Bronze bust statue of Vuk Stefanovic Karadžic in the Orthodox Church Park, Ljubljana. The statue was a gift from the city of Belgrade and unveiled in July 2016.
"Vuk Stefanovic Karadžic (7 November 1787 – 7 February 1864) was a Serbian philologist and linguist who was the major reformer of the Serbian language. He deserves, perhaps, for his collections of songs, fairy tales, and riddles, to be called the father of the study of Serbian folklore. He was also the author of the first Serbian dictionary in his new reformed language. In addition, he translated the New Testament into the reformed form of the Serbian spelling and language.
He was well known abroad and familiar to Jacob Grimm, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and historian Leopold von Ranke. Vuk was the primary source for Ranke's Serbische Revoluzion ("Serbian Revolution"), written in 1829.
Vuk Karadžic was born to parents Stefan and Jegda (née Zrnic) in the village of Tršic, near Loznica, which was in the Ottoman Empire (now in Serbia). His family settled from Drobnjaci, and his mother was born in Ozrinici, Nikšic (in present-day Montenegro.) His family had a low infant survival rate, thus he was named Vuk ('wolf') so that witches and evil spirits would not hurt him (the name was traditionally given to strengthen the bearer).
Education -
Karadžic was fortunate to be a relative of Jevta Savic Cotric, the only literate person in the area at the time, who taught him how to read and write. Karadžic continued his education in the Tronoša Monastery in Loznica. As a boy he learned calligraphy there, using a reed instead of a pen and a solution of gunpowder for ink. In lieu of proper writing paper he was lucky if he could get cartridge wrappings. Throughout the whole region, regular schooling was not widespread at that time and his father at first did not allow him to go to Austria. Since most of the time while in the monastery Karadžic was forced to pasture the livestock instead of studying, his father brought him back home. Meanwhile, the First Serbian Uprising seeking to overthrow the Ottomans began in 1804. After unsuccessful attempts to enroll in the gymnasium at Sremski Karlovci, for which 19-year-old Karadžic was too old, Karadžic left for Petrinja where he spent a few months learning Latin and German. Later on, he left for Belgrade, now in the hands of the Revolutionary Serbia, in order to meet the highly respected scholar Dositej Obradovic, and ask him to support his studies. Unfortunately, Obradovic dismissed him. Disappointed, Karadžic left for Jadar and began working as a scribe for Jakov Nenadovic. After the founding of the Belgrade Higher School, Karadžic became one of its first students.
Later life and death
Soon afterwards, he grew ill and left for medical treatment in Pest and Novi Sad, but was unable to receive treatment for his leg. It was rumored that Karadžic deliberately refused to undergo amputation, instead deciding to make do with a prosthetic wooden pegleg, of which there were several sarcastic references in some of his works. Karadžic returned to Serbia by 1810, and as unfit for military service, he served as the secretary for commanders Curcija and Hajduk-Veljko. His experiences would later give rise to two books. With the Ottoman defeat of the Serbian rebels in 1813, he left for Vienna and later met Jernej Kopitar, an experienced linguist with a strong interest in secular slavistics. Kopitar's influence helped Karadžic with his struggle in reforming the Serbian language and its orthography. Another important influence was Sava Mrkalj.
In 1814 and 1815, Karadžic published two volumes of Serbian Folk Songs, which afterwards increased to four, then to six, and finally to nine tomes. In enlarged editions, these admirable songs drew towards themselves the attention of all literary Europe and America. Goethe characterized some of them as "excellent and worthy of comparison with Solomon's Song of Songs."
In 1824, he sent a copy of his folksong collection to Jacob Grimm, who was enthralled particularly by The Building of Skadar which Karadžic recorded from singing of Old Rashko. Grimm translated it into German and the song was noted and admired for many generations to come.[1] Grimm compared them with the noblest flowers of Homeric poetry, and of The Building of Skadar he said: "one of the most touching poems of all nations and all times." The founders of the Romantic School in France, Charles Nodier, Prosper Mérimée, Lamartine, Gerard de Nerval, and Claude Fauriel translated a goodly number of them, and they also attracted the attention of Russian Alexander Pushkin, Finnish national poet Johan Ludwig Runeberg, Czech Samuel Roznay, Pole Kazimierz Brodzinski, English writers Walter Scott, Owen Meredith, and John Bowring, among others.
Karadžic continued collecting song well into the 1830s. He arrived in Montenegro in the fall of 1834. Infirm, he descended to the Bay of Kotor to winter there, and returned in the spring of 1835. It was there that Karadžic met Vuk Vrcevic, an aspiring littérateur, born in Risan. From then on Vrcevic became Karadžic's faithful and loyal collaborator who collected folk songs and tales and sent them to his address in Vienna for many years to come. Another equally diligent collaborator of Vuk Karadžic was another namesake from Boka Kotorska the Priest Vuk Popovic. Both Vrcevic and Popovic were steadily and uselfishly involved in the gathering of the ethnographic, folklore and lexical material for Karadžic. Later, other collaborators joined Karadžic, including Milan Ð. Milicevic.
The majority of Karadžic's works were banned from publishing in Serbia and Austria during the rule of Prince Miloš Obrenovic. As observed from a political point of view, Obrenovic saw the works of Karadžic as a potential hazard due to a number of apparent reasons, one of which was the possibility that the content of some of the works, although purely poetic in nature, was capable of creating a certain sense of patriotism and a desire for freedom and independence, which very likely might have driven the populace to take up arms against the Turks. This, in turn, would prove detrimental to Prince Miloš's politics toward the Ottoman Empire, with whom he had recently forged an uneasy peace. In Montenegro, however, Njegoš's printing press operated without the archaic letter known as the "hard sign"; in other words, it adhered to Vuk Karadžic's orthography. Prince Miloš was to resent Njegoš's abandonment of the unhappy hard sign, over which, at that time, furious intellectual battles were being waged, with ecclesiastical hierarchy involved as well. Karadžic's works, however, did receive high praise and recognition elsewhere, especially in Russia. In addition to this, Karadžic was granted a full pension from the Tsar in 1826.
He died at Vienna, and was survived by his daughter Mina Karadžic, who was a painter and writer, and by his son Dimitrije Karadžic, a military officer. His remains were relocated to Belgrade in 1897 and buried with great honours next to the grave of Dositej Obradovic, in front of St. Michael's Cathedral (Belgrade)."
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