{"id":16385,"date":"2009-12-08T20:51:58","date_gmt":"2009-12-08T18:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=16385"},"modified":"2023-04-06T09:38:58","modified_gmt":"2023-04-06T06:38:58","slug":"who-killed-the-sultan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/12\/08\/who-killed-the-sultan\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Killed the Sultan?"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Robert Murray Davis<\/span>
\n7\u00a0December\u00a02009<\/p>\n

Translations of little-known Albanian oral epics add another dimension to the endless conversation over the Battle of Kosovo.<\/em>
\nThe Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic<\/em><\/strong>. Introduction by Anna Di Lellio; translations by Robert Elsie. I. B. Tauris, 2009.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Rudyard Kipling may have been right when he wrote that \u201cThere are nine and 60 ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right,\u201d but as Anna Di Lellio shows in the masterly introduction to these translations of eight Albanian variants of the story of Sultan Murat and a Balkan Christian hero, there can be at least as many ways of understanding, interpreting, and using or misusing them.<\/p>\n

Di Lellio, a sociologist, journalist, and university professor with extensive experience in Kosovo, thinks that some of those ways can be politically and psychologically damaging. She has several related purposes in her commentary on these poems sung by Albanian preservers of a centuries-old oral tradition, about (sometimes admittedly) legendary events grounded in the historical battle outside Pristina in 1389 that cleared the way for the Ottoman empire\u2019s further expansion into the Balkans. First, and possibly least important for the general reader, is to present these poems, in facing pages of Albanian and English, to a broader audience. More broadly, she tries \u201cto rescue them from marginalization as folklore, or from turning them into a new prison for collective memory,\u201d managed by \u201cmemory entrepreneurs\u201d with axes to grind. Given the complexities of Balkan history, the second is probably, and unfortunately, impossible, since many Serb commentators \u201chave reduced Serbian history and politics to a story\u201d in which facts must give way to \u201cuninterrupted remembrance.\u201d<\/p>\n

CENTURIES OF CLAIMS AND COUNTERCLAIMS<\/p>\n

Most important for the observer of contemporary politics is Di Lellio\u2019s analysis of the significance for Albanians of the ways in which the story of Murat\u2019s death helps to create a national narrative by establishing their nation, and more broadly their people, as a part of Balkan resistance against Turkish invasion and, by extension, as part of European Christendom \u2013 and, not incidentally, resident in Kosovo from prehistoric times. Strategically this is important because, she says, Serbs have used Albanian allegiance to Islam to support an exclusive claim to Kosovo that \u201cgoes almost always undisputed in western diplomatic and intellectual circles.\u201d The counter-claim by a young Kosovar I recently met that his country (greater Albania?) is 40 percent Catholic, 40 percent Muslim \u2013 figures that would be a surprise to the compilers of the CIA World Factbook<\/em> \u2013 is clearly an attempt to refute the Serb position.<\/p>\n

The complementary Serbian and Albanian poetic narratives pose many contradictions, most obviously the name and nationality of the hero who killed Murat even as the Ottoman forces were victorious on the field of battle. No historical authority seems to support either side. In Serbian epics, he is a Serb called Milos Obilic and early in the last century and during and after the battles following the dissolution of Yugoslavia he \u201cevoked a medieval past of national greatness.\u201d In Albanian, the hero is named Millosh Kopiliq, an Albanian who was for centuries a local folk hero who became part of the national narrative during the Kosovan struggle for independence, useful as indicating a Western identity before what is referred to as the long parenthesis of Islamic domination and conversion, and a complement to the contemporary figure of the slain Kosovo Liberation Army commander Adem Jashari as a symbol of armed resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Of much later date, this painting glorifies the Ottomans\u2019 enemies in the
\nBattle of Kosovo even as it captures the convoluted course of that day\u2019s events.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>As might be expected in the Balkans, since we are dealing with human beings, neither side can fully agree among its own cohorts. Albanians are ambivalent about whether Islam is bad in the West\/good, East\/bad Manichean dichotomy or whether \u201cmulti-confessionalism\u201d and religious tolerance (which much resembles indifference) is the more profitable stance, especially if it is vaguely Christian. Or, as De Lellio puts it, whether \u201cMuslim identity \u2026 is conceived as foreign, or as constitutive of the nation.\u201d At one point, there was some discussion in Kosovo about mass conversion to Catholicism, though it came to nothing. Especially in the period after 9\/11 and other terrorist attacks, that discussion was likely, and perhaps calculated, to appeal to the European Union and the United States.<\/p>\n

The Slav-Albanian battle over facts and interpretations extends far beyond the use and misuse of these epics from the oral tradition. Di Lellio points to the controversy over entries about Albania in the Enciklopedija Jugoslavije,<\/em> published in Croatia in 1980, after which the Serbs demanded that the reference to Albanian descent from the ancient Illyrians be deleted in an obvious attempt to demonstrate the Albanians had no historical place in and therefore right to Kosovo. Almost 30 years later, a similar battle has erupted over the new Macedonian encyclopedia<\/span> which refers to Albanians, who make up about a quarter of Macedonia\u2019s population, as Shqiptars<\/em> \u2013 a term that Albanians consider derogatory when used by outsiders \u2013 and as primitive people who came from the mountains.<\/p>\n

The prime minister of Albania condemned \u201cthe racist, anti-Albanian doctrines of our neighbors [which] are based on the need to find an identity, because those who fake history just confirm that they are searching for their own identity. Albanians are not.\u201d An Albanian rights group spokesman said the reference work \u201cjeopardized interethnic harmony in Macedonia.\u201d Cynical observers will be surprised that he has been able to find some. In any case, the offending entries will be deleted.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, a friend joined me in Vienna to travel to Hungary. She asked, \u201cWhy can\u2019t these people over here just get along with each other?\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re only going to be here two weeks,\u201d I said. \u201cI can\u2019t possibly explain it in that short a time.\u201d More than a dozen years later, I still can\u2019t. Anna Di Lellio deals with some of the causes, but she is really interested in furthering \u201cthe democratic project\u201d of \u201cdeconstructing a national creed.\u201d People of good will, not always easy to find in any region, can only wish her luck.<\/p>\n

Robert Murray Davis<\/em><\/strong> regularly reviews literature and books on the Balkans for TOL.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Robert Murray Davis 7\u00a0December\u00a02009 Translations of little-known Albanian oral epics add another dimension to the endless conversation over the Battle of Kosovo. The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic. Introduction by Anna Di Lellio; translations by Robert Elsie. I. B. Tauris, 2009. Rudyard Kipling may have been right when he wrote that \u201cThere […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":782149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[772,231,379],"tags":[9773,9752],"class_list":["post-16385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-albania-balkans-english","category-balkans","category-kosovo-balkans-english","tag-albania-balkans-english","tag-kosovo-balkans-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}