Battle of Kosovo

The Battle of Blackbird Field (Serbo-Croat Битка на Косову/Bitka na Kosovu, Turkish Kosova Meydan Muharebesi) took place on 15 June 1389 on Blackbird Field not far from Priština on the course of the Lab River in present-day Kosovo. The Serbian coalition army led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović and Vuk Branković was reinforced by an army of the Bosnian King Tvrtko I, allied with Lazar, under the voivode Vlatko Vuković. Opposing them was the Ottoman army under Sultan Murad I and his sons Bayezid I and Yakub.

The conflict arose from the offensive action of the Ottomans against the remaining independent Christian kingdoms in the Balkan Peninsula. Murad I attempted to subject the Serbian principalities to the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. This would have removed the last obstacle to the takeover of the ByzantineEmpire with its capital Constantinople.

The battle, in which the leaders of both forces fell, ended without a clear victor. As a result, however, the Serbian princes' resistance to Ottoman expansion was decisively weakened in the years that followed. Serbian allies, such as the Lazarevići principality, had to acknowledge the suzerainty and supremacy of the Ottomans, which was opposed only by Vuk Branković as prince on the territory of present-day Kosovo, even after the battle. During the negotiations of a peace settlement between Princess Milica and Sultan Bayezid, the youngest daughter of Lazar, Olivera Despina, had to be handed over as tribute to the Sultan's harem in Bursa.

Although the Byzantine Empire was not involved in the battle, the weakening of its Serbian allies and their recognition of the Ottomans' suzerainty finally eliminated it as a power factor in southeastern Europe. Byzantium turned to Rome in order to avert the final subjugation of Constantinople with the support of Christian Europe.

The event was soon passed on in tradition in a highly mythologized form through processes of legend formation in folk poetry, as well as especially in the reception of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the cult of the Blackbird Field. In the genre of Kosovo epics orally transmitted over centuries by Guslars in the company of the Gusle, the central themes of Lazar's martyrdom were formed in folk traditions in the modification of contemporary chronicles and historiographies, the betrayal of Vuk Branković and the heroic deed of Miloš Obilić into the national myth of Serbia (Legend of the Field of Blackbirds - Priča o boju kosovskom), in which the illusion of a Turkish victory to subjugate the Balkan Peninsula to the influence of the Ottoman Empire through economic and military drive was soon realized by historical reality. However, the opinion that the Serbian Empire perished on the Field of Blackbirds is fundamentally wrong, since the state continued to exist for another seven decades, reviving both economically and culturally.

Vidovdan, celebrated in Serbia on June 15 / June 28^, is the commemoration day of the battle. Prince Lazar, who fell in the battle, was canonized as early as 1390 or 1391 and is one of the most important saints of the Serbian Orthodox Church. His bones are now in his mausoleum, the Ravanica Monastery.

Memorial buildings and artistic reception

Both the Serbs and the Turks honored the site of the battle with commemorative buildings.

Sultan Murat Türbe

In the Meşhed-i Hüdavendigar, part of Murad's mortal remains are kept.

Marble column Stefan Lazarevićs

Stefan Lazarević had a marble column erected on Kosovo Polje with an inscription that, in a solemn rhetorical narrative, portrayed Lazar in an antic manner as the "conqueror of the dragon" and celebrated his martyrdom. The inscription on the column, which was preserved until the end of the 15th century, has been handed down in the so-called "Turcica" in Constantine Mihailović's memoirs:

On the battlefield

Gazimestan Memorial

In 1953, in socialist Yugoslavia, instead of the controversial project of a monumental temple to the Field of Blackbirds, Aleksandar Deroko erected a simpler monument complex, with a tower in the shape of a medieval donjon at its centre. Called Gazimestan, it had little significance under the Communists, but became a symbolic site due to the 600th anniversary of the battle in 1989. During the Kosovo War and the administration of Kosovo by UNMIK, parts of the Gazimestan monument were damaged in 1999 and 2004. In particular, the staircase inside the tower was destroyed. In 2010, KFOR handed over guarding of the monument complex to the Kosovo authorities and the local police.

Vidovdanski hram

The greatest media publicity was given to the project of a national memorial to the Field of Blackbirds, which was first envisaged by the construction of a temple - Vidovdanski hram - during the reign of Aleksandar Obrenović before the First World War. The design came from the later court sculptor of the Karađorđević dynasty that succeeded the Obrenovićs, Ivan Meštrović. In 1905, he presented the project for a monumental basilica, in which numerous sculptures were to reflect the heroes of the Blackbird myth. The building project could not be concretized after Aleksandar Obrenović's assassination. Nevertheless, Meštrović had made most of the larger-than-life sculptures, including the Caryatids, the marble sculpture of Miloš Obilić (now in the Serbian National Museum), Miloš Obilić's bronze in the Royal Castle on Dedinje, Banović Strahinje (now in the Tate Gallery), as well as the marble sculptures Srđa Zlopogleđa and Male udovice, and as the central figure from the Kraljević Marko cycle, a now-lost monumental marble sculpture of a naked Kraljević Marko riding a horse, which today only gives the original impression as a smaller bronze. The figures of the cycle also include the representations of mothers and widows, of which the two sculptures of the mythological beauty Vukosava of Kosovo are shown as Secanje (Engl. Remembrance) in variants in the National Museum of Serbia, as well as in the Royal Castle on Dedije.

The sculptures of the Vidovdanski hram were first exhibited in Paris in 1908, the then completed cycle in 1910 at the Vienna Secession Exhibition, and the wooden model of the cathedral in 1911 at the exhibition in Rome in the Serbian pavilion together with the sculptures, where his work was awarded the gold medal, establishing Meštrović's world fame as a sculptor. The model was then in New York until 1968, after which it came to Kruševac, where it is now exhibited in the town's museum.

Other national projects

Hram Svetog Save

A highly symbolic project reflecting the historical echo of the Battle of the Blackbird Field also became the Temple of St. Sava in Belgrade. Planned since the 1920s and started in 1935, the controversy surrounding the building idea, which lasted for decades, was constantly modified in its symbolism. In its spiritual dedication to Serbian medieval history, the building was based on Bratislav Pantelić's design of a symbolic center of national unity and national memorial. His idea is to be understood as: external manifestation of the sentiment of uniqueness (of Serbs) and following the right path with the axiom created on the Field of Blackbirds - and thus committed to the multiple references to the Field of Blackbirds myth. Therefore, due to the fact that further construction was prevented for a long time by the communist nomenclature, the resumption in 1985 with the celebrations of the 600th commemoration day of the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in 1989, prepared in parallel, formed the modern climax in the awakening of national feelings. In the naming of the building as a temple, as in the abandoned project of the Vidovdan temple, its exceptional character was emphasized, which was further underlined by the addition of a memorial to the Battle of the Blackbirds in the form of a chapel, designed by the chief architect Branko Pešić, as the burial church of the Holy Martyr Prince Lazar (Grobna crkva svetog mučenika kneza Lazara), an integral part of the modified project.

The topos of the Battle of Amselfeld in the visual arts

In addition to Meštrović's sculptures, the themes and topos of the Battle of Blackbird and the heroic figures exaggerated in popular and epic tradition have also been addressed by other visual artists in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia. These include the realists Uroš Predić ("Kosovka dvojka"), Paja Jovanović ("Boško Jugović na konju" 1922, "Marko and the Vila") and the expressionist Petar Lubarda.

The latter created several studies of the Field of Blackbirds in the style of expressionism. Thus, on behalf of the Government of Serbia, he designed the "Kosovski boj", now considered a masterpiece in the pictorial topos of the "Battle of the Field of Blackbirds". It represented a true artistic sensation at its inauguration, as the depiction broke not only radically with tradition, but especially with the forms of Socialist Realism, and thus also contained a political statement. Preliminary studies for Lubarda's "Kosovski boj" can be found in the possession of the National Museum in Cetinje and the National Library of Serbia. The Central Work was intended as a wall fresco for the ballroom of the former Izvršno Veče Narodne Republike Srbije in the New Castle. Today the building serves as the official residence of the Serbian President.

Lubarda's "Kosovski boj" is a monumental 56 m² mural painting that ushered in a new epoch in Serbian painting through the figurative abstraction of details of the two armies falling on each other, the sometimes grotesque faces of people and horses, their partly sculptural depiction, and the use of bright colours in which red, purple and green dominate. Without descriptive means and literary allusion, the painting also uses universal symbols and sublimated impressions in the general depiction of the horror of war. Generally considered the main work of modern painting in post-war Yugoslavia, it is also the first modern battle painting in Serbian art.

A large-scale tapestry (5 × 3.33 m) of the 16th century depicting the battle (Bataille du Champs des Merles - La Bataille de Kosovo Polje) is found in the former French royal castle of Chenonceau. The tapestry, woven in Oudenaarde (Audenarde) in Flanders, is probably part of a pictorial cycle. Another one probably in the private collection of Yves Saint Laurent. The tapestry was completely unknown to previous researchers and historians and was discovered by chance by Jelena Bojovic. Depicted are Patriarch Spiridon blessing Princess Milica. Next to her her two sons Stefan and Vuk, Bosnian notables and Milos Obilic. In the left background the Ottoman army is depicted before the battle, on the right after the defeat with the dead corps Sultan Murat.

In isolated cases, the Battle of the Blackbird Field was also thematized by emigrants in the architecture of other countries, for example in the Palazzo Gopcevich built by a Serbian banker in Trieste in 1850.

Drama and film

Ljubomir Simović created the drama Boj na Kosovu in 1988 on the initiative of the Jugoslovensko Dramsko Pozorište. After the Serbian state broadcaster Radio Televizija Beograd (now RTS) wanted to adapt it into a series for the 600th anniversary of the battle, it was ultimately decided to make a feature film directed by Zdravko Šotra. In particular, Žarko Laušević was remembered in the role of Miloš Obilić. Simović returned to his drama in 2002, shortening the original 21 scenes to 11.

In 1989, Radio Televizija Beograd also produced a three-part documentary series (I- Najezda, II-Boj, III-Legenda), which was scientifically supervised by Sima Ćirković and Miroslav Pantić. The series, which was filmed in original locations, gives wide space to historical and literary documents.

Petar Lubarda "Kosovski boj" (1953), wall fresco in the Festive Hall of the New Castle in Belgrade


The large-format Renaissance tapestry "Bataille du Champs des Merles" on the right in the picture on the second floor of the vestibule in Chenonceau Castle shows motifs of the battle


The Meşhed-i Hüdavendigar


Gazimestan, Monument to the Battle of the Blackbird Field

Political Acts of State

The Vidovdan was first celebrated as a formal act of state in Serbia on the occasion of the 550th anniversary in 1939. However, as early as the coronation of King Peter I in 1904, scenes of the Battle of Blackbird Field were re-enacted and linked to the ceremony of King Peter's inauguration in the cult of Knez Lazar and Miloš Obilić.

Vidovdan was also officially commemorated during the First World War in 1916 in the Entente powers allied with Serbia, France and Great Britain, in the so-called Kosovo Celebration Day. Even in the United States, the day of the Battle of Blackbird Field in 1918 was commemorated as Kossovo Day under then American President Woodrow Wilson. Americans were called upon to pray for the Serbs in churches and the Serbian flag was hoisted at the White House.

Slobodan Milošević's appearance at the 600th anniversary of the battle on 28 June 1989 in Gazimestan and his Blackbird Field speech there is seen as the first significant demonstration of the Serbian national movement and the difficult process of finding Serbian identity in the crisis-ridden Yugoslavia of the 1980s. The nationality conflicts in late Yugoslavia, which contributed to the Yugoslav wars with the rejection of identification with Yugoslav society and rejection of a common state, were read out of the Amselfeld speech, especially in the West.