Kosovo Myth in Our Time

The Kosovo Covenant is a concept that is being talked about more and more today. Although there is no single definition, it has a clear meaning and visible presence in historical sources. In today’s world, oriented towards individualism, materialism, hedonism, and even nihilism, Kosovo’s commitment to the Kingdom of Heaven has an almost subversive meaning. This is, by all accounts, the attractive power of the Kosovo Covenant in our time.

The first impetus for new interpretations was given by the poem “Na Gazimestanu” by Milan Rakić, the Serbian consul in Priština and the son-in-law of Ljuba Kovačević, published in 1907 in the elite “Serbian Literary Herald” (reprinted in the collection “New Poems”, as part of the cycle “On Kosovo 1912). There, among other things, the “sacrificial” “sacred source” was emphasized, interpreted in a patriotic key:

“And today, when it reaches the last color / Undazzled by the old halo’s glow / I will give life, my fatherland / Knowing what I give and why I give it.”

An important incentive were the sculptures of Dalmatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, intended to be part of his monumental “Vidovdan Temple”. They were recognized as the official, artistic form of the Vidovdan idea, around which the Yugoslav youth movement gathered. The Vidovdan idea, as Isidora Sekulić (1911) called it, or the Vidovdan ethic, as Miloš Đurić (1914) called it, was a return to the heroic and “sacrificial” in Kosovo tradition. Vidovdan, as the day of the Battle of Kosovo, gained renewed popularity since the time of the appearance of Vuk’s collections. The new, Vidovdan idea, appeared mostly among the younger generations, in the era after the annexation crisis of 1908-1909. and it aimed to restore vigor and self-confidence to Serbian culture, faced with the colonial ambitions and war threats of Austria-Hungary. It can be said that it was a Serbian echo of vitalism and heroic activism, which were preached at that time by Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche. Miloš Đurić interpreted the “philosophy of Kosovo” as “the philosophy of the phoenix-bird, the philosophy of Golgotha”, while Isidora Sekulić wrote that the Vidovdan idea should be “a living and vibrant consciousness of falcons and soldiers and cultural workers”, “which will make us ramparts that do not fall”.