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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A C A S E S T U D Y I N T H EE M E R G E N C E O F

B Y Z A N T I N E S T U D I E SSerbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Srdan Pirivatric

When Byzantine studies emerged during the humanistic period, the Serbianlands were mostly under Ottoman control, separated from the intellectual

currents in Christian Europe. In the wider South Slavic region, the rudimentaryByzantine studies of the humanistic scholars from Dubrovnik and Dalmatia weremost often simply excerpts from Byzantine historiographers based on their westernEuropean editions.1 The works by these authors from the eastern Adriatic coast, withthe significant exception of Mauro Orbini in abridged Russian translation (1722),had almost no reception among the Serbs. Austrian Count Ðorde Brankovic, learnedwriter of an extensive work with a medieval conception of history (named “Chron-icles,” written between 1690 and 1711), made scant use of some Byzantine sources inhis work, but nevertheless he became the first Serbian historiographer who, althoughonly in a rudimentary manner, worked with original Byzantine source material.Archimandrite Jovan Rajic, the first ever Serbian author of a modern history(“of various Slavic peoples,” being the Bulgarians, Croats and Serbs, publishedin 1794–5), having been living on the periphery of the Austrian empire, used certainByzantine authors too, but only in the Latin translations of the chrestomathies. Inboth cases one is concerned with the reception of European Byzantine studies ratherthan any contribution to their development.

From the uprising of the Serbs in the Smederevo sanjak (1804) in the Ottomanempire to the creation of the autonomous (1830) Principality of Serbia and after-wards of an independent Principality (1878) and Kingdom (1882), several factorsaffected the development of the science of history in Serbia in general, and of Byzan-tine studies in particular. Besides the general aspirations towards the higher levels ofenlightenment, it had been mostly historicism, as the integral part of the foundationsof the Serbian nationalism in the nineteenth century, that prevailed. As was natural,there was a great interest in the Serbian past, most particularly the medieval period.The other significant factor was methodological in nature. The criticism in theapproach towards the historical sources was evident early on, at the very beginningsof modern historiography, for example in the works by Jovan Rajic or Vuk Karadzic.However, the critical historiography of the nineteenth century in Serbia remained fora long time rudimentary. Gathering and publishing sources were the preoccupation

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of learned men who wanted to contribute to the progress of historical knowledge.This was particularly visible in the activities over several decades of the Society ofSerbian Senses (Slovesnost) and its heir, the Serbian Learned Society, the predecessorof the Serbian Royal Academy. Outside of these valuable heuristic activities, theroad to scientifically and methodologically based research was long and slow. Mostparticularly, lectures in medieval studies and history in the Lyceum and the GreatSchool in Belgrade, the predecessor of the university, were under the strong influenceof national-romantic ideas, epic poetry and tradition in general. The teachers andresearchers were all amateurs. Finally, Serbian historiography was thematicallymostly focused on national issues. Within this general climate, the Serbian transla-tion of the Ioannina Chronicle, by Jeftimije Avramovic in 1862, represents anindividual attempt by an erudite, although it should be stressed that it was actuallythe first Byzantine study in Serbia, and that it remains the only translation of thisimportant source to this day.

The key event for the development of Serbian historiography and medieval studieswas the outcome of the conflict between the representatives of the romantic andcritical schools (the conflict is very well known, although not completely clear in itsdetails).2 The critical orientation of historiography represented a general phenom-enon in many countries, and thus could be considered a stage in the developmentof the very science of history. However, besides that general meaning, reconsideredin the framework of the local situation in Serbia during the last quarter of the nine-teenth century, the issue of survival or supremacy of the critical historiography wasin close relation to the issue of the general direction of the culture, with significantconsequences on the cultural policy of the state and social institutions. The victory ofthe critical school, which was strongly felt in the selection of members of the newlyestablished Serbian Royal Academy of Science in 1886, as well as in the personnelchanges at the Great School, heralded an age of significant progress of the historicalstudies in Serbia. The outcome of this conflict, which for years shook not only thescientific and educational circles and the Great School, but society in general, waslinked to the archimandrite Ilarion Ruvarac and Ljubomir Kovacevic, and also to aforeigner, a Czech, Konstantin Jirecek. Stojan Novakovic did not get involved in thisconflict, although he introduced the critical approach much earlier in his method andhis widely directed research. These scientists touched upon Byzantine themes in theirworks to a greater or lesser degree, but they did so with the aim of researching theSerbian Middle Ages. Finally, none of them, with the exception of Jirecek, wasprofessionally equipped for historical studies – based on formal criteria, they them-selves were amateurs.

Actually the first Serbian contribution to Byzantine history, namely Constantine:The Last Emperor of the Greeks or the Conquest of Constantinople by the Turks(ad 1453), was undertaken not in Serbia, but in London in 1892 by then ambassadorto the Court of St James and later Count, Cedomilj Mijatovic, who was both a highlypositioned politician and a historian. He was also considered a member of the criticalschool. The work was quite solid for that stage of Serbian historiography and Byzan-tine studies. Nevertheless it remained a solitary effort, an expression of the personalinterest of the author in pre-Ottoman Balkan studies and also of some indicativepolitical views. Significantly, it was dedicated to Prince Constantine, the heir to theGreek throne. Mijatovic was surely among those who considered that the Kingdom

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of Greece should move towards the revival of the Byzantine empire and that PrinceConstantine should take over what Emperor Constantine XI had lost.

Nonetheless, parallel to the rise of historical studies in general, and also tothe important changes in the teaching methodology at the Great School in the lastdecades of the nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly clear that a system-atic approach to Byzantine studies was needed.3 In 1890 it was decided to found adepartment at the Great School with a “special view on Byzantine history,” but thisdecision was not realized. After 1893, Byzantine studies were informally introducedinto the curriculum, once Bozidar Prokic had become lecturer in the HistoryDepartment on Ancient History and the Middle Ages, and his interests had graduallyturned towards Byzantium.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Serbia enjoyed its first generation of histor-ians who had been educated abroad, and were aware of the importance of Byzantinesources for the study of national history. Thus Stanoje Stanojevic envisaged avoluminous edition of all the Byzantine sources relating to the Serbs (although of tenplanned volumes, only two were published in Novi Sad, in 1903 and 1906, entitledThe Byzantine Empire and the Serbs). The government’s decision to provide statescholarships for the advancement of the talented graduate students abroad was ofutmost significance to the development of Byzantine and medieval studies. Thesedevelopments in Serbia turned out to be a happy concurrence with importantmoments in the development of Byzantine studies in western Europe. At that time,the first Byzantine departments were being established at major European uni-versities, in Munich in 1898 and in Paris in 1899. The state scholarships of theKingdom of Serbia enabled a group of students to attend the newly establishedseminars given by the already famous Karl Krumbacher in Munich, which had sig-nificant consequences for the development of Byzantine studies in Serbia as well as inother areas of historiography. Most of the generation of Serbian graduate studentswho, with the government’s support, became specialized Byzantinists or medievalistsabroad – Stanoje Stanojevic, Vladimir Corovic, Jovan Radonic, Nikola Radojcic,Dragutin Anastasijevic, Bozidar Prokic and Filaret Granic – were at some pointstudents of Krumbacher.4

Among Krumbacher’s students from Serbia, Dragutin Anastasijevic (1877–1950)could be considered the first specialized Byzantine scientist. After graduation fromthe Great School in Belgrade in the field of classical philology he was a student ofKrumbacher with a state scholarship. He received his Ph.D. from Munich in 1905with the dissertation Die paränetischen Alphabete in der griechischen Literatur.Almost simultaneously, a professor at the Great School, Bozidar Prokic (1859–1922), received his Ph.D. as Krumbacher’s student in 1906 with the well-knowndissertation Die Zusätze in der Handshrift des Johannes Skylitzes (Cod. Vindob.Hist. Gr. LXXIV).

In the meantime some significant changes occurred at the Great School in Belgradewhich brought about the establishment of an independent centre for Byzantinestudies. Namely, the Great School was turned into the university in 1905, where atthe beginning of 1906 the Seminar for Byzantine Studies was established within theFaculty of Philosophy (FPh), thus becoming the third oldest university departmentfor Byzantine studies in Europe.5 In May 1906 young Anastasijevic was appointedthe chair of the Seminar, at the rank of associate professor. In his first teaching years,

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1906–10, Anastasijevic taught medieval and New Greek language and Greek palae-ography, and from 1910 to 1914 he taught the history of the Byzantine empire forthe period 395–1025. The exercises mostly consisted of reading texts and analysingtheir language and style. He paid special attention to the creation of the Seminar’slibrary and in spite of a scarcity of resources he managed to create a relativelyexpansive collection. But it was almost completely destroyed during the First WorldWar. Prokic continued his career at the National Archive. The basic line of hisresearch, before and after the publication of his dissertation, was the investigationof the so-called Samuilo’s state, an important research subject for Serbian histori-ography and a subject on which he published several works, not fully surpassed tothis day.

Nikola Radojcic (1882–1964), who studied in Graz, Zagreb, Jena and Munich,was a student of Krumbacher, but also of Heinrich Geltzer, who was his mentor forhis important Ph.D. thesis Zwei letzten Komnenen auf dem konstantinopolischenTron, published in 1907. His body of work makes him one of the most significantSerbian historians in general; however, after having published several significantByzantine studies – on how Byzantine authors of the eleventh and twelfth centuriesnamed the Croats and Serbs, on Anna Komnene’s information on the Serbs, on theinformation supplied by later Byzantine authors on the Serbs – his interests turnedaway from Byzantine themes towards the history of the institutions, state law, thehistory of Bosnia and the history of historiography.

For Stanoje Stanojevic (1873–1937) and Vladimir Corovic (1885–1941), studentsof Konstantin Jirecek and Vatroslav Jagic, the short time they spent with Krum-bacher was just an additional, secondary professional advancement. Stanojevic’sinterest in the relations between the Byzantine empire and Serbia, from the beginningof the century, almost completely ceased in his later years, with the significant excep-tion of his fruitful Serbian diplomatic studies, which also included the Byzantinecomponent. Corovic, on the other hand, in his remarkable scientific career – over1,000 published works make him the most prolific Serbian historian – rarely touchedupon Byzantine themes. Nonetheless, the Byzantine component in their professionaleducation was very significant for their very important support for the personnelchanges which, in the 1930s, brought about the advancement of Byzantine studies atBelgrade University.

The First World War interrupted lectures at the university, which restartedafter the war in significantly different political circumstances, in the newly foundedKingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1931 onwards Yugoslavia). Afterthe end of the war, Anastasijevic, with typical fervour, began working to replenish theSeminar library, which in part was covered by German war reparations funding.However, as was the case in the years before the war, the key problem of the Seminarwas the lack of resources and associates. For many years he conducted his research inthe archives of the Mt Athos monasteries, primarily Hilandar and the Great Lavra.He took over 600 photographs of various documents nowadays partly lost, and theprecious collection is now kept in the Archive of the Serbian Academy of Science andArts (SANU). He was preoccupied with Byzantine–Serbian relations, particularlyunder the first members of the Nemanjic dynasty and the period before the fall ofthe Byzantine empire, as well as with Byzantine–Bulgarian and Byzantine–Russianrelations in the second half of the tenth century, in connection to Samuilo’s state. It is

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known that he was working on a synthetic overview of Byzantine history, which waspublished in over 100 articles in the National Serbo-Croato-Slovene Encyclopedia(I–IV, 1924–9). Anastasijevic’s studies provided him with international renown asa distinguished Byzantine scientist. In 1921, Anastasijevic started teaching at theTheological Faculty, but he remained the chair and often the only associate atthe Seminar for Byzantine Studies. The organization of the Second InternationalCongress of Byzantine Studies, held in Belgrade in 1927, was his great success. In1931 Anastasijevic finally left the Seminar, without leaving behind him an immediatesuccessor or heir.

Nonetheless, as early as in 1932, another student of Krumbacher – a monk namedFilaret (Branko) Granic (1883–1948) – was appointed chair of the Seminar. He waseducated in Novi Sad and Vienna, and later in Munich, where, in 1909, near the endof Krumbacher’s life, he obtained his Ph.D. with the dissertation Die Subscriptionenin den datierten griechischen Handschriften des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts. He enteredan Orthodox monastic order in 1912 and later graduated at the Higher TheologicalSchool in Sremski Karlovci. After the war he transferred to the Theological Faculty inBelgrade, and from 1932 to 1941 he taught the cultural history of the Byzantineempire as an honorary professor at the Seminar. Granic’s work, a significant scien-tific corpus, did not receive sufficient recognition in his lifetime. He dealt with issuesthat remained outside the focus of scientific interests, or were rather narrow andrecondite. Nevertheless, his interests were diverse, including church history, canonlaw, the relations between the state and the Church in the fifth and sixth centuries,the first monastic communities, the church policy of Justinian, the founding of thearchbishopric of Ohrid, and the autocephalous state of the Serbian Church and itsmonastic codebooks. He covered these issues in a number of works of permanentvalue, first because of his scrupulous approach to the subject and sources, but alsobecause of his special knowledge gained through his education and his service inthe Church. Particularly valuable were his notes and outlines published in thebibliographic sections of Byzantinische Zeitschrift.

The position of chair of the Seminar was given to George Ostrogorsky (1902–76)in 1940, even then a well-established Byzantine scientist, who under peculiar circum-stances had ended up in Belgrade a few years earlier. Ostrogorsky was born inSt Petersburg, which he fled during the October Revolution in 1917, taking asylum inFinland. He began his university studies in Heidelberg, continued them in Paris, andcompleted them in 1925 at Heidelberg with his Ph.D. dissertation Die ländlischeSteurgemeinde des byzantinischen Reiches im X. Jahrundert. From 1929, he taughtas a private associate professor at the university of Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland).However, with the rise of Nazism, his living and working conditions deteriorated.Ostrogorsky decided to accept an earlier invitation from Stanoje Stanojevic andmoved from Breslau to Belgrade in 1933. In the first years of his stay in Belgrade heworked within the Seminar for Byzantine Studies as an honorary professor, until hetook over the chair from Granic in 1940.

Around the same time when Ostrogorsky started working at the Seminar,Vladimir Mosin (1894–1987) joined the department at the position of a privateassociate professor. He was part of the last wave of Russian scientists who, as refu-gees from Russia, relocated to the Kingdom of SCS between the two wars, and madean enormous contribution to their new homeland. Some of them were extremely

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important for Byzantine research, and one might mention Teodor Taranovski(1875–1936), Sergije Troicki (1878–1972), Aleksandar Solovjev (1890–1971),although of the group only Ostrogorsky and Mosin could be considered Byzantinistsstricto sensu. In 1936, together with Solovjev, Mosin published a very significantvolume, exemplary for its time, of the Greek charters issued by the Serbian rulers.However, Mosin’s engagement at the Seminar was casual, while he was waiting forseveral years to be appointed associate professor at the FPh in Skopje, which eventu-ally happened in 1940. On the other hand, Ostrogorsky’s activities were closelylinked to the Seminar from the very beginning, and completely in accordance withthe wishes of that circle of historians who assisted in bringing him to Belgrade. Itwould turn out that his coming was a turning point in the development of Byzantinestudies in Serbia.

Yugoslavia’s involvement in World War II, in April 1941, did not interruptOstrogorsky’s scientific work, but rather saw him secluded in his study, away fromthe public eye, where in silence he prepared significant studies which awaited bettertimes for publication. University life was almost at a standstill during the war, but theSeminar library was this time spared, and thus facilitated his solitary research.

Without a doubt, George Ostrogorsky was one of the biggest names in Byzantinestudies of the past century. His scientific work is well known in details, and has beenevaluated on many occasions.6 The first years of his brilliant scientific career weremarked by his remarkable dissertation, and he proceeded to discuss the commercialand social foundations of the development of the Byzantine empire, the socialmetamorphosis of the Byzantine empire, the relationship between the state andChurch, the tax system, co-rulership, prices and wages. The most important phase ofOstrogorsky’s work was in Yugoslavia, where he published seminal works on autoc-racy in the Byzantine empire and the Slavic world, the medieval hierarchy of thestates, the agrarian situation in the Byzantine empire, Byzantine iconography, and onrelations between the Byzantine empire and the Slavic world. Out of this extensiveand modern research came his famous synthesis of Byzantine history, considered formany decades the best of its kind, and in many ways unsurpassed – Geschichtedes byzantinischen Staates, Munich 1940 (2nd edn 1952, 3rd edn 1963, Sonderaus-gabe 1965).

Radical political changes came about by the end of the Second World War, namelythe Communist Party of Yugoslavia coming to power in Belgrade and Serbia (1944)and then the rest of Yugoslavia (1945), as a result of a series of internationalcircumstances, war operations of the USSR army and activities of the YugoslavPartisan-Communist movement. These had a significant and long-lasting effect onboth Serbian and Yugoslav historiography, in a degree and manner that thus far hasnot been the subject of any scientific research. One might offer a general opinion thatmedieval and Byzantine studies were, compared to other disciplines, relativelyunscathed, and the opportunities for scientific work and university lectures in thesefields remained relatively good, although they did not approach the favourableconditions that had existed before the war.

The material resources at the university, in the difficult post-war years of“reparation and rebuilding,” were scarce, and thus it could not have been expectedfor the Seminar to be transformed into a significant scientific centre. However, thepossibility of establishing scientific centres within the academies of science at the

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federal level resulted in the foundation of the Institute for Byzantine Studies of SANUin 1948, under the leadership of Ostrogorsky. In the decades that followed, theInstitute proved itself to be the organizational nucleus of large projects, mostlyvisible in its journal Zbornik radova Vizantoloskog instituta (ZRVI), a series ofmonograph studies and an edition of Vizantijski izvori za istoriju naroda Jugoslavije(VIINJ) which offered translations of and commentaries on excerpts from Byzantinesources that related to the history of the peoples of Yugoslavia. The scientific work wasorganized in several larger thematic groups, consisting of the history of the Byzantineempire, Byzantine–South Slavic relations, Byzantine literature and philology, andByzantine and post-Byzantine art.

Ostrogorsky was the initiator of and driving force behind all initiatives inByzantine studies during the three post-war decades. He continued working on thethemes outlined in his pre-war research. Numerous fundamental studies followed,including those on peasants, the Byzantine land register, Emperor Dusan and hisaristocrats in their struggle with the Byzantine empire, the Byzantine emperor andthe world hierarchic order, the internal structure of the Byzantine empire, the cre-ation of the thematic system, the history of tax-exemption in the Byzantine empire,Byzantine towns in the early Middle Ages, the Byzantine village municipality,the feuds under the Komnenos dynasty, the Byzantine aristocracy, and the evolutionof the Byzantine coronation ceremony. A particular mention should be given to thesignificant monographs on the pronoia and the Serres region after the death ofDusan. His synthetic history was published in many languages, including in Englishfor the first time in 1968. Almost all of his works were published in the CollectedWorks of George Ostrogorsky, in five volumes (1969–70). Under his firm hand,the Twelfth International Congress of Byzantine Studies was held in Ohrid in 1961,after which he became the honorary President of the International Association ofByzantine Studies, and was a recipient of significant national and internationalhonours and awards.

Common activities of the Seminar and the Institute under Ostrogorsky’sleadership brought about the phenomenon known in international circles as the“Belgrade School of Byzantine Studies.” From the early 1960s through to the end ofthe 1980s, over twenty graduate students, fifteen of whom were foreigners, under-took their specializations at the Seminar, under then rather restrictive conditions forattending the graduate courses. Under Ostrogorsky’s supervision, several prominentlocal Byzantine scientists and medievalists graduated, first and foremost JadranFerluga, Bozidar Ferjancic and Ljubomir Maksimovic.

Jadran Ferluga (1920–2004) received his Ph.D. in 1956 for a dissertation onByzantine administration in Dalmatia. His career as a professor at the FPhlasted until he transferred to Münster in 1971, where he took over the Seminarfor Byzantine Studies. His significant career focused on the issues of Byzantine pro-vincial administration, Byzantine rule over Dalmatia and Byzantine–South Slavicrelations, as well as some particularities of the Byzantine feudal system. Particularlyinteresting are his commentaries with the translation of excerpts from Leo theDeacon and John Skylitzes, where he elaborated in great detail on many issues relat-ing to the so-called Samuilo’s state. His fruitful career in Münster was unfortunatelystopped prematurely, in 1993, due to illness.

Ostrogorsky’s immediate successor at the Seminar and the Institute was his

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student Bozidar Ferjancic (1929–98). Born and educated in Belgrade, after under-graduate studies of history at the FPh in Belgrade he received his Ph.D. in 1960 for athesis on despots in the Byzantine empire and South Slavic states. He took over therunning of the Seminar from Ostrogorsky as a tenured professor, and ended hiscareer at the FPh in 1994, while he worked as the director of the Institute from 1976until his death in 1998. After Ostrogorsky’s departure, Ferjancic took over the largeresponsibility of the further development of Byzantine studies in Serbia. Quietlyand unobtrusively, he organized the scientific research and took care in educatingnew generations of researchers. Concurrently, his scientific career was receivinginternational acclaim.7 He was a Byzantinist of wide horizons, with interests mostlyfocused on the late Byzantine period, particularly the issues of internal development,society, institutions and economy, which are the themes that became almost atrademark of the Belgrade School of Byzantine studies in the last decades of thetwentieth century. Among these are the famous studies on the dignities of despotes,sebastokratores and kaisares, about the internal conflicts between the last Palaiolo-goi, properties of the Palaiologoi and the institution of co-rulership under thePalaiologos dynasty. Besides, as a mentor for graduate studies, with his selection oftopics, he orchestrated the production of several monographs on the Palaiologoiat the school. He also wrote monographs about Thessaly in the thirteenth and four-teenth centuries, and Serres under Serbian and Byzantine rule during the fourteenthcentury. For the VIINJ, he translated and wrote commentaries for excerpts from thework by Constantine Porphyrogenitos, the historians of the second half of the tenthcentury, data from different hagiographies and finally from the Byzantine rhetors ofthe second half of the twelfth century. His translation and commentary of theexcerpts from Nicephorus Gregoras and John Kantakouzenos, in collaboration withSima Cirkovic, are outstanding. Two more almost completed larger works werefound after his death among his papers: the translation of and commentary onexcerpts from the legal collection of Demetrios Chomatenos, and a monographabout the king and emperor Dusan, also written in collaboration with Cirkovic.

Ostrogorsky envisaged the Belgrade School of Byzantine Studies primarily as aschool of historians, and thus history was the main focus of the scientific activities atthe Institute for Byzantine Studies, but other disciplines had their place within thisframework, notably philology and art history, and among the most importantscholars were Franja Barisic (1914–88), Ivanka Nikolajevic (Stojkovic) (1921–90),Ninoslava Radosevic (1943–2007) and Ivan Ðuric (1947–97). The principles laidout at the time by the founder of the Belgrade School, George Ostrogorsky, weresustained through this period under the careful leadership of Bozidar Ferjancic.During years when Yugoslavian society and the state were plunged into crisis, at theend of the 1980s, Byzantine studies were for Serbian science “one of the few remain-ing windows onto the world.” In the hard 1990s this enabled the small organism tosurvive, if not to flourish. The atmosphere at the Seminar and the Institute enabledmembers not only to continue with their true vocation, but also, in a milieu ofintellectual and spiritual tolerance, provided them with a safe haven.

It is paradoxical that exactly at the time when the dissolution of the SocialistFederal Republic of Yugoslavia started, the institutional nature of Byzantine studiesbegan to consolidate on the national level – the Yugoslav Committee for ByzantineStudies organized the First Yugoslav Conference of Byzantine Studies in Zadar in

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November 1990. The scientific gathering in the heart of the old Byzantine theme ofDalmatia was also the last of its kind. After the successive secession of the republics,the break up of Yugoslavia followed, and in the light of further political develop-ments, the Yugoslav Committee for Byzantine Studies became Serbian, within theappropriate legal succession. In the meantime, two more conferences were held(Studenica monastery, 1995; Krusevac, 2000), exclusively attended by Byzantinescientists from Serbia.

After Ferjancic retired in 1994, Ljubomir Maksimovic (b. 1938) became the chairof the Seminar, and after the death of the former in 1998 he also became the directorof the Institute. He took over both duties under very difficult and special generalconditions of delayed transition in Serbia, the UN sanctions on SR Yugoslavia andinternational isolation of the country. The principle of historical distance woulddemand that our overview of the history of the institution of Byzantine studies inSerbia, namely the activities of the Seminar and the Institute, should stop at thispoint, with a note that at the end of the second millennium, the life of the BelgradeSchool was marked by the representatives of the older and internationally acclaimedgeneration of Serbian Byzantinists. Besides Ljubomir Maksimovic, there were alsoGojko Subotic (b. 1931) and Mirjana Zivojinovic, another pupil of Ostrogorsky,who all led the scientific projects or participated in them as the members of SANU,followed by Radivoj Radic (b. 1954), a distinguished middle-generation representa-tive of the Belgrade School.

It is evident from this overview that the Seminar and the Institute were the axis ofByzantine studies as a scientific discipline in Serbia. However, other institutionsand many individuals also contributed fundamentally to the development of thediscipline. Space permits us to mention only a few of them at this point.

The strong and complex relationship between old Serbian art and Byzantine artopened up a whole new scientific field, which required interdisciplinary research.It was enabled primarily by the relative wealth of preserved archaeological artefacts,and over time the fact that some of the areas with numerous or particularly import-ant monuments (Kosovo, Metohija, the northern part of the Vardar valley inMacedonia) became part of the Kingdom of Serbia after the Balkan Wars ended(1912–13). Lectures and scientific research in the fields of archaeology and art his-tory were established at the FPh in Belgrade, as well as at the Institute of Archaeologyof SANU and the Institute for Art History at the FPh. Several institutions created inSkopje after the First World War, and which lasted until the Bulgarian occupationin 1941 – such as the Scientific Society, the FPh and the Museum of Southern Serbia– gave Byzantine studies an important place, though not at an institutional level.

Mihailo Dinic (1899–1970) worked on topics relating to the Serbian Middle Ages,primarily based on material from the Dubrovnik Archives, and contributed signifi-cantly to Byzantine studies in Serbia in the research into Byzantine–South Slavicrelations. The same applies even to a greater extent to his student and immediatesuccessor at the chair of the Middle Ages National History at the FPh, Sima Cirkovic(1929). Besides his aforementioned contribution to the edition of the VIINJ, incooperation with Bozidar Ferjancic, he focused on Byzantine–Serbian relationsin many of his works. Jovanka Kalic, professor of Medieval History at the FPh,collaborated too on the VIINJ edition, with the commentary on the excerpts ofJohn Kinnamos and Niketas Choniates, and made also numerous contributions on

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different Byzantine–Serbian topics. The significant opus of Miodrag Purkovic(1907–76) is often neglected, especially his studies of Serbian church and dynasticprospography.

The very beginnings in the field of history of old Serbian arts are linked primarilyto Mihailo Valtrovic (1839–1915), and then Vladimir Petkovic (1874–1956), MilojeVasic (1869–1956), Milan Kasanin (1895–1981), Radoslav Grujic (1878–1955) andNikolaj Lvovic Okunjev (1886–1949), while the rise and the greatest achievementsin the research are primarily linked to Svetozar Radojcic (1909–78), and then alsoto some of his students, including Vojislav J. Ðuric (1925–96), Gojko Subotic(1931–) and Gordana Babic (1932–93). Aleksandar Deroko (1894–1988) and ÐurdeBoskovic (1904–90) focused on old Serbian architecture, and around the secondhalf of the twentieth century, their successor, Vojislav Korac (1924–), made an inter-nationally acclaimed contribution to this field. Vladislav Popovic (1930–99), amember of the French Institute, made a significant mark in the field of early Byzan-tine archaeology, while Vojislav Jovanovic (1930–2005) complemented him in thefield of old Serbian archaeology.

In discussing the emergence and consolidation of Byzantine studies in Serbia, wehave focused on the people who contributed most, and have not mentioned manywho are today working hard to preserve and advance that legacy.8 The contributionof scholars based in Serbia to Byzantine studies has been immense, but in many waysit has been limited by the fact that most scholarship was published only in a languagethat remains inaccessible to many Byzantinists, and to most other medievalists.Moreover, the Serbian contribution must be measured against similar contributionsby scholars and institutions in neighbouring states and in western Europe andRussia.

NOTES

1 Barisic 1961.2 Cirkovic 1988.3 Maksimovic 1988.4 Maksimovic forthcoming.5 Maksimovic 1988; Radic 2008.6 Ferjancic 1993.7 Maksimovic 2001.8 For biographical and bibliographical details on all mentioned scholars see Cirkovic and Mihaljcic

1997. For more recent material see entries on Ferjancic in ZRVI 38 1999/2000, on Cirkovic in ZRVI41 2004, on Subotic in ZRVI 44 2007 and on Radosevic in ZRVI 45 2008.

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