the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot
in their heads." May the people of Serbia and Bulgaria rather listen
to such men as Nicholai Velimirović, Bishop of Žiča,[3]
who--to speak only of his sermons and lectures in our language--lives
in the memory of so many in Great Britain and the United States on
account of his wonderful eloquence, his sincerity, his profound
patriotism, and the calm heights from which he surveys the future. For
those who think with him, the Serbs, in uniting with the Croats, have
already surmounted a more serious obstacle. They believe that for
three reasons their union with the Bulgars is a more natural one: they
practise the same religion, they use the same Cyrillic alphabet and
their civilization, springing from Byzantium, has been identical. The
two people are bound to each other by the great Serbian, Saint Sava,
who strove to join them and who died at Trnovo in Bulgaria. Vladislav,
the Serbian prince, asked for his body; Assen begged that the Bulgars
might be allowed to keep it, but, when the Serbs insisted, a most
remarkable procession set out from Trnovo, bearing to his homeland the
remains of him whom the Bulgars called "our Saint." ... If, then, the
two people will for a few years demand that the misguided professors
shall confine themselves to their original functions--and, likewise,
those students who sit at the professors' feet--one may hope that in a
few years the miserable past will be buried and all the Yugoslavs
united in one State. The time has vanished when Serbia and Bulgaria
stood, as it were in a ring, face to face with one another, paying far
more attention to the disputes of the moment than to those great
unifying forces which we have mentioned. But now Serbia is a part of
Yugoslavia, which has to deal with a greater Italy, a greater Roumania
and others. And the question as to whether a certain town or district
is to be Serbian or Bulgarian sinks into the background.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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