During the early days of the German occupation of Belgrade in 1941, the occupying forces and the collaborationist regime issued a call to prominent Serbian intellectuals to sign a notorious document known as the Appeal to the Serbian People. This appeal, framed under the guise of “order and obedience,” demanded patriotic support in the fight against communists—even as the brutal decree loomed, stipulating the execution of 100 Serbian civilians for every German soldier killed.
One professor at the University of Belgrade resolutely refused to sign. “How can I endorse an appeal against the partisans,” he said under pressure, “when more than half of them are my students? What will I say to them when we meet again?” When a concerned music professor warned him of the consequences and asked why he was taking such a risk, the professor replied simply: “It’s easy for you—you play the bagpipes. I teach ethics to my students!”
That man was Miloš D. Đurić, a Serbian classical philologist, distinguished Hellenist, university professor, philosopher, translator, and a full member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The ethics he referred to was the Vidovdanethic (Vidovdan is, notably, the day commemorating the epic Battle of Kosovo in 1389—a historical moment that, in Serbian folklore, has taken on the qualities of an archetypal struggle for freedom.), a philosophy he devoted an entire book to, from which the following lines are drawn:
“The philosophy of Kosovo is the philosophy of the phoenix—the philosophy of Golgotha—raised from a universal value to a national particular. It is a philosophy of high culture, an ethic that is radiant, selfless, and mature; as national as it is humane; ethnological, yet equipped with all the qualities necessary to enter the universal, enriching the palette of the world soul with a new and vibrant hue.
Our national experience teaches us the profound value of suffering and martyrdom in shaping our collective identity. And this resonance is such that it can become a virtue in the elevation of the spirit of life, a virtue in shaping the global, ecumenical soul, a force within the economy of spiritual cultivation of the cultured world.
If a nation wishes to earn a name of honor, it must strive to be known not merely through statistical tables where the number of madmen increases by one, but must prove itself worthy of communion with others. It must seek to be a radiant strand in the grand tapestry of national souls, a fuller verse, a more thoughtful stanza in the imperial, all-human poem of the centuries—a hymn to the highest theme: the triumph of life over death.
For a nation is worthy only to the extent that it incarnates historical dreams with all the life it possesses, fulfills the promises of time, and, with all its might, serves the moral will of history.”
It was words born of this very understanding of the Vidovdan ethic that were spoken by Serbian Patriarch Gavrilo Dožić when, on the eve of the German assault on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he stood as one of the few high-ranking church leaders in Europe to explicitly and unequivocally condemn Nazi ideology. He declared that March 27, 1941, was the spiritual and moral equivalent of June 28 (June 15, Julian calendar), 1389.
“We have been forced, until just yesterday, to witness the beginnings of Hitler’s doctrine being applied in our own country, especially against the Jews—whom Hitler had stripped bare and driven from their hearths. Millions of innocent men, women, and children have been deprived of their rights and freedoms, their lives rendered utterly worthless. Hitler is determined to exterminate the Jews at any cost. Our Jews were already in dire straits. And yet they are our fellow citizens. They marched beside us in the wars for liberation and unification, with courage and honor, earning the highest recognition. Their representatives turned to the Serbian Church, appealing for our protection. I fulfilled my duty by approaching the Royal Regency and stating openly that our citizens must not be terrorized by Hitler. This is truly a scandal. It is tyranny worthy of the barbarians of the Middle Ages. All religions should have raised their voices in protest against such lawlessness. No one did—which is itself shameful.”
There is no need to explain the immense price paid during the Second World War for holding such a Vidovdan-inspired position, one that stood in stark opposition to all worldly realpolitik. Nor must we delve too deeply to understand just how profoundly wrong, almost proverbially so, are the sinister ignoramuses like Batrićević, Bursać, and Nikolaidis—figures who, at the mere mention of Vidovdan and Kosovo during anti-regime protests in Belgrade, reach for the same tired, prepackaged far-right rhetoric: “glorifying defeat,” “irrationality,” “Greater Serbian nationalism.” They go so far as to draw obscene equivalences—likening students blocking roads in protest to phony students who support the regime of Aleksandar Vučić, simply because they refuse to relinquish Kosovo.
The central argument behind the long-standardized form of chauvinistic farce was a speech by the popular literature professor Milo Lompar, in which he mentioned Serbian integralism—namely, the struggle to preserve Serbian identity in Republika Srpska and Montenegro. Even more contentious, however, was the fact that Lompar recently spoke at the launch of a new poetry book by Radovan Karadžić, a man convicted of crimes against humanity.
Never mind, for the moment, that every single critic of Lompar for attending Karadžić’s event is a known NATO and EU lobbyist—and that any honest analyst should refrain from drawing moral distinctions between Karadžić’s crimes against Bosnian Muslims and NATO’s crimes against Muslims across the Islamic world, especially given their unconditional support for Israel during the genocide in Gaza. We’ve come to expect even worse displays of hypocrisy, ignorance, and a kind of chauvinism that eerily mirrors that of Dragoš Kalajić from these self-proclaimed “critics of Greater Serbian nationalism.”
And here lies the crux of the problem: in one of his recent public appearances, Professor Lompar stated his opposition to erasing figures like Kalajić and Karadžić from cultural memory. This, in itself, would not be problematic—were it not for the plainly affirmative tone in how he believes they should be remembered. This is deeply troubling, given that one is a man of transparently neo-fascist convictions and the other a political leader who—regardless of the Hague Tribunal’s rulings—will remain historically documented as responsible for the deaths of 20,000 innocent people and the systematic destruction of Bosnian Muslim religious and cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This destruction echoes the operations of the Office for the Demolition of Orthodox Churches, established in 1941 by the fascist Ustaše regime in the Independent State of Croatia.
If we are to be guided by the Vidovdan ethic in the way it was understood and lived by Professor Miloš Đurić and Patriarch Gavrilo Dožić—an ethic of protecting the threatened and persecuted human being, and of standing tall against tyranny, as today’s protesting students are doing—then it must be concluded that the professor’s criticism of communist repression, while simultaneously brushing aside the monstrosities of the 1990s, is not only unethical, but leads directly into the ideological playground of Dragoš Kalajić’s most devoted disciple: Dragoslav Bokan, a man of unmistakably Nazi worldviews. Let’s be clear, we’re talking about a man whom Lompar today presents as his political enemy. But is that really the case, fundamentally?
If Professor Lompar was right to reproach former Belgrade mayor Živorad Kovačević for failing to oppose the proclamation of Nicolae Ceaușescu as an honorary citizen of Belgrade—and if he deemed that silence a moral failing—then how much more questionable is the morality of claiming that Radovan Karadžić was convicted purely for political reasons (which—even allowing for the selectiveness of Hague justice—is simply untrue), and then appearing at the launch of his book as if it were no more than the work of an eccentric, controversial artist.
This isn’t merely a case of double standards—it’s emblematic. One such example lies in Professor Lompar’s historical reflections, shared in an interview for the journal Koraci (Kragujevac, Year XIII, Volumes 11–12, 2008, pp. 175–194):
“Shortly after the Soviet army and partisan units entered Belgrade in November 1944, Politika published a list of prominent intellectuals who had been executed. Among them was Svetislav Stefanović: doctor, poet, essayist, translator of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, and a friend of Laza Kostić. Beyond any alleged reasons, the key reason for his execution—without trial—was his membership in the International Red Cross commission that investigated the mass killings in the Katyn Forest. When Hitler and Stalin divided Poland (1939), several thousand Polish officers were executed by a shot to the back of the head in Katyn. Each side accused the other. During the war, Stefanović was part of the commission that concluded the Soviets were responsible. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia insisted the Germans were to blame. And that is why Stefanović was executed… Hence, the claim that ‘the Other Serbia does not reconcile itself with crimes’ is a fundamental lie: it has, even after sixty years, reconciled itself with the crime against Svetislav Stefanović. By striving even now to erase his name, it seeks, in a virtual sense, to reenact that very crime.”
If we were to view reality the way Lompar wishes to portray it, Stefanović was merely a doctor and man of letters caught in the crossfire and then, through no fault of his own, executed by bloodthirsty and intolerant communists. In his account, Lompar—deliberately or not—omits an entire set of crucial facts, such as the one that, from the mid-1930s, Stefanović was a self-declared racist and Nazi sympathizer who wrote approvingly of book burnings in Nazi Germany, regarding such measures as justified in the preservation of the racial purity of the European man.
Lompar also fails to mention that during the German occupation, Stefanović, as president of the Serbian Literary Cooperative, played a significant role in disseminating Nazi propaganda. He advocated for the Cooperative to direct its activities toward the promotion of German literature, which he portrayed as the key source of values necessary for the cultural uplift of the Serbian people. He authored articles supportive of the occupying forces and Milan Nedić’s collaborationist government.
It was precisely for these reasons—and not because he was a doctor, essayist, or member of the Red Cross commission—that he was executed in 1944 following the liberation of Belgrade by Yugoslav communist partisans.
This, then, is how Lompar’s ethics function: those who support the communist liberators of Belgrade must repent for the execution of a known Nazi and collaborator, while Milo Lompar, without a trace of remorse, can stand at the launch of a book by a convicted war criminal, Radovan Karadžić—responsible for the horrific deaths of thousands—and proclaim him a “political prisoner.”
In other words, the fact that such double standards reflect a hypocrisy in which every form of integralism—Albanian, Bosniak, Croatian, Bulgarian—is deemed legitimate, while only the Serbian one is subjected to hysterical chauvinistic campaigns, cannot serve as justification for those same double standards. They inflict tremendous harm on the pluralistic student movement and its positive influence on regional dynamics and anti-colonial thought.
That is precisely why, today more than ever, a crucial question must be asked: Will we, as a society and a culture in search of meaning and truth, genuinely embrace the Vidovdan ethic—one that demands we stand tall before tyranny, extend a hand to the suffering, and understand life as a duty of sacrifice rather than a selfish privilege? Or will we, blinded by ideological agendas, political alliances, and the lies of manipulated memory, continue to slide into silence, hypocrisy, and the aestheticization of evil? The Vidovdan ethic is not a folkloric cliché or a relic of the past—it is an essential moral compass in a time when students are once again blocking university entrances, not to identify with any necessarily hypocritical political “narrative,” but to show that life has value only when it has purpose—the very purpose Đurić called all-human, one that each new generation must rediscover in its struggle against every new form of spiritual and political occupation.
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