked with legends of vampirism in 1985 and received much media exposure, but has since been largely discredited.

The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of “The Vampyre” by the English writer John Polidori; the story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend, even though it was published after fellow Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novel Carmilla. The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, television shows, and video games. The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre.

The origin of the word

Vampire is the only word from the Serbian language that is generally accepted in all world languages (Serbian: Vampir).

In various parts of the Slavic world, the vampire is also called by other names: vukodlak, lampir, lapir, vjedogonja, jedogonja, and most often – upir. The origin of the word vampire can be found from the latter. Namely, the ancient Slavs, like most ancient peoples, believed that if the body of a dead man is not burned, his soul will remain trapped in this world forever and will never find peace. That’s why they subjected their dead to “treatment” in which they burned them on a big pyre and thus sent them to the “eternal hunting grounds”. However, it happened (especially during wars or great diseases) that the body of a victim was not found at all and was not properly washed away, which allegedly led to the unfortunate person getting up at night and killing people. Until someone is found who will “treat” him with a hawthorn stake. They would stop coming out of their graves and killing people if someone pierced them with a hawthorn stake.

Folk beliefs

Despite the occurrence of vampiric creatures in many ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe, when verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but they can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire. Belief in such legends became so pervasive that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and even public executions of people believed to be vampires.

18th-century vampire controversy

During the 18th century, there was a frenzy of vampire sightings in Eastern Europe, with frequent stakings and grave diggings to identify and kill the potential revenants. Even government officials engaged in the hunting and staking of vampires. Despite being called the Age of Enlightenment, during which most folkloric legends were quelled, the belief in vampires increased dramatically, resulting in a mass hysteria throughout most of Europe. The panic began with an outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Habsburg monarchy from 1725 to 1734, which spread to other localities. Two infamous vampire cases, the first to be officially recorded, involved the corpses of Petar Blagojević and Miloš Čečar from Serbia. Blagojević was reported to have died at the age of 62, but allegedly returned after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the following day. Blagojević supposedly returned and attacked some neighbors who died from loss of blood.

The two incidents were well-documented. Government officials examined the bodies, wrote case reports, and published books throughout Europe. The hysteria, commonly referred to as the “18th-Century Vampire Controversy”, continued for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics of so-called vampire attacks, undoubtedly caused by the higher amount of superstition that was present in village communities, with locals digging up bodies and, in some cases, staking them.

The controversy in Austria ceased when Empress Maria Theresa sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate the claims of vampiric entities. He concluded that vampires did not exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies, ending the vampire epidemics. Other European countries followed suit. Despite this condemnation, the vampire lived on in artistic works and in local folklore.

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Glossary:
vampire – vampir
werewolf – vukodlak
folk (noun) – narod
folklore – folklor
Eastern Europe – Istočna Evropa
blood – krv

The romanization of Serbian or latinization of Serbian is the representation of the Serbian language using Latin letters. Serbian is written in two alphabets, Serbian Cyrillic, a variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, and Gaj’s Latin, or latinica, a variation of the Latin alphabet. The Serbian language is an example of digraphia.
Gaj’s Latin alphabet is widely used in Serbia. The two are almost directly and completely interchangeable. Romanization can be done with no errors, but in some cases knowledge of Serbian is required to do proper transliteration from Latin back to Cyrillic. Standard Serbian uses both alphabets currently. A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin alphabet whereas 36% favors Cyrillic; the remaining 17% preferred neither.
Serbo-Croatian was regarded as a single language since the 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement, to be written in two forms: one (Serb) in the adapted Serbian Cyrillic alphabet; the other (Croat) in the adapted Croatian Latin alphabet, that is to say Gaj’s Latin alphabet.
The Latin alphabet was not initially taught in schools in Serbia when it became independent in the 19th century. After a series of efforts by Serbian writers Ljubomir Stojanović and Jovan Skerlić, it became part of the school curriculum after 1914.
During World War I, Austria-Hungary banned the Cyrillic alphabet in Bosnia and its use in occupied Serbia was banned in schools. Cyrillic was banned in the Independent State of Croatia in World War II. The government of socialist Yugoslavia made some initial effort to promote romanization, use of the Latin alphabet even in the Orthodox Serbian and Montenegrin parts of Yugoslavia, but met with resistance. The use of latinica did however become more common among Serbian speakers.
In 1993, the authorities of Republika Srpska under Radovan Karadžić and Momčilo Krajišnik decided to proclaim Ekavian and Serbian Cyrillic to be official in Republika Srpska, which was opposed both by native Bosnian Serb writers at the time and the general public, and that decision was rescinded in 1994. Nevertheless, it was reinstated in a milder form in 1996, and today still the use of Serbian Latin is officially discouraged in Republika Srpska, in favor of Cyrillic.

Foreign names
In Serbian, foreign names are phonetically transliterated into both Latin and Cyrillic, a change that does not happen in Croatian and Bosnian (also Latin). For example, in Serbian history books George Washington becomes Džordž Vašington or Џорџ Вашингтон, Winston Churchill becomes Vinston Čerčil or Винстон Черчил and Charles de Gaulle Šarl de Gol or Шарл де Гол.

Serbian literature emerged in the Middle Ages, and included such works as Miroslavljevo jevanđelje (Miroslav’s Gospel) in 1186 and Dušanov zakonik (Dušan’s Code) in 1349. Little secular medieval literature has been preserved, but what there is shows that it was in accord with its time.
For example, the Serbian Alexandride, a book about Alexander the Great, and a translation of Tristan and Iseult into Serbian. Although not belonging to the literature proper, the corpus of Serbian literacy in the 14th and 15th centuries contains numerous legal, commercial and administrative texts with marked presence of Serbian vernacular juxtaposed on the matrix of Serbian Church Slavonic.
By the beginning of the 14th century the Serbo-Croatian language, which was so rigorously proscribed by earlier local laws, becomes the dominant language of the Republic of Ragusa. However, despite her wealthy citizens speaking the Serbo-Croatian dialect of Dubrovnik in their family circles, they sent their children to Florentine schools to become perfectly fluent in Italian. Since the beginning of the 13th century, the entire official correspondence of Dubrovnik with states in the hinterland was conducted in Serbian.
In the mid-15th century, Serbia was conquered by the Ottoman Empire and for the next 400 years there was no opportunity for the creation of secular written literature. However, some of the greatest literary works in Serbian come from this time, in the form of oral literature, the most notable form being epic poetry. The epic poems were mainly written down in the 19th century, and preserved in oral tradition up to the 1950s, a few centuries or even a millennium longer than by most other “epic folks”. Goethe and Jacob Grimm learned Serbian in order to read Serbian epic poetry in the original. By the end of the 18th century, the written literature had become estranged from the spoken language. In the second half of the 18th century, the new language appeared, called Slavonic-Serbian. This artificial idiom superseded the works of poets and historians like Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović, who wrote in essentially modern Serbian in the 1720s. These vernacular compositions have remained cloistered from the general public and received due attention only with the advent of modern literary historians and writers like Milorad Pavić. In the early 19th century, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić promoted the spoken language of the people as a literary norm.

Serbian (srpski) is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. t is the official and national language of Serbia, one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and co-official in Montenegro and Kosovo. It is a recognized minority language in Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Standard Serbian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian (more specifically on the dialects of Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovina), which is also the basis of standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin varieties and therefore the Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Montenegrins was issued in 2017. The other dialect spoken by Serbs is Torlakian in southeastern Serbia, which is transitional to Macedonian and Bulgarian.
Serbian is practically the only European standard language whose speakers are fully functionally digraphic, using both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who created it based on phonemic principles. The Latin alphabet used for Serbian (latinica) was designed by the Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s based on the Czech system with a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in a parallel system.

Classification
Serbian is a standardized variety of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language (Indo-European), of the South Slavic subgroup. Other standardized forms of Serbo-Croatian are Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. “An examination of all the major ‘levels’ of language shows that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system.”

Geographic distribution
Serbia: 6,540,699 (official language)
Bosnia and Herzegovina: 1,086,027 (co-official language)
Germany: 568,240
Austria: 350,000
Montenegro: 265,890 (language in official use)
Switzerland: 186,000
United States: 172,874
Sweden: 120,000
Italy: 106,498
Kosovo: est. 70,000 – 100,000 (co-official language)
Canada: 72,690
Australia: 55,114
Croatia: 52,879 (recognized minority language)
Slovenia: 38,964
North Macedonia: 24,773 (recognized minority language)
Romania: 22,518 (recognized minority language)

Status in Montenegro
Serbian was the official language of Montenegro until October 2007 when the new Constitution of Montenegro replaced the Constitution of 1992. Amid opposition from pro-Serbian parties, Montenegrin was made the sole official language of the country, and Serbian was given the status of a language in official use along with Bosnian, Albanian, and Croatian. In the 2011 Montenegrin census, 42.88% declared Serbian to be their native language, while Montenegrin was declared by 36.97% of the population.

Dialects
The dialects of Serbo-Croatian, regarded Serbian (traditionally spoken in Serbia), include:
• Šumadija–Vojvodina (Ekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): central and northern Serbia
• Eastern Herzegovinian (Ijekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): southwestern Serbia, western half of Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia
• Kosovo–Resava (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern central Serbia, central Kosovo
• Smederevo–Vršac (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): east-central Serbia
• Prizren–Timok (transitional Torlakian): southeastern Serbia, southern Kosovo
• Zeta–Raška (Ijekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern half of Montenegro, southwestern Serbia