Mr. Miatovich says that when as Cabinet Minister he had been defeated, forty years ago, the next day he heard the people singing this event in the streets.
Whatever the subject--whether it deals with ancient times or with the present; whether it is an epic or one of the so-called women's songs--the Serbian pesma is anonymous. No single writer or composer claims it. It is the work of the people, all of whom have had a chance to modify it as it has passed through the ages.
Among all the heroes of the guslars the favorite has always been Prince Marko. Although much of the career of the Marko of the pesmas was fabulous, this prince had a real existence in the latter part of the fourteenth century--the son of Vukashin, who tried to usurp the throne of young Urosh after the death of Stephen Dushan, and Queen Helen, unless one prefers to account for Marko's glittering qualities by making him the offspring of a dragon and a fairy queen. The real Marko was not a great man, as the world counts greatness. He ruled a small territory in Macedonia, and Prilip was his capital. He is said to have been friendly with the Turks and to have died fighting for the Sultan. This was after Kossovo, when Serbia was sleeping. Yet he must have had qualities that made him rise above this in popular estimation, for his local reputation grew with time and became national. Certainly for five centuries he has been a living personality, not only in Serbian but in Croatian, Bulgarian, and Roumanian tradition.
It is worth considering--this theory that in Prince Marko the Serbian nation projects itself; that his sufferings and successes are the sufferings and successes of the whole nation; that it beholds its own virtues and weaknesses in his; its own individuality in his popular personality; its own doom in his tragic fate.
Athletic, keen-minded, quickly reading the designs of his foes, he, as an individual, was what Serbia would like to have been as a political entity. Even as he triumphed over Magyar, Venetian or Turk, so would the Serb have triumphed. When Serbia was sunk in poverty the guslar brought before his hearers visions of splendid things they could never hope to see, but whose beauties satisfied their imagination.