A new generation....
Posted on 06/27/2003 5:02:45 PM PDT by joan
For all the Serbs around the world, in Serbia and the Diaspora. Pedal in Peace wishes everyone a great weekend of celebration. Dosta!!!
VIDOVDAN! KOSOVO JE SRBIJA, BOSNA JE SRBIJE. KOSOVO JE SRPSKA ZEMLJA!.
Remain strong and faithful to our faith, Serbia remains strong only if we remain strong. The Orthodox is our foundation, our pillar which we must never relinquish. Already, the Pedal in Peace founder has received disturbing phone calls from Croatians "criticizing" this endeavour. Ignorance is their fault while their bigotry will not detract from PiP's focus!
Pedal in Peace rides on Aug 02 through the 15th, ending in Presevo, Serbia after starting in Novi Grad, Republika Srpska.
"This help does not only mean meeting their basic needs but also being aware that there is someone who cares for their future. Such a generosity will be certainly returned to someone else in the future. We'll open a circle of good deeds this way and they will lessen the evil that afflicted the youngest."
This is great. I have been looking for a project like this for our church family. Please explain to me exactly what you understand about how it works.
Vidovdan is also the date Djindjich and his anti-Serb coalition decided to extradite Miloshevich to the Hague.
Many have used Vidovdan (St. Vitus' Day) to make fun of Serbs who celebrate their "defeat." Historically, the result of the Kosovo battle between the Turks and the Serbs was a draw.
Although the Turks defeated the Serbs in battle, a fateful but not a given outcome on the Blackbird's (i.e. Kosovo) Field, their victory was tempered by the killing of the Turkish Sultan the night before by a Serb warrior Milosh Obilich. Aftere the battle, the decapitated Turkish army reatreated to what is today FYROM Macedonia for 100 years.
Thus, in their defeat, the Serbs have delayed Ottoman conquest of Europe and won, knowingly or not, for Christian Europe badly needed and precious time to prepare for and check the Ottoman advance next time around.
The Military Krayina was formed by the Serbs escaping Bosnia in the 15th century, a rather desolate and scarcely populated region. As a border that served Austria as an effective barrier to further Ottoman advance, the Krayina Serbs were privileged and free, as compared to their Croatian neighbors, who were serfs -- the seeds of the Serbo-Croat conflict that was to come of age centuries later.
In 1914, Archduke Ferninand came to Bosnia to observe Austro-Hungarian war games on Serbia's border with Austrian-occupied Bosnia. The day was Vidovdan, and a clear provocation.
After resisting for a whole year the might of Austria-Hungary and Germany combined, Serbia -- that only two years earlier fought two major wars -- began to collapse. The Serb army retreated, thanks to various units that were literally sacrificed to slow down the enemy advance, to the Kosovo Polye and there made a decision to retreat through Albania to the coast, where they were promised by the British to be picked up and readided to come back to Serbia.
So, symbolically, once again, on that Field, and with their sovereign, the Serbs chose to die (about 1/3 died on the trek through Albania) rather than surrender.
The very first Yugoslavia (then known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) had a Constiution that was voted in on Vidovdan and is in fact known as the Vidovdanski ustav, St. Vitus's Day Constitution.
Miloshevich held his famnous and misquoted speech on the Gazimestan, the physical battlefield in Kosovo Polye, for a 600th anniversary, when over 1 million Serbs showed up.
Kosovo has been Serbia's curse and blessing. It is one of those eternal issues that never goes away.
Yes. I very much agree and think that there is much we don't (yet?) understand about the Serbs and Kosovo.
A new generation....
Maybe this is a big can of worms to open, but I'm interested in hearing your take on this; I've heard that Archduke Ferdinand was actually very pro-Serb and had much respect for the Serbian people which tended to mark him as a black sheep to the Hapsburghs and therefore expendable. I'm actually friends with Serbs that had him as Kumovi in their family and they consider him a sacrificial lamb for the Austria-Hungarian Empire.
I heard that Archduke Ferdinand may have been sent to Sarajevo on Vidovdan knowing that he would likely be executed and it would be a great excuse for Austria-Hungary to declare an ultimatum to Serbia that they could never possibly accept and therefore Austria-Hungary could feel justified in swallowing up a Serbia that had been very much exhausted by the Balkan Wars.
Do you think there can be any truth to this theory?
The Serbian Royal Police warned Austria-Hungary that there may be an attempt on Archduke's life if he came to Sarajevo on Vidovdan, but that warning went uheeded. Serbia had no interest in fighting one of the largest empires in Europe, especially in view of the effort and sacrifice of successfully kicking Turks out of Europe in the First Balkan War (1912), and then defeating her ally Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War (1913) that started with Bulgaria's unprovoked attack on Serbia. So, Serbia had no motive to kill Archduke. It also had nothing to gain. On the other hand, Austria-Hungary had a rich motive and stood a lot to gain by picking a fight with Serbia, especially at the time when Serbia's energies have been drained by wars.
Looking at the political map of the Blakans in 1914, the only obstacle to the so-called Berlin-Baghdad Axis was Serbia and its tiny sister kingdom of Montenegro. They were the only two countries that had native dynasties and were firecly pro-western. All other Balkan countries, including Serbia's ally Greece, had foreign royalty, mostly German and, in the case of Albania, Italian.
Although tiny compared to super powers of Europe, Serbia has doubled its size in just two years following the Balkan wars, and was becoming a local powerbroker. More importantly, Serbia has been a source of inspiration to other Slavs in the area who were still in German, Hungarian or Italian lands. The Croatian Illyrian (later renamed Yugoslav) movement was looking towards Serbia as a way of helping Croats attain their independence from Austria-Hungary.
Serbia and Montenegro therefore stood as a living proof that Southern Slav can not only be free but victorious. That did not go very well with Vienna or Berlin.
In addition to that, Bosnian Serbs (who were a 44% majority population at that time) were boiling with a desire to rid themselves of Austrian and Muslim domination, and to join their kin in Serbia and Montenegro. Besidres, Bosnia has always been a Serb land -- and edicts of Bosnia's earliest rulers leave no doubt of that.
An underground movement called "The Black Hand" headed by a Serbian colonel with alias Apis was actively recruiting the willing and able to fight Austria covertly by means that, depending whose side you are on, are called terrorist or guerilla. The Serbian government was not happy about this and saw Apis as a dangerous destabilizing factor that could hurt Serbia's interests, so Serbia had very reason to warn Austria-Hungary of the impending assassination attempt.
The actual assassination attempt on Archudke failed. A hand granade tossed into his car was thrown out only to explode on the street and hurt members of the motorcade security. Later, Archudke went to Sarajevo's hospital to visit the victims of the attack. That visit was obviously not scheduled and could not have been planned as a target opportunity by the Serbs. The assassin Gavrilo Princip (Printsip) happened to be standing at the corner where the official motorcade leaving the hospital made an unscheduled turn. Having slowed down to practically a crawl, he rushed to the car and emptied his gun killing not only the Archduke but his wife as well.
If Archduke had been a friend of the Serbs, as you say, he would not have been assassinated because all the Serbs had to do is wait for him to take the throne once Fraz Jospeh II passed away. I also seriously doubt that your friends had Archduke over for kumovi unless they were at the very top of the social pyramid -- royal and government. Maybe the Archduke was passing by some village and was caught in an impromptou moment to be part of some celebration, but that is a coincidence not a pattern.
I also seriously doubt that your friends had Archduke over for kumovi unless they were at the very top of the social pyramid -- royal and government.
They were at the very top of the social pyramid and the Archduke was Godfather to my friend's father-in-law in more than just a ceremonial way.
Care to share with us precisely who they are?
Ferdinand was not a very popular figure. His political vision of a Tripartite state instead of a Dual Monarchy, with equal rights for Slavs as well as Hungarians and Germans did not sit well with Franz Joseph II, or the establishment in Austria-Hungary.
That did not mean Ferdinand had any special love feelings for the Slavs. He was trying to prevent the outdated Monarchy from falling apart and proposed the unthinkable -- federalization of the state.
He fell into the line of succession by sheer luck, or lack of it. Jospeh's son Rudolf never made it, and Joseph's brother, Ferdinand's father, who would have succeeded Joseph, died prematurely. Ferdinand was not a choice.
He was neither popular with the German or Hungarian people who despised Slavs, nor with his own family. He was therefore a perfect sacrificial lamb for Austria to realize its long-desired goal of eliminating Serbia/Montegro as pro-western obstacles to the energy-rich Berlin-Baghdad axis.
Ferdinand also married a common woman of Slavic ethnicity, Czech (Bohemian) by nationality despite the Emperor's objections. Her father was an equerry, not a very flattering thing for a future empress.
Marrying "below" his status, and a Slav, was in clear violation of rules that any successor of the Habsurbg throne had to be someone from the ruling houses of Europe. The thought of having a commoner and a Slavic Empress in Austria was about as terryfying as having an Arab (Princess Di's last lover) in the Buckingham Palace. Emperor Jospeh II did not attend his wedding.
His children (three of them) were explicitly barred from succeeding their father on a throne, and his wife from sitting with him in the royal box or royal carriage.
The Austrian government was specifically warned that it would not be a good idea for the Archuke to go to Sarajevo by the Serbian ambassador to Vienna, Yovan Yovanovich. The warning was dismissed because Yovanovich was considered a pan-Serb "extremist."
After the assassination and all the outward politically correct outrage and rhetoric about the loss, the murdered couple was burried. Neither Austrian, nor German emperors attended the funeral.
It looked as if the Serbs handed Austria and Germany a perfect solution for eliminating the Serbian roadblock to Baghdad, while ridding the Austrian court of an unawanted successor to the throne.
As it turns out, things are not always what they seem to be.
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