CHAPTER 4

PRAYING FOR ONE'S PEOPLE: SERBIA 1872

‘God of Justice’ (‘Bože pravde’) is the first and, so far, the only state anthem that Serbia, as an independent state, has ever had. Its present lyrics, which closely follow the original of 1882, were set by the Law on the Appearance and the Use of the Coat of Arms, Flag and the Anthem of the Republic of Serbia, 11 May 2009 (Zakon 2009). This law replaces the Recommendation of the National Assembly of Serbia of 28 August 2004, which introduced the current lyrics (replacing ‘the Serb king’ of the original with the ‘Serb lands’) and recommended its use as the state anthem ‘until the final determination regarding the state symbols’ (Preporuka 2004). The final determination came in Article 7 of the Constitution, adopted unanimously by the National Assembly of Serbia in November 2006, stating the state anthem of the Republic to be ‘God of Justice’.

Although the song started its anthem career in 1882, the Constitution of 2006 is the first constitution of Serbia that proclaims ‘God of Justice’ to be a state anthem and the law of 2009 the first law to set out its lyrics and regulate its use.¹ Prior to this royal proclamations or ministerial decisions or regulations determined what the anthem was. Its late legal codification was, perhaps, in part due to its doubtful popularity. In the referendum on the national symbols, held in May 1992, ‘God of Justice’ came second, after the ‘March on Drina’ (Pavlović 1998: 150) (see below). This makes ‘God of Justice’ relatively unique; no other state anthem has been adopted after getting a second (and not the first) place in a national referendum on anthems.

The anthem is certainly unique among the current anthems of the new states discussed in this book. It is the only prayer-anthem that follows the model of the British ‘God Save the King/Queen’. It is also a unique prayer-anthem because the singers pray not for the safety and well-being of their monarch or ruler but for their ‘lands’, the word that replaced ‘king’ in the original anthem. Aleksandar Karadjordjević, the son of the last Serbian (and Yugoslav) king, Petar II Karadjordjević, currently lives in the palace of his grandfather in Beograd and is officially addressed as ‘prestolonaslednik’ (the heir to the throne) but Serbia is a republic and its state anthem thus can no longer be a prayer for a non-existent king.

When Montenegro seceded from the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in May 2006 and thus made Serbia an independent state, the Constitution in force in Serbia was still the one instituted in 1990 under the Communist regime of Slobodan Milošević when Serbia was still a federal unit in the SFRY. The 1990 Constitution affirmed, for the first time in Serbian constitutional history (Pavlović 1998: 145), that Serbia had an anthem but did not identify the actual song. The Yugoslav anthem ‘Hey Slavs’ continued to be used, without lyrics, as the state anthem of the federal state until 2006. The overthrow of the Milošević regime on 5 October 2000 brought no change to the Constitution in Serbia nor a change in its anthem. The successive coalition governments found much more urgent matters to attend to than the change of constitution or the adoption of a new anthem.

Faced with the adoption of a separate Montenegrin anthem in 2004, the minority government in Serbia led by Vojislav Koštunica, a legal scholar, passed the above Recommendation, making the ‘God of Justice’ a temporary anthem of Serbia. The secession of Montenegro from the State Union, the breakdown of talks with the EU as well as the threat of the implosion of the minority government, led to the negotiations between the four major parties in Serbia (both in government and in opposition), which in September 2006 produced the draft of the constitution (Vreme 2006). During negotiations only the Socialist (formerly Communist) Party appeared to object to the adoption of ‘God of Justice’ as the state anthem (primarily because its associations with the monarchy) but soon accepted the anthem as all other parties did. For Prime Minister Koštunica, a former anti-Communist dissident and a practising Orthodox Christian, its royalist associations were rather appealing reminders of the glorious days of the Serbian kingdom. Various commentators of liberal and libertarian persuasion noted, however, that this was an anthem of only one national group – the Serbs – in a state that was multinational (with over 20 per cent of the population not Serb) and that the religious form of the anthem was also not acceptable to a large number of non-believers (Katalaksija 2004).² But in September 2006 no parliamentary party apparently found these features of the anthem objectionable. In October 2006 the draft of the Constitution was put to a hastily convened referendum and once it was passed the Constitution was promulgated by the National Assembly. The inappropriateness of the song for non-Serb citizens of Serbia such as Bosniaks was later raised again in 2012, in a public debate over the refusal by Adem Ljaljić, a Bosniak soccer player in the Serbian national soccer team, to sing the Serbian anthem (Ćorović 2012).

Although the overthrow of Milošević and his Socialist Party in 2000 brought down the barriers to the singing of ‘God of Justice’ on public and official occasions that the Socialist Party had previously put up, its adoption first as a temporary anthem in 2004 and then in 2006 as the ‘permanent’ anthem was not a result of a sudden surge in its popularity or an expression of novel national aspirations and hopes (or anxieties). Apart from those who were not Serbs and who had no reason to pray for the safety of the Serb people, there were also those citizens who had nostalgic memories of singing of ‘Hey Slavs’ and who preferred its stirring international and secular lyrics to the Serbo-centric prayer-lyrics of the new/old anthem.³ The legalisation of ‘God of Justice’ was thus triggered mainly by the changes in inter-state relations (with Montenegro and with the EU) that had little, if any, relation to popular self-perceptions or aspirations of the Serbs as a nation.

A prayer for unity and a hope for new happiness

The current lyrics of the anthem (Zakon 2009) remove all the previous references to the monarchy; the removed words are given in brackets in the translation.

This is a prayer-anthem with a quite few self-congratulatory verses. Although it is no longer a monarchical prayer-anthem, it also contains series of clichés or topoi found in other monarchical prayers, such as the Habsburg ‘Gott erhalte unser Kaiser’ (‘God save our Emperor’) of 1854 and the Romanov ‘Bože carja hrani’ (‘God save the Tzar’) of 1833, reproduced below in English translation.

God save our Emperor
May God save [erhaltet], may God protect
Our Emperor, our land!
Powerful through the support of the faith,
he guides us with his wise hand.
Let us defend the crown of His fathers
against any enemy:
always the fate of Austria remains bound
with the Habsburg throne.

Let's keep strongly together,
in the unity stays the power,
with united strengths, even the worst can
be easily overcome.

Let us as in ‘a band of brothers’
aim for a common target.
Hail for the Emperor, hail for the Land,
Austria will stay forever!⁸

The lyrics of the national anthem of the Austrian Empire (of which the above are only the first three stanzas) were written by Johann Gabriel Seidel. This anthem was in use (in its 11 official languages) in the Habsburg Empire from 1853 until its dissolution in 1918.

The following is the Russian imperial anthem:

God save our Tzar

God save [hrani] the noble Tsar!
Long may he live, in pow'r,
In happiness,
In peace to reign!
Dread of his enemies,
Faith's sure defender,
God save the Tsar!⁹

These lyrics were written by Vasily Zhukovsky and adopted as the official anthem (consisting of this stanza alone) of the Russian Empire from 1833 until 1917. Prior to that a longer song, entitled ‘The Prayer of the Russians’ by the same author (using the music of the British ‘God Save the King’), was in use as the national anthem. The ‘Prayer’ starts with an almost identical verse, obviously copied from the British anthem: ‘God, save the Tzar’.¹⁰

In the above three anthems, God is exhorted to save and to protect the monarch and the land or the people. The word translated as ‘to save’ in all three anthems means ‘to preserve’ or ‘to nurture’. In Serbian and Russian the word is the same – ‘hraniti’ – and in German it is ‘erhalten’. God is thus exhorted to preserve and nurture the crowned head and thus save him. In the current Serbian version, God is asked to do all this for the Serb lands and people. The preservation and salvation primarily consists in facilitating two achievements: one is victory over their adversaries or enemies and the other is the unity of the people. In both the Serbian and the Austrian anthem there is an almost equal emphasis on victory over the enemies and unity of the people. However, in the very brief Russian anthem, victory stands alone and unity is not mentioned.

In other monarchical prayers, victory and unity are often intertwined and this is how we find them in the Serbian ‘God of Justice’. The unity of the monarch's subjects is claimed to guarantee the defeat of the foe. In addition, the foe is identified by the word that also means ‘devil’: the foe is a devil and the devil can be defeated by the unity of people. The argument seems to be that dissent and disunity among the crown's/government's subjects opens the road to the victory of the foe/devil. Therefore, it is necessary to stick together and support the monarch/government. This ‘prayer’ is of course an argument presented to the people and not to God and thus the exhortation to unity in this lyric is a pretext for a scare-mongering argument.

The emphasis on unity was certainly needed and the second and the third stanzas of the song are both given to the topic of unity, here presented as golden ‘fruit’. Note that the golden fruit in the second stanza in the original 1872 version of the song (reproduced below) was freedom. Freedom was later dropped in the 1882 version – the version celebrating the proclamation of the Kingdom of Serbia under the Obrenović dynasty. As we shall see below, the call for unity in 1882 was a response to the threat that this dynasty faced from the rival dynasty, the Karadjordjević line. The unity that the original song invokes is the unity of subject-singing-in-unison under one monarch and his dynasty. The anthem's initial function was, apparently, to scare its subjects-in-unison into supporting the incumbent dynasty for fear of outside foes. In September 2006, instead of the monarch there was a rather wobbly minority coalition government in Serbia facing the recent secession of Montenegro and the imminent secession of Kosovo. This government, regardless of its ideological and political orientation, would have certainly needed all the unity it could gather. And praying for unity might have been as efficacious a method of getting it as any other.

Importantly, the image of the God to whom the prayer is directed in the Serbian anthem differs from those of the Habsburg, Romanov and British anthems. By describing him as God of Justice, the anthem insists that the demands or requests made of God, on behalf of the Serbian people, are requests for justice and are not for favours. The Serbian king and his subjects deserve, as a matter of justice, all the blessings that are listed in the anthem. In fact, God is exhorted to grant the whole list as a matter of justice and it is only in the last verse that it is disclosed that the Serbian people pray for this to happen. The anthem is thus a hymn to Serbian just demands rather than an expression of humility before the God whose justice invests the faith of a people: the Serbs demand justice, rather than mercy or blessing. As with ‘God Save the King/Queen’, an apparently benign expression of appropriate power relations (a prayer from the created to the creator) belies a contractual ploy. In ‘God Save the King/Queen’ this is more or less a warning to the sovereign that the monarchy is (or should be) of the constitutional kind.¹¹ In the case of ‘God of Justice’ the prayer conceals a demand made of God that the Serbs should have justice. The basis of Serb demands is not clear but the implication is that in the past God was just to the Serbs and therefore should continue to be so.

The reader is struck immediately by the range of imagery or scenery in the text, a mixture of metaphors for the putative Serbian condition. These are things that may have faded from the consciousness of those singing, that is, those who know the song ‘by heart’. There is a ship of state steering from antique catastrophe to unknowable future. The good ship, sung on its way, has fortress solidity in the second stanza. Then there is the call for brotherhood of the Serbs, which in the third stanza is transformed into golden fruit on a branch. There was obviously no more evocative image for the value that was placed on fraternity – a feature that, as we have seen above, was sorely lacking in 1882 as well as in 2006.

Apart from the victory and unity, the anthem intriguingly requests a blessing for ‘fields, meadows, town and home’. The image projected is that of peace, expressing desire for security. The overall message appears to be: leave the Serbs to lead their own lives peacefully, until they have to fight, and when they do, grant them victory. This relatively modest request stands in contrast to the frenetic insistence on unity that precedes it. The peaceful and modest tone is continued in the next stanza where the request is extended to granting ‘new happiness’ that should follow the proclamation of the kingdom. The last stanza opens, a little gloomily one might say, with the image of glory shining out of the darkness of the grave, promising happiness as fruit of 500 years of battle, overseen by God, whose protection was no doubt the key to survival all this time. This ultimate image of the centuries of the battle is a self-understood allusion to the ‘Ottoman yoke’, the rule of the Islamic Ottomans (from Turkey) over Serbia and the Balkans from 1389 until 1815, when the first Obrenović, Miloš, led the Second Serbian Uprising against the Ottomans. Unlike the First Uprising that failed, this one eventually resulted, in 1830, in the restricted (‘conditional’) independence of Serbia and the granting of the title of heriditary prince to Miloš Obrenović. The promotion of the princely line into the royal one is what this anthem was initially meant to celebrate/legitimate.

Throughout this rollercoaster ride of national imagery, one is constantly reminded that health, safety and protection are achieved through God's good offices; hence the efficacy of prayer, and/or of the prayer-song. In the last stanza, God is told, ‘the Serb people pray to you’. But is this song an actual prayer or is it the description of one, something like a recipe for a prayer? If this is only a recipe for a prayer to God, a description of a prayer, how can it be effective in securing salvation and protecting the king? In addition, if God has indeed provided protection over the past 500 years, why is there a need to pray to him now to secure more of the same? This is, of course, a problem for all anthems of the prayer type. The widespread and continuous use of the prayer-songs perhaps also indicates that their exhortative functions are not hampered by the logical questions here indicated.

Prayerfulness is not however the only indeterminacy besetting this song. The very motive for the song is also ambiguous. Why is all this singing being done? What are the political effects of the song? Those in unison tell the listener, ‘Unity will be the enemy's defeat’. This fact is what constitutes ‘a glorious deed’ for the purposes of this song. The point of singing Serbian unity seems to be to annoy some other unnamed party, one obviously excluded from (and by) this particular act of unison.

The theme of unity predates the song by more than half a century, in the coat of arms known from the First Serb Uprising of 1803. The leader of that uprising was the first Karadjordjević, Karadjordje Petrović, founder of the rival dynasty to the Obrenović dynasty. This coat of arms has four semi-circular signs which were often read as reversed Cyrillic letters standing for the abbreviation of the slogan ‘only unity can save the Serb’ (‘Samo sloga spasava Srbina’). This first coat of arms, unveiled by a Karadjordjević, invoked unity as the source of salvation. However, unity was not achieved and the Obrenovićs, more than half a century after the First Uprising, preferred to turn to God to pray for the unity that had eluded them and the Serb people after so many centuries of struggle. More than a century later, in 2006, the highly disunited political parties of Serbia, facing two consecutive secessions from their state, turned again to God to pray for the unity that eludes them, the Serb people and the Serb ‘lands’. The anthem thus shows the continuous need for unity from the very beginning of the modern Serbian state to the present.

The themes of the anthem can be summarised as: unity, victory, peace and security, essentially suggestive of happiness after a long struggle for the new era. All this seems rather conventional and it is. At the risk of a tautology, we can say that the cliché is serviceable precisely because it is recyclable. In 2006, a new era was dawning, albeit in somewhat different circumstances to those of 1882, and Serbia had again become a state independent of others. In 2000, a government based on a wide coalition of liberal and democratic parties had returned to Serbia after more than half a century of rule of the Communist Party and its successors. Serbia's new-found single-state or independent status by 2006 was the result of almost a decade of wars, international sanctions and widespread misery– culminating in the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Thus the anthem echoes Serbia's claim to happiness in its new found independence after such a long and terrible struggle.

The demands/desires for peace, security and happiness are indeed common in many national songs and anthems and these demands also provide a ground for national self-congratulation. The singers congratulate themselves on having the laudable and exemplary desires of a peaceful people who are as much focused on themselves as a nation as they should be: the singers desire peace and happiness for themselves but do not want to deny them to any other nation or group of singers. This is a standard and acceptable type of single-nation-centricity found in many national songs and anthems.

In the context of a decade of war, peace and security seem as desirable as they had been in 1882. Unity is once again at a premium within a society with huge ideological and social cleavages. In 2006 there was no indication of any future violent struggle but there was a clear premonition of the impending ‘loss’ of the province Kosovo.¹² And so, instead of calling for unity to preserve the dynasty, the anthem can be easily interpreted as calling for unity to preserve the territory. In fact, the changes in the text of the formerly royal anthem strongly suggest such a territorial interpretation. Throughout the anthem the word ‘king’ is replaced by ‘lands’ (‘zemlje’) and the word ‘crown’ in the last stanza is replaced by ‘fatherland’ (‘otadžbina’). Thus God is now, in the Republic of Serbia, entreated to protect and save not a king but the lands – that is, the fatherland of the Serbs. The use of the plural ‘lands’ as opposed to the ‘land’ may indeed suggest that the fatherland of the Serbs is not limited to the internationally recognised borders of the Republic of Serbia; beyond its boundaries, there are other lands, populated by the Serbs, that may also a part of their fatherland. It may refer in particular to the Republika Srpska (the Serb Republic), an entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which from 1992 until 2006 had the very same anthem ‘God of Justice’ with the original lyrics (see Chapter 7).

In summary, the vagueness of the clichés in ‘God of Justice’ makes the anthem re-usable both in peace and in crisis. For crisis there is an exhortation to unity and a request for God's assistance and mighty hand in leading a people to victory. In post-crisis situations there is a request for peace and security. The exhortations and the outcomes are as vague as they are mutually reinforcing, hence their serviceability.

For the purposes of expressing goals, the superhuman agent God functions as an addressee, one whose passivity assures the permanent relevance of exhortation in the given form. The clichés entailed make the Serbs look rather ordinary – similar to any group that wants unity, victory, peace and happiness, and thus just like any other anthem-grinding nation. The Serbs' claim to distinctness lies in the five centuries of struggle, in other words in their perseverance in a struggle for independence.

The clichés of nation are delivered in a language of glitter and gold: unity is golden, the crown glistens, the dawn shines. The light of the future-as-national contrasts with the darkness of the tomb and thus the past of subjugation. This simple contrast between a dark past and a bright future serves to underline the value of the new era's newfound happiness. In spite of its relatively mournful, slow melody and the repetitive and vacuous refrain, exhorting the preservation and nurture of the king or the lands, true believers find in ‘God of Justice’ a song of hope for the future.

An accidental anthem: A brief history of the search for the Serbian national anthem

Very few European state anthems have been written with the purpose of becoming state anthems. Most European anthems prior to gaining their official status served as national songs that were often used to mobilise the singers for national causes, in war and, perhaps more rarely, in peace. Most of the anthems discussed in this book belong in one way or another to this category. Very few anthems became anthems by accident, in the absence of any more suitable or popular national song, ‘God of Justice’ also appears to belong to this category.

Its original lyrics were the curtain-song of the play ‘Marko's Sabre’ (Markova sablja), which was billed as ‘a play with singing and shooting’ – something akin to a musical with some theatrical displays of martial valour or joy. The play was written and performed to celebrate the coming of age and the elevation to the throne of Prince Milan Obrenović. In 1872, he decided to remove the regency and proclaim himself the Prince of Serbia. To celebrate this occasion he commissioned the director of the National Theatre in Beograd, the prominent playwright of the day, Jovan Djordjević, to stage a play. Djordjević decided to write about the sabre that the mythical hero of Serb folk songs, Marko Kraljević, left to posterity for the fight against foreign oppressors. The music for the songs was written by the conductor and composer of the National Theatre, Davorin Jenko, the composer of the music for ‘Forward the Flag of Glory!’ (1860), later the national song and unofficial anthem of Slovenia (see Chapter 3). All the participants of the play – both mythical and historical figures of the Serb past – turn to the Prince of Serbia in the play and sing the following:¹³

As the play was staged many times both in Serbia and in Serb-populated parts of southern Hungary (today the Serbian province of Vojvodina), the song became quite popular. Once Prince Milan decided to proclaim himself the king, he commissioned the same author to write his royal and state anthem. Djordjević quickly obliged by changing the prince into the king, removing the second stanza and adding three new stanzas. This song, almost identical to the current state anthem, was sung for the first time on 22 February 1882 as the state anthem in the very same National Theatre in Beograd at the proclamation of the kingdom and the king (Pavlović 1990: 165).

We shall never know why the future king chose the curtain-song of a play as the basis for a state anthem. Perhaps he just liked the song and perhaps Djordjević could not come up with another set of lyrics more suited for the occasion than the already existing song. As we have seen, the anthem follows the model of the imperial anthem of the neighbouring empire, Austria-Hungary, as well as the Russian Empire of the Romanovs. This may have a good enough recommendation for a new king of a small and poor kingdom that only four years previously had been a tributary of the Ottoman Empire.

Previous attempts, by Milan's adopted father, Prince Mihailo Obrenović, to find the lyrics suitable for a state anthem not only failed but also resulted in the best Serbian parody of an anthem: Jovan Jovanović Zmaj's ‘Jututunska narodna himna’ (‘The Yututun People's Anthem’). In 1864, the poet Ljubomir Nenadović, a section head of Mihailo's Ministry for Education, approached first the poet Djuro Jakšić and then Jovan Jovanović-Zmaj (editor of the satirical magazine and a well-known poet, living in Budapest, Hungary) to write a short song similar to the imperial anthems which ‘would become popular and the people's army could sing it’ (Pavlović 1990: 157). In response, Jovanović wrote a long ‘People's Anthem’, which starts with ‘God of Justice, the defender of the creatures/God of hope, God of Temptation’. In the last few lines, God is requested to provide a ruler who would be like a father and teach the singers ‘how one should be a good Serb/and to live for one's people – or to die for them’ (Pavlović 1990: 159). This poem, although put to music, did not satisfy the Minister for Education. Another poet, Vladislav V Kačanski, apparently in response to the same request, at the same time wrote the ‘Anthem’, which started with:

The God of Dušan, great and mighty!
Listen to the voice of the Serb people
Accept our warm prayer
Let Serbia live! Long live the prince!'

and ended with the prayer:

Let the crown of glory shine over him [the prince] …
Hearken God, God Most Illustrious,
To Serbia and to your Serbian people.
(Pavlović 1990: 196).

This sycophantic poem led Jovanović to publish, in July 1865, in his satirical magazine Zmaj, ‘The Yututun People's Anthem’:

Holy God, stand by our prince [king],
healthy, bouncing, arrogant and famous,
because there has never been on this Earth,
nor there'll ever be anyone equal to him.

This people knows it very well,
it has been born for the sake of the prince [king] only,
to give him taxes and praise,
to wait upon him and to humbly bow to him.

God Almighty, Thou that comes from the Highest,
please fulfil our old desire
God Almighty, do not let anyone have anything,
so that the Ruler should have even more […]¹⁴

Give Him the most shining presents from the Heaven,
the constables, informers, policemen,
if he prefers to let our foes alone,
let Him vent his anger on His own people

Let other peoples know about our glory,
and then let us slumber in the shade
but let a close guard be kept over us,
because [in our slumber] all kinds dreams may crop up.¹⁵

This is a prayer with a vengeance – a mock-prayer for an absolutist and self-seeking ruler from an abject and subservient people. Yet there is a sense of menace in the last line ‘all kinds of dreams may crop up’. This menace came to be realised only a year after the proclamation of the kingdom, in 1883, when the mass populist party, the Radicals, rose in armed rebellion in eastern Serbia against King Milan. Finally, these ‘dreams’ led to the overthrow, in 1903, of the Obrenović's dynasty and the murder of its last king, Milan's son, Aleksandar and his wife. The overthrow of the dynasty temporarily ended the career of Djordjević’s ‘God of Justice’ which was, as an Obrenović royal anthem, abandoned by the Karadjordjević dynasty and the Radicals, now firmly in government.

However, this flurry of anthems and anti-anthems provided a diverse and useful template for Djordjević's curtain-song and for his ‘God of Justice’. Jovanović's ‘People's Anthem’ gave him both the first words and the title of his song– ‘God of Justice’. Jovanović's anthem also asked God to ‘let the sad hearts sing again/and the old brothers embrace’ and to ‘bless our dear fatherland/bless the ruler’. These themes of the blessing of the land (‘village, field, meadow, town and home’) of brotherly unity and new happiness all reappeared in Djordjević's own song. In addition, Kačanski's ‘Anthem’ introduced the theme of the prayer and of pleading with the God to listen to the prayer of the people. He wrote of the ‘shining the crown of the glory’ – the shine that re-appears in ‘God of Justice’ together with the prayer and pleading with God to ‘hear our voices’. Finally, Jovanović's anti-anthem serves as a warning against indiscreet and overt sycophancy, a warning that Djordjević seems to have heeded. His ‘God of Justice’, unlike the earlier Montenegrin anthem ‘To Our Splendid Montenegro’ (see Chapter 5), avoids any praise of the ruler, his rule or his virtue. The ruler is present in ‘God of Justice’ only as an object of prayer and even there it is only his protection that the people are praying for, not for his health, long life, might or military valour. We learn nothing of the ruler or the qualities that he has or is expected to have; instead we only learn that the people pray for his protection. In fact, we do not even know whether he actually needs any protection. In that sense, it is a prayer by convention or rote. The singers pray for the ruler to be protected only because this seems to be the thing to do when singing anthems of this kind.

The lack of information about the king or about his need for protection proved to be a significant – almost God-given – asset in 2004 when the royal anthem was to be transformed into a republican one. The impersonal king, of whom we knew nothing, could be easily replaced with ‘the lands’ and no meaning was lost or added.

The murder of the last Obrenović and the election of Petar Karadjordjević as the King of Serbia in 1903 initiated yet another search for an anthem to replace the Obrenović royal anthem ‘God of Justice’. Early in 1904 the Ministry of Education and Church Affairs opened a public competition for a new anthem (lyrics and music) and, out of 61 submissions, did not find a suitable one. Following this failure, the Ministry invited eight well-known poets to write an anthem and offered a thousand Serbian dinars for the winner. It took almost two years for the Ministry to choose from the seven submitted entries. The winner was the poem by Aleksa Šantić, a leading Serb patriotic poet who lived in Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina (at the time under the administration of Austria-Hungary). In its first stanza the anthem called upon God to shine the sun's rays over the fields of Serbia and did not, even once, mention the king (although the crown does get one mention). Once the anthem was published, all the newspapers in Beograd, almost on cue, attacked it as totally unacceptable (Pavlović 1990: 166). The poet attempted to withdraw his submission only to be told that his poem was now the property of the state and of the people!

In spite of this, the government of the day had no option but to abandon the anthem and indeed any further search for an anthem. In February 1909, it officially reinstated ‘God of Justice’ as the state anthem with slightly altered lines regarding the king: instead of the ‘Serbian king’ in the penultimate line the Karadjordjević version had ‘King Petar’. The line in 1909 read: ‘King Peter, God preserve/the Serb people prays to you’ (Pavlović 1990: 175). In 1919, the first and the last stanza of ‘God of Justice’ became the first and the last stanza of the composite anthem of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) (see Chapter 1) with a further slight change: the word ‘Serb’ was everywhere replaced with ‘our’. The last line thus became ‘King Petar, God preserve/Our people prays to you’. Upon the death of King Petar, his name was replaced with his son Aleksandar and then, upon his assassination in 1934, with that of his son Petar the Second (Petar Drugi). Finally, in 2004, with all the kings gone, ‘Petar the Second’ was deleted, so that in the current lyrics the line reads only ‘God save, God protect’.

‘God of Justice’ thus proved its durability long before its latest resurrection in 2004: the secret of which appears to be in its flexibility and adaptability. The anthem proved easily adaptable to a rival dynasty and then to a new ‘three-named’ kingdom as well as change in the reigning kings. It is not then all that surprising that it proved to be adaptable to a republic too. As long as the singers appear to be praying to God to grant them the same set of things – those nationally desirable commodities of unity, victory, peace and security – it does not matter who the putative object of their prayer for protection is. The adaptability of the anthem showed that one can pray as easily for the protection of one's king, as for one's ‘lands’.

To march or to pray – or perhaps both?

In 1992, the war in Croatia had just ended (at least temporarily) and another in Bosnia and Herzegovina had just started. As a result, the remnants of the Yugoslav People's Army (a conscript armed force of the SFRY) were withdrawing from the now independent states, while Serb paramilitary forces (made up of volunteers) were crossing into Bosnia and Herzegovina to fight against non-Serb forces. The River Drina, subject of the song reproduced below, marks the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.¹⁶ In 1914 this had been the border of Austria-Hungary and Serbia which, at the outset of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian forces had to cross in order to invade Serbia. In 1992, many of the military units withdrawing to or leaving Serbia had to cross the same river although at this time, however, Serbia was officially not at war and there was no threat of another invasion.

In April 1992, following popular referenda, Serbia and Montenegro formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and then on 31 May the government of the Republic of Serbia called the Referendum for the purpose of preliminary declaration of the citizens regarding the symbols of the Republic of Serbia. There were three candidates to choose from: ‘God of Justice’, ‘March on Drina’ (‘Marš na Drinu’) and ‘Serbia Arise’ (‘Vostani Serbijo’).¹⁷ (Pavlović 1998:148). ‘March on Drina’ got 1,730,070 votes, which constituted only 46.67 per cent the eligible voters (Direct Democracy 2012); ‘God of Justice’ got slightly fewer votes and ‘Serbia Arise’ took third place (Pavlović 1998: 150). Since none of the proposed anthems passed the required threshold of 50 per cent of eligible voters (set in the 1990 Constitution of Serbia), the referendum failed to select a new anthem and the old anthem ‘Hey Slavs’ continued to be used without lyrics. In contrast, the 2006 Constitution simply proclaimed ‘God of Justice’ to be the state anthem and tacitly abandoned the requirement of its 1990 predecessor for a referendum for the ‘preliminary declaration of citizens regarding symbols’.

Below is the march that, according to the referendum in 1992, the citizens of Serbia appear to have preferred to the ‘God of Justice’:

The melody of this song was composed by Stanislav Binički, the conductor of the Royal Guard Orchestra of the Serbian military, after the Serbian victory over the Austro-Hungarian army at the mountain of Cer in western Serbia on 24 December 1914. After that it became a highly popular musical piece widely performed during both world wars. Although the Communist authorities discouraged its performance immediately following 1945 (because of its associations with their wartime enemies, the Royalist Chetniks), upon the release of the film ‘March on Drina’ in 1964 about the battle of Cer, the melody became very popular indeed. In 1963, the Danish guitarist Jørgen Ingmann made the composition an international pop hit and its popularity spread worldwide.¹⁵

In 1964, the lawyer and poet Miloje Popović wrote the lyrics for this melody and the quote above is an excerpt from his much longer poem (Pavlović 1990: 199–201) and is the part of his poem that is now commonly sung. Due to its continuous presence in the popular media, its melody was much better known than that of ‘God of Justice’. Indeed, until 1988 ‘God of Justice’ was not performed on officially approved occasions and was not publicly broadcast. Even after 1988, because of its royalist associations, the officials of the ruling Socialist Party never encouraged or favoured its performance. Moreover, ‘God of Justice’ is a much less singable song and has a less stirring melody than ‘March on Drina’. The melody of the latter is based on the melodic pattern of the Serbian folk-dance, kolo, and therefore would be easily recognisable to most Serbs. In view of all this, it is surprising that ‘God of Justice’ got as many votes in 1992 as it did.

‘March on Drina’ is primarily a marching song although the call to march is found only in its first line. Its verses aim to evoke the solemnity of the battle, the sacrifice of the fallen heroes and their bravery. It reminds the singers and audience of the sacrifice in blood that the Serbian soldiers at Cer made for the sake of expelling the enemy from Serbian soil. It does not even suggest that the singers should or even could imitate these heroic deeds because it is a song in praise of the past and not a call for future battle. In that sense, it is also a self-congratulatory song: it lauds and celebrates the bravery of the singers’ ancestors and, indirectly, expresses the singers' gratitude for the heroic deed. And yet, given the events of early 1992, the song could have been understood as suggesting that the time had come to fight again and that the Drina would be the witness of battles once again.

‘March on Drina’ is no doubt a song of pride, national pride in the glorious deeds of one's ancestors. In a sense, ‘God of Justice’ is also a song of national pride although the pride felt by the singers – in freedom won after 500 years of battle – is much more humbly expressed than in ‘March on Drina’. The difference between the two is thus not so much in the sentiment that they try to evoke but in their emphasis and methods of evocation. ‘March on Drina’ evokes pride in a series of striking and perhaps even gory images that are obviously lacking in ‘God of Justice’. Both the fast-paced folk-based melody and the striking images of sacrifice make ‘March on Drina’ more attractive than a prayer expressed in a rather slow and perhaps somewhat unfamiliar musical vocabulary. It is therefore not surprising that a large number of Serbs preferred to sing the melody and lyrics of a simple march instead of that of a prayer.

Yet, in spite of the common expression of pride, the two songs tell very different tales. ‘March on Drina’ is a rather vague tale of a real and bloody battle and of Serb sacrifice while ‘God of Justice’ offers instead a list of things that the singers desire or should desire – brotherly unity, happiness in peace, victory in battle, and the protection of the fatherland's freedom. It is unclear from the 1992 vote which of the two tales the Serb voters-to-be-singers preferred to tell and later the 2006 Constitution removed the need for choice.

However, these two songs still serve to illustrate aspects of Serb self-understanding of themselves as a nation. On one hand, Serbs see themselves as a nation proud of its glorious past, primarily described in the terms of the huge sacrifice in human life for the sake of freedom from foreign rule. And, on the other hand, they see themselves as a nation desiring to be united (amidst the fractious politics and its fragmenting polity) and desiring to live in an idyllic peace and happiness, undisturbed by outsiders who had, during those symbolic 500 years, sought to rule or dominate them. Pride in the glorious past of battle and a desire for undisturbed happiness and peace are, of course, not incompatible; in fact, they may be viewed as complementary. Those who have sacrificed so much for their freedom, and who are aware of their sacrifice, would like at least to enjoy the ‘fruits’ of the freedom which is happiness in peace. If all this appears to be rather staple fare of anthems and national songs, then these two songs, each in their own way, suggest that the Serbs when singing their anthems behave in much the same way as singers-of-anthems the world over.