Nationalism and Folk Poetry in 19th century Greece and Serbia
...on of nations, from which two radically different concepts of the nation have emerged. b. The Romantic concept of nation: Johann Gottfried Herder We referred to the two cultural patterns that emerged in the later 18th century as the variants of a wider Romanticism. The version that concerns us here is the German one, because it was in Germany that the idea of romantic nationalism and the concept of the romantic nation emerged and developed. In Central and East Europe, where people were socially and politically less developed than the West, national boundaries seldom coincided with those of the existing states. Thus, nationalism there became not so much a concept to protect the individual from an authoritarian state but rather an attempt to redraw the political boundaries to fit the ethnic bodies. Romantic nationalists adopted the idea of popular sovereignty, propagated by the adherents of the neo-classic movement, but combined it with the idea that each nation is a distinct organic entity were a common language, a shared history and universe of cultural symbols, monuments and myths constituted the elements of the national identity. In other words, romantic nationalism emphasised the building of nation on the traditions and myths of the past that is on folklore. The romantic concept of nation was above all developed by Johann Gottfried Herder, an eighteen-century German scholar. Behind Herder’s doctrines lay his resentment of French cultural hegemony over Germany. He found it unbearable that the culture of the French Enlightenment, the fashions and manners of the Versailles dominated Germany’s courts and that the German language and literature demoted. In his work he strongly believed that the German culture was being abused because Germans lacked a powerful state to defend their own nation. In his philosophical writings he suggested that German people had to build a national culture on native foundations and, consequently, formulated a set of principles of nationalism that inspired most of the nationalistic movements in the 19th century East and Central Europe. The ideas of the return to nature, the historical growth and the cultural diversity, which concerned the movement of historicist romanticism, will find their more elaborate expression and combination in the Herder’s philosophy of nationhood. Accordingly, for Herder the nation, like family, was a natural, organic entity. Humanity, like nature, which endows all things with individuality, is divided into separate peoples and cultures. All men shared a common humanity but history and natural environment made them different. So each people developed its distinctive culture. These cultural bonds that linked the members of a nation, were not artefacts imposed from above but living energies, Krafte. They were a bundle of linked ideas, memories and sentiments created over time in a particular environment and circumstances through collective experience. This constitutes a people’s ‘collective’ soul and their distinctive character. So each nationality was a creation of nature and history and possessed a specific character. As a result every nationality must develop in accord with its own innate abilities, in line with its own cultural pattern. For a nation to attempt to develop on a different cultural pattern than its own meant breaking the continuity of the past and disrupting nation’s organic unity, things that would lead to its extinction. One of Herder’s major nationalist ideas was that of the Volk, the people. He identified the folk with the lowest order of society, the labouring part of the nation; the most oppressed and exploited section of the population. He argued that they are not simply an inarticulate mob but rather the creative source of a nation’s culture. He expressed the conviction that the Volk constituted the most genuine expression of the national character and that embodied what was most natural and original in a nation. Another important element in Herder’s national philosophy was the concepts he developed about the language. For him language and reason arose simultaneously and thought of language, as a medium through which man becomes conscious of his inner self and of his outer relationships. According to Herder, it also constitutes a link with the past, which thus becomes ingrained in a community’s own consciousness. In this way language embodies the historical growth and the cultural matrix in which a man’s awareness of his distinctive social heritage is aroused and deepened. Hence, through language people understand that they share a culture and historical tradition and therefore form a people (Volk). As a result language is the criterion by means of which a group’s national identity can be established: ‘To impose another language on…a people is to send their history adrift…to tear their identity from all places. To have lost entirely the national language is death.’ Hence language equals nationality and nationality language; they are inextricably and naturally linked. In summary, a nation (Volk) is a natural, organic entity that possesses a distinctive national character imbedded in his language. Herder’s thinking of Volk and national character in this linguistic sense had immense consequences. The view that only those who share a common language and literary tradition were worthy of recognition as a nation not only led the ideological foundation of the national doctrine; but also initiated a prodigious scientific research that accompanied nationalist agitation. The role of the professors of philology and collectors of folklore became central to the nationalist movements. c. Herder and folk poetry as national poetry Herder’s romantic nationalism had a profound influence on the discovery and study of oral poetry in that period. In Volklieder, which came out between 1778 and 1779, he considered popular poetry as national poetry. We have already referred to his historicist approach to the idea of nation and language. He believed that both evolved from the stage of childhood to the stage of manhood, eventually, becoming more complex and abstract and losing their spontaneity and vitality. In popular poetry he saw the childhood of a nation in which the natural genius of the Volk, had created his songs from a unity of experience. In the Volk Herder believed that was kept alive the spark of the national heritage. Hence, the folk poets were national poets, the agents through whom the true character of a nation made itself manifest. Another reason that made Herder considered folk poetry, as national poetry is that he thought that folk poetry retained the national language in its most perfect form. We have already discussed Herder’s idea of the nation as a natural entity with a distinctive culture and character that has to develop in accord with its own cultural heritage and character in order to survive. Herder sustained that the essence of this cultural heritage and the national character could be traced in folk poetry. In his Fragmente, he maintained that popular poetry was the loftiest and most precise expression of a people’s character. ‘Folksongs…are in certain respects the result of a nations beliefs, feelings, perceptions, and strengths…Their (a people’s) songs are the archives of the folk, the treasury of the deeds of its forefathers and the events of its own history, an echo of its heart…’ This idea that the national soul or the cultural pattern of a people is expresses itself best in people’s folk poetry is found everywhere in Herder. Consequently, the better place to go in order to discover the soul and character of a nation is its folk poetry. It is obvious that Herder is trying to discover the body of a nation in the folk poetry. In his philosophy we have the connection between the literary and the cultural trends of the era of Romanism and the political needs that the rise of nationalistic ideology produced. The result is the geneses of a demand to study ‘folk’ poetry on national basis and in that way serve the need to define national identity. Others have since echoed Herder’s view that national character was impossibility in the absence of folk-song tradition. The later collections of folksongs were often nationalist in inspiration and sentiment. In Germany the second generation of romantics will move to the idea of a political nation where the folk tradition will constitute the cornerstone of the nation. In collecting Germany’s folk songs, a work that coincided with the invasion of Germany by Napoleon the two editors, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Bretano were conscious of accomplishing a historical and patriotic work that intended to encourage national consciousness. In the same fashion, Joseph Gorres argued energetically for Germany’s necessary interest in folk poetry. The brothers Grimm, also, in collecting folklore material, continued a national movement that perceived the folklore studies in national terms and as a means to gain access to the ‘German spirit’. In the works of these German nationalist intellectuals the scientific research of the folklore is fusing with an escalating nationalism. The attitudes of Herder and his successors towards folk poetry and folklore, in general, will have a great impact on other European nations. The cases I will examine here are the Greek and the Serbian ones. Chapter 2: The Greek Case a. The rise of the Greek national consciousness The German school of ‘historicist’ romanticism, Herder’s ideas on the concept of romantic nation and folk poetry as national poetry will have a profound influence on the rise and development of the study of oral poetry in Greece. Before I examine the way the Greek scholars attempt to defend and reinforce their national identity through the collection and interpretation of folk poetry, I have to refer to the rise of national consciousness in Greece and the certain peculiarities that presented. The formation of the Greek national identity constituted a rather perplexing enterprise. As it has already been suggested in the introduction the ‘historicist’ intellectuals, in asserting a national identity followed the method of ‘regressing’ into the past. In that way they could establish a continuum with previous civilizations that serve as a source of pride for the new country and legitimise its existence as a nation. The 19th century Greek intellectuals followed this practice as a model for creating their self- image. The past that the Modern Greek intellectuals could draw for ideas was what Smith calls ‘full’. The passage of centuries had witnessed the rise of several cultures and civilizations that bore the stamp of Hellenism. All had contributed to the creation of a remarkably long and varied tradition. Furthermore, each succeeding culture and civilization had developed its own special character with the result that these cultures often represented conflicting and contradictory worlds. Subsequently, the Greek intellectuals had to deal with the hard task of defining and integrating these disparate cultures into the unified whole of a ‘national’ culture whose existence was vital in order to give meaning to the new political unity, the Greek state. Finally, they formulated a unitary vision of their history that united the contemporary Greeks with the Hellenic city-states through the Greek Christian Byzantine Empire and the Greek culture that survived under the Orthodox Church during the centuries of the Ottoman rule. The formulation of such intellectual establishment evolved through several stages. Firstly, the rise of a ‘Hellenic’ national identity was initiated among the Greek long-established diaspora in Western Europe and the trading networks that extended throughout the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe. These groups had better channels of communication with the West and became earlier conscious of the values of western nationalism than the populations in the Ottoman Empire. As a result, a Greek national consciousness arose firstly among the intellectuals in the diaspora who cultivated the idea of a regenerated Greece as a new Hellas. On the other hand, within the Ottoman Empire, a consciousness of Greek identity had been historically fused with the Orthodox faith. . By the end of the 18th century and the early 19th a split was clearly developing between the Orthodox politico-religious elites, on the one hand, and the Greek speaking millet, on the other. The problem will appear more acute after the independence. The secularists’ dream of a Hellas is threatened by the reality in Greece proper where the peasant orthodox population was practically indifferent to the European culture and ideas. The split between the Euro centric ideal and the Byzantine-Orthodox vision will become endemic to modern Greece, extending to many issues. This kind of identity crisis in the newly established state inaugurated a second phase of Greek nationalism. In that phase the Hellenic intellectuals and intelligentsia will search for a new integrative national ideal that would come to terms with the deeply rooted Orthodox identity. Hence, immediately after independence folklorists, philologists and historians sought to establish and define the Greek national identity on common bases. The cultural evolutionist approach, developed by Herder, served this purpose and greatly affected the development of the above disciplines in Greece. This approach that sought to make sense of contemporary cultures in terms of a linear sequence of evolutionary states suited the Greek conditions exceptionally well and served as the ideological context for the claim for the continuity of Greek culture. The Greek intellectuals in 19th century will try to establish a continuity of Greek experience, by demonstrating the presence in the popular memory of a Hellenic era and by interpreting the achievements of Christian Byzantine period as development of the pagan classical virtues. This concept prevailed in the field of folklore studies in Greece and it is evident in the way the Greek folk poetry was used to define and reinforce the Greek national identity. b. Rediscovery of the ethnic past or pasts and folk poetry: The Romeic and Hellenist Thesis. In the introduction, I referred to the intellectuals’ ‘regress’ into the past in order to define a cultural identity, as a process of cultural purification. As it has already been mentioned, the first stage of the process of the purification of culture is the rediscovery of a golden age ‘myth’ that constitutes a part of an elaborate national mythology in which continuity and identification with a distant past are the main characteristics. Nineteenth century Greece witnessed a conflict of competing ‘golden age’ myths. The one school pointed to the Byzantine roots and glory of Greece and dreamed the restored Byzantine Empire; the other argued for the cultural affinity with the ancient Athens and desired a Hellenic renaissance. The result was an identity crisis that manifested itself among the Greek intellectuals. In particular, folklore research was part of the ‘defining’ process but among the Greek folklorists there was no agreement on the proper national image in creating a culturally homogenous people. Among them we can distinguish two different approaches, the Hellenist and the Romeic. Hellenism, as a national ideology, initially was externally directed and was unrelated to the existing culture in Greece. It was only by means of the reception of the Enlightenment’s neo-classicism into Greek thought that the modern Greeks came gradually to conceive themselves as descendants and heirs of the ancient Greeks. Besides, European countries joined hands in sponsoring the Hellenic identity. In the field of folklore studies, foreign scholars had already shown great interest in the Greek folksongs and appeared enthusiastic in fostering the conceptual model of continuity between the modern Greeks and the ancient ones. On their part, the Greek folklorists had a vital political interest to maintain this enthusiasm by convincing Europe that they were the modern Hellenes. The counter argument to this conceptual model was the Romeic thesis. The advocates of the Romeic view held that, rather than an outward-directed image; a more appropriate image would be one that was based on an inward-looking, self-critical collective appraisal. According to this view the self-designation of Greeks had long been Romios and changed to Hellene as a part of the Hellenist’s theme of cultural continuity. The Hellenist-Romeic distinction has significance in the language question as well. The Hellenist identified with the neo-classical form of the Modern Greek and cultivated the ‘Καθαρεύουσα’, a purist form of Greek. On the other hand, those who espoused the ‘Romeic’ thesis, the Demoticists, favoured the use of the living language, spoken by the people. The split was evident among the 19th century scholars that were engaged in collecting and interpreting the material of folk poetry. However, the Hellenist view gained new impetus especially after Fallmerayer’s attack to the premise of continuity in Greek history. Fallmerayer asserted that the peasants of modern Greece were a mixture of various racial stocks, particularly Slavs and Albanians that invaded Greece in the middle ages. That way he shook the very foundations of the Hellenist theory of descent from the ancient Greeks. His attack flung a challenge to Greek folklorists that joined in the fray to prove that the foreign invaders were eventually assimilated into the Greek culture through detailed research for continuities in their respective material. Hence, in the first years of statehood, the Hellenist model of cultural continuity served the ‘crafting’ of national culture and identity far better and it prevailed upon the Romeic one. c. Claude Fauriel, Niccolo Tommaseo: An outward directed model. Claude Fauriel’s two-volume compendium, ‘Chants populaires de la Grčce moderne’, that was published in France in 1824 and 1825, signals the onset of the Greek folk poetry studies. The fact that a foreigner became the forerunner and founder of the Greek folklore scholarship is another proof that the folklore movement in Greece was outward directed. Fauriel was well acquainted with the ideas and the theories of Herder and the German romantics. In the prolonged introduction of his work, he argues that the chants grecs represent the voice of a nation: ‘I thought that a collection of Greek folksongs would contribute to a better understanding of the ethics, the assets and character of the contemporary Greeks’. The Greek folksongs were not only the quintessence of the ‘Greek character’ but also the ‘voice of a new epopee’, ‘the Iliad of modern Greece’. Fauriel, echoing Herder, believed that this epopee was the direct result of the ‘folk genius’ and added that the unlearned genius of man is one of the phenomena and products of nature. In his work he also applied Herder’s organic theory of the language as it is made explicit in his introductory discourse on his Greek songs collection that constitutes an example of an overall treatment of a people’s civilization based on its language. Next to Fauriel, Tommaseo, with his work, Canti del popolo Greco, is thought to be one of the forerunners of the Greek folklore studies. He also belonged to the romantic school of thought that encouraged the language research and thought of the language of the Volk as a medium for the intellectuals to come closer to the people. Both these romantic scholars, and collectors of Greek folk songs were dedicated to the Greek cause and expressed their enthusiasm and admiration for the newly ‘resurgent’ Greeks. Fauriel published his work in 1824 when the Greeks were conducting a desperate war. Of course, his interest in Greek folk poetry was scientific but the timing of the publication was due to political reasons. As he reveals in his letters his Greeks friends were pressing him to publish them as soon as possible. His interest in the Greek revolution followed the tide of a general European enthusiasm with the Greek ‘revival’. Fauriel, as well as, Tommaseo wanted to participate in the Greeks’ struggle for freedom. Fauriel’s concern was to prove that the modern Greeks had a true national identity and a cultural heritage undoubtedly derived from the ancient Greeks. He argued that Greek folksongs offer a better understanding of the ancient Greece and that the European scholars could discover easily the vestiges of the ancient ethics and customs in the modern Greek folk poetry and realize ‘how special and everlasting are the traits of the character of the children of the Greek earth’. He concluded his introduction urging the Greeks to collect their folk songs because ‘Europe will owe them gratitude for whatever they do to preserve them; while themselves will one day be enchanted because they will be able to acknowledge…these simple monuments of the spirit, history, and customs of their ancestors’. In this last sentence we can find what later came to be the essence of the Hellenist trend. Greek folklore studies were marked by a turn to the ‘illustrious past’. Folk poetry was thought to be important only as a repository of verbal monuments of the ancient past. d. Fauriel, Tommaseo, Solomos, Manousos: The Romeic approach Despite the fact that Fauriel, Tommaseo and the local folklorists of Hellenist persuasion agreed on the importance of the Greek cause, there were significant conceptual differences between them. In Fauriel and Tommaseo’s thinking was present the European philhellenic conviction of the permanence of the spirit of the ancients in the modern Greeks’ own folk songs. However, both these scholars introduced in their studies the Romeic view of Greece, a view of the rural Greece as it saw itself. Something that later their Greek successors would find difficult to accept. Fauriel, exactly because he believed in the romantic dogma of the natural and organic growth of the languages, he left the texts of the folk songs very much as he found them. In his introduction he stresses, ‘Being sure that such a collection would be the most scholarly work for the study of the Greek language, I did not neglect anything, so as the texts would be as precise as possible’. In the same passage he refers to the advice he received from his Greek friends where it is revealed the cleavage between him and those of the indigenous Greek scholars and proponents of the Hellenist thesis. ‘The modern Greeks do not pronounce the ending –n…I was about to follow this kind of orthography in the published text but the majority of the Greeks assured me that this orthography is totally unaccustomed in the written language and would disturb their compatriots, so I was bound to accept their view’. Furthermore, Fauriel that was well aware of the language question in Greece sided openly with the demoticists and condemned the trend that suggested the purification of the Greek language and the introduction of archaisms. In the same fashion, Tommaseo argues that it would be ‘a sacrilegious folly’ to emend a folksong and that the idiomatic elements or the dialect type should be preserved in the publication of a folk poem. He opposed to the purist fashion that the Greek scholars were following in the language matter and he seemed to fear the worst when he was accusing his Greek colleagues that ‘What you prepare is an artificial Dark Age’. In general, these foreign collectors of Greek folk poetry appear to be extremely careful and accurate in rendering and translating their texts. Both preferred to leave blank any uncertain passages instead of attempting any imaginative reconstructions, a tactic that the Hellenists will follow later on. They also respected textual elements that the Hellenist folklorists were to find embarrassing and inconvenient. On the other hand, it is probable that Fauriel and Tommaseo censored their material, as expurgation was a common feature of the Western European scholarship at the time. Moreover, the educated Greek scholars, who were usually their advisors and providers of folk song material, exercised certain influence on them. This is obvious in Fauriel’s admittance that he followed the suggestion of his Greek friends in using the –n ending in his transcriptions. Nevertheless, their approach to the Greek folk poetry study, at least with regard to the language question, is the Romeic one. In Greece proper, as well, a version of this Romeic model was already in full swing. Unlike Athens where the majority of the scholars were committed Hellenists; in the Ionian Islands many intellectuals were demoticists. Among the demoticists, Dionysios Solomos was a leading figure. He was influenced both by Fauriel and Tommaseo, as far as the romantic theory of the language and its application in the study of folk poetry is concerned. Solomos regarded folk poetry as a rich source of understanding and documentation for the systematic study of the demotic language and consciously promoted a program of nation-forming literary activity based on the demotic language of the folk songs. His Romeic vision was also evident in the language of his poetry that is fundamentally influenced by the language of the demotic songs. Therefore, when Tommaseo claimed that ‘the modern Greeks that could have their Homer and Dante, they will have the kingdom of Ade if Solomos do not forestall this’ , he made an open allegation of Solomos’ role in promoting a Romeic view of the folk poetry tradition. In the circle of Solomos belonged Antonios Manousos who published a collection of folk songs in 1850, which, in fact, was the first one published by a Greek scholar. Manousos, as far as the language matter is concerned, made it explicit that his dispute was with Hellenism. He was a demoticist and entirely against the purist Greek. Additionally, he was perceptive enough to see that the issue had dimensions far wider than those of the language. He respected the oral character of the texts and he disclaimed any right to emend them. On the other hand, while he espoused the Romeic cause explicitly and utterly, in his work can be found conceptions that are part of the Hellenist position. References to the fatherland or the treatment of the Kleftic songs as a category of patriotic texts constituted influences of the dominant ideological dogma of Hellenism. Undoubtedly, a clear connection exists between the linguistic attitudes and the question of the scholars’ position in Greek culture. In other words, the emergence of two streams of folklore research was closely connected with the language problem. The Demoticists supported a ‘literary’ (demoticist) ideological style of folklore study, while the Hellenists adopted a ‘patriotic-archaeological’ one. The latter consisted in the treatment of the popular literature as a repository of survivals from the past that proved an ethnic and cultural lineage from classical Hellas. e. Zampelios: The Hellenist Thesis The archaeological approach to the folk poetry will take root strongly in Greece, in an attempt to legitimise the Hellenist thesis that is the ideological premise of continuity with the glorious classical past. Though the new scholars accepted gladly the philhellenic thrust and the outward-directed view of the Greek history and culture, they thought it was time for them to decide what was Greek and what was not. In other words, they decided to create a national culture of their own. It is the phase of what Smith calls authentication in the purification process. The Hellenist notion of continuity held by the Greek folklorists acted as a filter through which only the relevant data could pass and constituted the criterion by which the folk poetry tradition would be authenticated. We can observe the application of this approach in the work of Spyridon Zampelios. His study on folk poetry constitutes the first major development of the Hellenist thesis. Spyridon Zampelios’ collection of folksongs that was published in 1852 was accompanied by a long preface titled ‘Historical study of Medieval Hellenism ’. In the opening paragraph he explained the reason why a folksong collection was prefaced by a study on medieval Greece: ‘It is this dark age through which the finest people in the history of civilization, passed from the ancient to the modern era’. Obviously Zampelios attempts to treat the medieval phase as a connecting link between the ancient and the Modern Greek culture. The main argument he developed in his analysis was that the Greeks retained their Hellenic genius through the ages and remained fundamentally unchanged in spirit. This spirit was kept alive in the institutions of the Orthodox Church and the lore of the people. In fact, he saw folklore and the Orthodox Church as repositories of the true Greek character. Consequently, referring to the folk poetry he wrote: ‘If we do not study the historical character of our people then the beauty of our folk poetry is just philological vestiges’. So folksongs acquired meaning only through their association with the historical past. Zampelios’ reading of Greek folk poetry was made in terms of this particular ideological perspective of continuity. A characteristic example of this approach was Zampelios treatment of the Kleftic songs. Kleftes were the Greek guerrillas during the years of the Ottoman rule and the war of independence and Kleftic ballads were the demotic songs that celebrated the deeds, the life and ethics of these fighters. Zampelios saw in these songs the embodiment of the Hellenic valour. He held that the Kleftic songs epitomize the Hellenic heroism in order to support his Hellenist argument of continuity. Furthermore, he felt free to emend the texts of the original songs without indicating that he has done so. Some examples of his interventions are indicative of his ideological suggestions. In his textual interferences, Zampelios usually tended to amplify the Kleftes rage against the Turks. For example, in the last three verses of a song that was lamenting the death of two Kleftes he added a forth one in an attempt to emphasize their resistance to the national enemy. ‘Which one of the two to lament, To lament for Konstantis or for the poor Nikolakis. They were bairaikia in the mountains and flaboura in the valleys’. In Fauriel’s collection the demotic song finishes here but Zampelios added a last verse: And well-founded towers against the pashas’ rage. Evidently, Zampelios did not hesitate to cause ideological alterations to a text in order to attain his objective. In another song that celebrated a guerrilla raid in a village in Epirus, where the women were taken hostages and were questioned so the Kleftes could decide which one had a wealthy husband to ask him for ransom, Zampelios preferred to silence the ransom episode and see these robbers as heroes of the national revival. According to Apostolakis, he added another verse where he exalted the Hellenes: ‘Angeliki, the daughter of Koumos’ wife, has a truly brave husband…his legs are strong like a Hellene’s, his chest like a lion’s. Apostolakis commenting on Zampelios alteration writes: ‘How peculiar…the ethnic self regard of Zampelios was and what misplaced and laughable thoughts it could bring the man to entertain’. On the other hand Herzfeld disagree that the verse about the Hellene is a forgery but he suggests that the omission of the ransom incident is convincing as evidence of Zampelios Hellenist approach. To conclude, Zampelios aimed at establishing the Hellenic character of the Greek folk poetry. In the missionary view he took of his task of editing the folk song texts, the alterations and suppressions were consistent with his Hellenist ideology. As a Greek, Zampelios thought that he was able to understand better the Greek folk spirit and culture and participate in its shaping. Zampelios was not the only one that indulged in such patriotic editing of the folk song material. This kind of ‘crafting’ was generalized and easily made. Even whole songs proved to be forged such as the ‘Kolokotroneika’ and those that celebrated the Kleftes of Roumeli. Such phenomena are the result of a pervasive trend among the Hellenist scholars to construct a generalized picture of the Greek character using the folk song material. As Politis puts it: ‘Folklore studies…tried in its development to define the national identity of the modern Greeks, to define what is and what should be within the limits of the national consciousness’. To sum up, in 19th century Greece a cultural purification process is evident in the field of folksong studies. In the first phase of this process, it will be the foreign centres of scholarship and the Greek diaspora that will rediscover the Greek folk poetry, seen through the lens of the Hellenist model that was interested in Modern Greek culture only as long as it presented survivals from the glorious classical past. The outward-directed model was imported by the indigenous scholars and developed as a theory of cultural continuity that became the ideological matrix of their scholar enterprise. In the second phase of authentication, the folk poetry research, already, constituted one of the instruments used in fashioning a national culture and identity. Chapter 3: The Serbian Case a. The rise of the Serbian national consciousness: The importance of language As it has been stated in the introduction, the nationalist intellectuals devoted to a scholarly enquiry into the linguistic, cultural and historical attributes of their ethnic group so as to achieve all the characteristics of their national identity. The South Slav intellectuals will follow the same pattern in order to establish a national identity. Before I examine the Serbian intellectual performance in shaping national culture with regard to folk poetry studies, I would like to make a short outline of the awakening of the Serbian national consciousness. The rise of Serbian national awareness and action can be traced at the end of the 18th century. In the beginning of the 19th century national awareness among the Serbs, both those that were subject of the Habsburg Empire and those of the Ottoman Empire, will develop, gradually, as a reaction to the Magyar nationalism, in the first case, and to the Ottoman oppression, in the second. As far as the Serbs of the Habsburg monarchy are concerned, the intensification of their national consciousness will be the result of the external threat to their national rights and cultural integrity. Moreover, being adjacent to the political and cultural centres of nationalist ideas developed in the West and Central Europe, they came sooner to a national awakening and established a transmission belt of these ideas to the Pasalik of Beograd. The Habsburg Serbs became an active reservoir of administrative, political and intellectual leadership for Serbia. In the first place, the discovery of the national identity among the Habsburg Serbs took linguistic and cultural form. Using the cultural models borrowed from Germany, the intellectual leaders finally came to convince their audiences to identify on the basis of national ties. In particular, the German romantic idealizations and Herder’s philosophy had great influence among them. Above all, Herder’s thoughts about the existence and merit of national culture shaped by the sharing of a common language set in motion a greater concern for a native literary language among the South Slavs. In the Serbo –Croatian speaking lands the development of a literary language was not a simple task. Except for the many dialects and subdialects, the linguists had to contend with at least four literary languages. The Croatian dialectal situation consisted in the existence of three distinct dialects (štokavian, kajkavian, čakavian). On the other hand in Serbia there was the Slavenoserpski, old, conservative, sacred language of the church. Against this religious sacred language was the vernacular štokavian dialect of the Serb masses. The 19th century belief that a single language is a necessary component of national existence led to a series of linguistic reforms in order to codify, modernize and bring the various South Slavic languages together. These linguistic reforms undertaken by the nationalist intellectuals were often found in conflict with each other due to the fact that the aforementioned romantic dogma could not be reconciled with the complicated situation of the South Slavic linguistic landscape. Linguistic reform among the Serbs began in the first decades of the 19th century. The decisive force behind the linguistic definition of Serbdom was Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Until that time the written Serbian language differed from the spoken one. Karadžić’s struggle was to replace the artificial tongue of Slavo-Serbian that was favoured by the Serb Orthodox hierarchy and the religious ultra-conservative bourgeois elites with the vernacular Štokavian dialect. On the other hand, in Croatia there was no conflict between an artificial, sacred language and the vernacular. The Štokavian and Kajkavian vernacular dialects had replaced the older Čakavian. In addition the Illyrianist intellectual elite that was on the head of Croat national consolidation decided to abandon their native Kajkavian dialect and opted for the Štokavian solution because they believed that the cultural unity not only of the Croats but also of the Slavs could be achieved on Štokavian basis. Besides, Štokavian was representative of the most Croatian speakers and closest to the literary language Vuk had codified in the neighbouring Serbia. The nationalist trends manifested in the matter of the language were closely connected with those that appeared in the folk poetry. Folk poetry was significant for establishing a literary language among the Serbs and the Croats because it was already a literary language of the people. This is the reason why the oral folk poetry became the bone of contention between those who propagated the separate South Slav nationalisms and those who strove for South Slav integration. Particularly, Vuk Karadžić considered the folk songs he collected as Serbian folk poetry. In contrast, those Illyrians who wanted to use the folk poetry, as well as the language itself, as a unifying force questioned Vuk’s national designation of the folk songs almost from the beginning. Indeed, oral poetry in the South Slav lands constituted a shared tradition and could provide a powerful argument for unity of the South Slavs. Such an argument was used by the Serbs and Croats of Yugoslav orientation just before and after World War I. Of course Vuk’s collections of folk poetry as well as his linguistic reforms were exclusively Serbian but in the same time had pan-South Slavic ramifications. That is because sung poetry, particularly oral epic, was the shared property of many South Slavs. So, although Vuk’s work on oral poetry was not pan-South Slavic in its nature, in fact, encouraged greater emphasis on what linked the various South Slav groups that had been separated on the basis of religious and political affiliations. b. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić: The rediscovery of the folk poetry tradition As it has been mentioned, historicist Romanticism and the ideas of Herder on Volkgeist and his Volkslieder had provided a stimulus for the spread of a literary demand for the ‘natural’ and ‘national’ folk poetry. This general European appetite for the natural and the national had paved the way for the discovery of the ‘popular songs’ of the South Slavs. During the 18th century a significant number of songs was recorded in the South Slav area and were preserved in manuscript copies. Additionally, in 1756, Andrija Kačić Miošić published a collection of nearly 140 mainly patriotic poems in order to illustrate historical events. Clearly though, the romantic mode for national poetry was not yet felt in the Balkans. Actually, the interest in folk poetry and in its collecting came from outside. The German scholars stimulated by Herder’s doctrines were the first to look with the new interest on these works of the South Slavs, while among the literate Slavs folk poetry was looked upon as inferior and they could not sympathize with the interest of the foreign scholars in their own primitive heritage. Indeed Karadžić in the introduction of the edition of his first collection referring to Mušicki’s request to write down any simple Serbian folk song, he wrote: ‘I did not dare to write down even one of them and hand it in, for I was convinced that Mušicki was using this as a means to mock us, lads who had grown up in the woods, among pigs, goats and sheep’. In fact nationalism and the incorporation of Herder’s doctrine of people’s language and poetry constituting the essence of a nation, came to the Serbian folk poetry only after the appearance of Vuk Karadžić. Namely, the feeling of nationalism pre-existed and was already strong without the influence of folk poetry. The sense of national consciousness did not come through the folk songs; they were rather rediscovered and seen in the light of nationalist ideals. Since the nationalist feeling coupled with the need for a sense of the dignity and importance of Serbia in the world met with the historicist Romanticism movement in Vienna, it was expected that nationalism and folk poetry would finally converge. It would be Vuk Karadžić and the group that was working with him in Vienna, especially the Slovene Jernej Kopitar, who played a central role in connecting folk poetry with the national awakening. Karadžić came from a peasant family settled at a village some seventy miles outside Belgrade. The fact that he could read and that he had received more schooling than most of his contemporaries, served to ensure him some more prominence in his homeland. In 1813, after the Turks crushed the Serbian uprising, he crossed with other thousands of Serbs the border into the lands of the Austrian Empire and went to Vienna. Here Karadžić became acquainted with Herder’s ideas about the importance of the vernacular form of the language and the popular literature as the most profound manifestations of the national spirit. His meeting with the Slovene Jernej Kopitar constituted a turning point in his life. Kopitar, an educated and sophisticated man, had an in depth knowledge of the Slavonic languages and was particularly concerned to discover the culture of the Slav populations of the Austria-Hungary and make them conscious of their own inheritan...