Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians

Serbians attach the utmost value and importance to the sympathies of the such a highly cultured, great, and therefore legitimately influential people as is the British nation. Since the beginning of the twentieth century there have been two critical occasions - the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria and the war against the Turks - when we have had opportunities to note how British sympathies, even when apparently only platonic, can be of great practical importance for our nation. It is quite natural that we should desire to retain and if possible deepen and increase those sympathies. We are proud of our army, but we flatter ourselves that our nation may win sympathy arid respect by other than military features of its national character. We wish that our British friends should know our nation such as it is. We wish them to be acquainted with our national psychology. And nothing could give a better insight into the very soul of the Serbian nation than this book which M. Woislav M. Petrovitch has so happily conceived.

The Serbians belong ethnologically to the great family of the Slavonic nations. They are first cousins to the Russians, Poles, Czechs; Slovaks, and Bulgars, and they are brothers to the Croats and Slovenes. Since the Church has ceased to be the discordant and -disuniting element in the life of the nations, the Orthodox. Serbians and the Roman Catholic Croats ar-e practically one and the same people. But of all Slavonic nations the Serbians can legitimately claim to be the most poetical one. Their language is the richest and the most musical among all the Slavonic languages.

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