Oral Tradition, 6/2 3 (1991): 200-224

Bugaršćice: A Unique Type of

Archaic Oral Poetry
Josip Kekez

Historical and Geographical Definition

In the context of oral literature, bugaršćice1 represent an important and

unique genre in many respects. They are, among other things, striking proof that
oral literature is not simply a discovery of the nineteenth century—as was long
maintained in South Slavic regions—and that two literatures, oral and written, were
in contact from the earliest times in a number of ways, including the manner of
their recording and study. On the other hand, we would know nothing of the genre
in question and its aesthetic values if interest in oral literature had not existed from
the beginning; many passages in the early literature of Croatia would have forever
remained obscure, while Croatian poetry of the present day would have assumed
a different profile. Scholars have not so far taken sufficient account of the fact
that the poetic system of the bugaršćica is distinctly indigenous and in many of
its features remote from other verse forms of oral literature; nor is there evidence
that it existed at any time or in any national community or setting other than those
discussed below.
Apart from one or two examples, all bugaršćice have been recorded on the
eastern Adriatic strip from Istria in the north to the Gulf of Kotor in the south, so that
they are geographically strictly defined. One poem was recorded on the western side
of the Adriatic, in southern Italy, but it was sung in their own language by settlers
from the eastern side of the Adriatic. Two actually come from the hinterland, from
the edge of the Kajkavian dialectal region. In spite of their numerous Kajkavian
features, these examples would not in themselves extend the area of the bugaršćica
as

1
Pronounced “boo-gahr-shchee-tseh”; sing. bugaršćica. For English translations of forty-
one bugaršćice with texts in the original, and an introductory survey and extensive bibliography of
major scholarship on the bugaršćica, see Miletich 1990.
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 201

defined if there did not exist other evidence in written Kajkavian literature and if
we did not know of a fair number of Kajkavian forms in bugaršćice recorded in
the extreme south. Apart from the fact that they were certainly current in Kajkavian
dialectal areas, the territory of the bugaršćice should be moved from the central
and southern littoral toward the interior, as indicated by traces of their existence—
particularly in medieval inscriptions—in that region. There are, indeed, theories
according to which the origins of the bugaršćice should be sought somewhere other
than on the coastal strip. These migratory theories suggest that bugaršćice came
to the western part of the Balkan Peninsula from the East. The fact is, however,
that all known examples, commentaries on them, and popular names applied to
them (as well as the term, used in linguistic, literary and other published works) all
derive from the western region of the Balkans, or else from areas settled by Croats.
Neither eastern nor western neighbors of the Croats are familiar with bugaršćice.
All this might mean that the bugaršćica is of very ancient indigenous origin,
and it might be supposed that it was known throughout the entire nation, its subsequent
uneven distribution in the course of history being a consequence of geographical
and political fragmentation: in some districts the course of events led more rapidly
to its disappearance, in others more gradually, so that by the eighteenth century it
had in fact practically vanished everywhere, and only fragmentary echoes survived
into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Kekez 1978:13-14, 18). While many
writers of the older period in the western area actually apply the term bugaršćica
and use the verb bugariti to describe its plaintive performance, the verb with the
same meaning was current in popular usage throughout the nineteenth century,
again in those areas from which we have recordings and where there is evidence
of its previous performance. Thus Vuk Karadžić included the lexeme bugariti in
his dictionary, adding a note to the effect that it was used in Croatia. And two very
brief fragments written down in the nineteenth century are from that area, in fact
from its western most part, so that they define both the geographical and the upper
chronological limit in the history of the bugaršćica.

Texts and Principal Modes of Presentation

Fate ordained—although not without some degree of diachronic logic—that

the earliest recording should be the last to be discovered. This took place only
recently, and certain literary-historical values that had hitherto prevailed had at
once to be revised: the poems from the manuscript collection Zbornik Nikše Ranjine
[Nikša Ranjina’s Miscellany]
202 JOSIP KEKEZ

(1507), which also include the poems of the first Dubrovnik lyric poets, can no longer
be considered the oldest complete recordings of Croatian or Slavic oral poems. Nor
are Petar Hektorović’s two mid-sixteenth-century recordings the earliest bugaršćice,
although their literary-historical value remains considerable and their aesthetic
quality unimpaired; they retain their fame as the first published examples of oral
poetry. The principal character in the earliest known bugaršćica, Janko Sibinjanin,
one of the most frequent figures in oral poetry, whether bugaršćica or not, like many
characters in lyric and epic poetry who find themselves imprisoned, generally by
the Turks, is languishing in a Smederevo dungeon and addresses an eagle, asking
the bird whether he cannot somehow be rescued from his confinement. The poem
was performed on Thursday, June 1, 1497, in the small town of Gioia del Colle, near
Bari, which was at that time already inhabited by the Molise Croats (Šimunović
1984). The performance was in honor of Queen Isabella del Balzo and presented by
Slavs drinking “according to their custom” and shouting “in their tongue.” During
the recitation they leaped like goats and whirled around. The Italian poet, Rogeri de
Pacienza, courtier and eyewitness, has left us a detailed account of the performance,
performers, and actual text with which Queen Isabella was welcomed. Since Italian
literary historians believed that they were dealing with a minor poet, they paid no
serious attention to his work until quite recently. They then came across the passage
in question, which they could not understand, and turned to their Slavist colleagues
for assistance. In this way the poem was discovered, identified as a bugaršćica, and
first published in our own time (Pantić 1977).
A comparison of the language of the poem with that of the Molise Croats,
and of the recorded names of the performers with those of Slavic settlers in southern
Italy confirms the fact that the poem shows fifteenth-century linguistic features of
the Neretva region. The names of the performers also coincide with first names and
surnames of the Molise Croats and other medieval Croatian settlers of southern
Italy. Both sets of names belong to the same linguistic and intellectual milieu as
regards origin, formation, and anthroponymical content (Šimunović 1984:53).
Early features linked with the bugaršćica have been preserved elsewhere. At the
time of the Turkish wars, especially during the whole of the sixteenth century,
there was an exodus northward from the northwestern mainland areas of Croatia
and from its coastal strip. The emigrants, who now live for the most part along
the Austro-Hungarian border in the province of Gradišće [Burgenland] and call
themselves the Gradišće Croats, have preserved motifs and plots as well as stylistic
and metrical characteristics of the bugaršćica in their early songs (Gavazzi 1951;
Miletich 1987).
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 203

What other sources are there for the preservation of the bugaršćica?
We should be grateful to those who recorded this specific literary form before
it disappeared and for thus saving it from oblivion. To date all anthologies of
bugaršćice organized chronologically have begun with recordings made by the
writer Petar Hektorović (1487-1572) as the earliest and most aesthetically perfect
examples of the genre. Nobleman and poet, Hektorović, who was from the island
of Hvar, went on an outing in the Adriatic, even at a relatively advanced age, in the
company of two fishermen, his fellow islanders Paskoj Debelja and Nikola Zet,
who shared with him their knowledge of oral literature. Nearly four and one-half
centuries ago, our poet spent three pleasant days with them, rowing and fishing,
talking and singing, reciting poems and proverbs, and solving riddles. As they
traveled through the familiar waters of their homeland, one of the fishermen sang
the bugaršćica of Marko Kraljević and his brother Andrijaš, while the other sang
the one about Radosav Siverinac and Vlatko Udinski. Hektorović interpolated into
his own work two bugaršćice, three rhetorical oral počasnice (poems of praise),
and one lyric poem, reproducing them, moreover, exactly as he had heard them
from his informants. In this context, incidentally, Hektorović states his opinion
that folk songs should be transcribed just as they are heard, a rule that ought to be
considered inviolable, but that has only been strictly observed in our own time.
Judging by all that has been said, we see that Hektorović is the first accomplished
South Slavic folklorist. Moreover, no one before him had drawn a portrait of folk
singers, described in concrete terms the situation in which songs were sung, nor
defined the purpose of the singing. Hektorović does not mention when he took
down the two bugaršćice, but it was before 1556, when his own work was written,
and thus twelve years before the first edition of his Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje
[Fishing and Fishermen’s Conversations] was published in Venice in 1568. They
were first extracted from Ribanje and published by Ivan Kukuljević in his Pjesnici
hrvatski I [Croatian Poets I] in Zagreb in 1856 (pp. 100-01), and then by the famous
Slovene Slavist Franz Miklosich in Vienna in 1870 in his anthology of folk epic
poetry of the Croats (1870:62-65). They were subsequently included as a matter
of course by Valtazar Bogišić in his anthology (1878), and ultimately in all other
anthologies.
We owe the bugaršćica entitled Majka Margarita [Mother Margaret], one
of the most moving of these poems, to a transcription made by a citizen of Zadar,
Juraj Baraković (1548-1628), who incorporated it in his poem Vila Slovinka [The
Slavic Fairy], published in Venice in 1614. Kukuljević also included it as a separate
item in his Pjesnici hrvatski II [Croatian Poets II], published in Zagreb in 1867
(pp. 7-8). Its poetic quality has insured it a place in every anthology of bugaršćice
published to date. Baraković makes no mention of the place of transcription. We
may suppose, indeed,
204 JOSIP KEKEZ

that he heard it in his early youth and learned to recite it by heart. It may also be
presumed that it was generally known not only in the immediate surroundings of
Zadar but also in the broader coastal area, for echoes of the poem found their way
into the written literature of Dubrovnik in the sixteenth century. Its popularity and
wide circulation are also confirmed by its variants, which Bogišić planned to publish
in his second volume, while an almost entirely literal transcription of Baraković’s
copy can be found in Zagreb MS. 638.
Among the papers from the trial in which Petar Zrinski (1621-1671) —
governor of Croatia, politician and military leader, and acknowledged man of
letters—was condemned to death together with Fran Krsto Frankopan, another
well-known writer, there subsequently came to light the text of a bugaršćica that
is most frequently published under the title Popivka od Svilojevića [The Song of
Svilojević]. The recording is from northwestern Croatia, and some believe that it
might even have been made by Zrinski himself, who, apart from his other literary
activities, was also engaged in the collection of folk poetry and was himself the
hero of popular poems. It was first published by Miklosich in 1851. Later, Bogišić
included it in his anthology, as did all subsequent compilers. When Miklosich
published it for the first time, he did so in prose form with no mention of Zrinski,
and with the statement that it had been written down in 1663 (1851). He was to
publish it again in 1870 in the anthology mentioned above, only this time in the
bugaršćica meter. He initially published it in prose because it was in that form in the
manuscript, which has since been lost. One ought to bear in mind that bugaršćice
were not sufficiently well known at that time as a specific literary form, although
the two recorded by Hektorović and the one transcribed by Baraković had already
been available. In his 1870 edition Miklosich included the poem as a bugaršćica,
stating his reason for the change: “At that time I did not recognize the meter, and
probably it would not have been clear to me even now, if the Dubrovnik manuscript
had not made available to me a larger number of poems composed in that same
meter. . .” (71).
It is in the Dubrovnik MS., housed in the library of the University of Zagreb,
that we find the largest number of bugaršćice. Apart from them, the manuscript
contains other material of interest to students of written and oral literature and
linguistics. The anthology was started at the end of the seventeenth or the beginning
of the eighteenth century by the writer Đuro Matijašević, who was then joined by
another writer, Jozo Betondić, and a number of other unknown transcribers. Ivan
Marija Matijašević (1714-1791), a Jesuit, writer, and scholar who was active in
the public life of Dubrovnik, was inspired as a collector by Andrija Kačić Miošić’s
Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskoga [Pleasant Recreation for the Slavic People]
and added his own material to that collected by his uncle Matijašević, Betondić,
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 205

and the others. To the collected material he gave the title “Popjevke slovinske
skupljene g. 1758. u Dubrovniku” [“Slavic Songs Collected in Dubrovnik in the
Year 1758”].
In the Historical Institute of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts
in Zagreb, there are two manuscripts, one relatively long and the other shorter,
which are known as Zagreb MS. 638 and Zagreb MS. 641. The former was written
at the very beginning of the eighteenth century and contains nothing but twenty-
seven bugaršćice, while the latter has three bugaršćice, mostly religious poems,
and a smaller number of heroic decasyllabic poems. Both manuscripts originated
in the region of the Gulf of Kotor. No one published anything from the second
manuscript before Bogišić, but Miklosich published some eighteen items from the
first manuscript, and later others were published at random.
Likewise, before Bogišić no one had published examples of the Perast
bugaršćice. A manuscript was found in Perast in the home of a certain Balović,
and thus became known as the Balović MS. It contains twenty-four folk songs,
including nine bugaršćice. Both the bugaršćice and the heroic decasyllabic poems
deal exclusively with events that took place in Perast and the surrounding area, so
that in this respect they differ markedly from other bugaršćice or heroic decasyllabic
poems. It is believed that the manuscript originated at the end of the seventeenth or
beginning of the eighteenth century. Linked with the Balović MS. is the Mazarović
MS., which also derives its name from the Perast family in whose home it was
found. The cover bears the date 1775 as the year of origin. This manuscript does
not contain bugaršćice, but it does have heroic poems in decasyllables, of which
some are literal renderings of bugaršćica subjects from the Balović MS. Both the
Balović and the Mazarović MSS. are in the Bogišić archives in Cavtat (about six
miles south of Dubrovnik).
A number of other recordings were omitted from Bogišić’s edition, the
first comprehensive published collection with a treatise on the bugaršćica, simply
because the anthologist did not know of them. Among the omissions were two
poems from the middle of the seventeenth century that were written down by the
Dubrovnik sea captain Nikola Ohmućević. An admirer of Ivan Gundulić’s verse,
he spent his leisure time copying that author’s Osman, and added as a supplement
to his manuscript two moving bugaršćice usually entitled Smrt despota Vuka [The
Death of Despot Vuk] and Smrt kralja Vladislava [The Death of King Vladislav].
They were discovered in the manuscript of Osman by the literary historian Armin
Pavić while he was preparing Gundulić’s works for the standard edition in the
series Stari Pisci Hrvatski [Early Croatian Writers] (Pavić 1879). Ohmućević’s first
transcription was published by Miroslav Pantić in his anthology (1964:61-64), and
I included the second in mine (1978:203-8). I
206 JOSIP KEKEZ

also included there a bugaršćica that gives a lyrical account of the Croatian
governor Derenčin and his defeat by the Turks on the battlefield of Krbava in 1493
(1978:104). It was written down in 1682 by the Croatian writer and philologist
Pavao Vitezović (1652-1713) and is now part of a manuscript kept in the library
of the University of Zagreb. Apart from my anthology, it has not been included in
other collections of bugaršćice, but some historians have quoted it in their published
studies. A bugaršćica that describes lyrically a skirmish between Croats and Turks
near Zagreb in 1593 was written down in the seventeenth century and published in
the nineteenth, but has not found its way into any of the anthologies so far (Kekez
1986a:32).
In 1851 Josip Antun Petris recorded fifty-four songs in Vrbnik on the
island of Krk, including some in the bugaršćica meter. For my anthology (Kekez
1978:131-32) I took two brief fragments from Vjekoslav Štefanić’s Narodne pjesme
otoka Krka [Folk Songs from the Island of Krk], published in Zagreb in 1944;
they have not been published elsewhere. Petris said that they were not complete,
and somewhat less than a century later Štefanić tried to discover remnants of the
fragmentary bugaršćice in question, but even the fragments had vanished from oral
tradition.
This, then, constitutes the body of bugaršćica texts collected in the course
of several centuries. Their discovery, presentation, and interpretation in modern
times began with Miklosich’s 1870 publication, referred to above. His collection
preceded Bogišić’s, and inspired the latter to search for and publish a broader range
of material and to elaborate on the subject (1878). Apart from bugaršćice, Bogišić’s
anthology also contains other forms of oral poetry from earlier periods. It includes
altogether seventy-six bugaršćica texts, some of which are incomplete, and, apart
from two or three fragmentary recordings which are absent, it represented for some
time the sole body of texts at the disposal of researchers. In the course of time, as
mentioned above, entire new texts were discovered. Indeed, Bogišić states in his
anthology that hitherto unknown bugaršćice, together with variants of known texts,
had come into his hands after his book had gone to press. He did not, however,
include them in his book, provide sources, or say anything about them except
that he would include them in a second volume, which was never published. All
subsequent editors, in fact, merely published a selection from Bogišić’s corpus,
and all researchers were necessarily committed to his edition in their discussion
of bugaršćica texts, since there was no point in having recourse to manuscripts
and deciphering early handwriting and orthography when everything was already
available in one place together with relevant commentary. Bogišić’s anthology
assembled all material known to him at the time and provided a comprehensive
and multifaceted description of the published texts. Its importance to the field is,
therefore,
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 207

considerable; but, as we have seen, a number of examples are missing from his
collection. Furthermore, in spite of his many valuable observations and competent
approaches, he was capable of improper procedures, principally because he himself
was taken unawares by the unusual features of the bugaršćice, and interpreted
them or altered details in them to conform to notions that he had formed under the
sway of other verse prominent at that time, paying less attention to the bugaršćice
themselves in this respect.

Definition of Terms and the Question of Origins

Until recently Hektorović enjoyed the distinction of being not only the first
to write down bugaršćice and leave us other valuable information concerning them
and other oral literature of his period and region, but also the first to call them
bugaršćice. The term is, for the most part, identical with that used by later writers,
becoming firmly established in the technical vocabulary of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Hektorović calls them bugaršćica and bugaršćina. Quoting
Majka Margarita in his Vila Slovinka, as recited by “some young child,” Baraković
confirms that bugaršćica was the customary term in the central Dalmatian region
at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries other etymologically related terms like bugarkinja and pjesma bugarka
were frequently used. Bugaršćice were also called popijevke and davorije, although
other songs and not only bugaršćice were understood by these terms.
The word bugaršćica and its etymological variants have prompted re-
searchers to offer explanations of the origins of the form. In general, they may
be reduced to three categories. The term has been linked by some to the adjective
bugarski, indicating that the poems are of Serbian origin, because Croatian Humanist
writers understood bugarski to refer to both Serbian and Bulgarian regions. Others
derive the term from the Italian poesia volgare, or the Latin carmina vulgaria,
because the poetry of the inhabitants of the eastern Adriatic coast struck them as
popular. A third group sees the solution in a contamination of these two explanations.
In the dictionary of the Yugoslav Academy, Đuro Daničić suggested that the term
bugaršćica might be derived from the verb bugariti, formed from Medieval Latin
bucculare. Daničić argued that it was difficult to believe that bugaršćica could stem
from the national designation bugarski. It was more likely, in his opinion, that it
sprang from an Italian word corresponding to the Medieval Latin bucculare, from
which are derived boccalone and boccalona, that is, males and females who shout,
wail, or cry; and to Romance peoples it seemed that their Slavic neighbors were
shouting or wailing, even when they were merely talking; probably the
208 JOSIP KEKEZ

opposite was also the case.

I do not doubt that the term bugaršćica is connected with the verb bugariti,
the fundamental meaning of which is to sing sadly. This indicates, on the one hand,
the basic mood, or, to be more precise, the mood of the subject matter as conceived
by the people, regardless of the fact that certain poems have plots that end happily,
if somewhat cheerlessly, and the fact that they were performed on festive occasions.
On the other hand, instances of the verb bugariti are to be found in the works of
early Croatian writers, and, more recently, among the inhabitants of the coastal
region. Thus, both these factors coincide with a third, which indicates the area
where the bugaršćice originated and were performed and written down.
Another theory explains the origin of the bugaršćica by migration from
the East. It differs from the previous theories in that it is based on a few motifs
and themes, and characters from the thematic cycle. I refer to the so-called Srem
theory, according to which bugaršćice were poems from southern Hungary (hence
the presence of personages from the Hungarian court), whence they were allegedly
adopted by Serbian noblemen in the sixteenth century; after the conquest of Srem
in 1521 and the retreat from the Turks, they were taken to the coastal area. This
theory, of course, has many weaknesses, which I shall not enumerate here. It is
sufficient to note that the bugaršćice of the coast are older than the critical date
proposed by the Srem theory. Nor is there any reason for inventing new terms, such
as pjesme dugog stiha [long-line poems]. On the contrary, the specific features of
the bugaršćica as a poetic form provide sufficient reason for the retention of that
term, especially when it matches the poetic nature of the bugaršćica better than
any other term in literary theory matches the concept it is meant to define. The
term pjesma dugog stiha should not displace a term that has been established for
centuries, not only because it is ambiguous—not every long-line poem need be
a bugaršćica—but also because it merely stresses a formal feature of the genre,
and, moreover, does not identify it geographically or chronologically. We would
not expect this of a given term if we did not in in fact have one that includes all
that and more. Since all that is so, it should be regarded as an etymological boon.
Etymological definitions of the word have led to numerous misunderstandings,
disagreements, and, not infrequently, deliberate misrepresentations. The false
conclusions have stemmed from fundamental methodological errors: we ought to
distinguish between an etymological explanation and a definition of a literary form
in national terms, especially since the latter should not be controversial. The origin
of the word has still not been established reliably, and it is certainly not the only
such case, but the fact is that the bugaršćica is closely linked, etymologically and
semantically, with the verb bugariti, and both the
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 209

nominal and verbal form have been widely used in Croatian literary and philological
works in past centuries (Kekez 1978:33-38). The verbal form always denotes a
plaintive, distressing, melancholy, and nostalgic kind of singing, and the bugaršćica
is a song with precisely those qualities. And this is what constituted its attraction
for the listener; even if the ballad did not end tragically—in the course of history
certain changes of that kind did take place—it still retained its typical melancholy
character, or at least qualities akin to it. Its distinctive features came into being
through the choice of motifs, structure, versification, poetic diction, and all those
other stylistic elements calculated to produce a specific aesthetic effect.

The Poetics of the Bugaršćica, Its Performance,

and Its Stylistic Metamorphosis

Until now, most scholars have regarded bugaršćice as epic poems, con-
sidering them “a matter of fact” and historically credible. In short, they have
concentrated on the content, while other qualities interested them less. This is
evident even from some of the recordings, since some collectors left out the refrain,
for example, or other “superfluous” elements. Even some who introduced the
bugaršćica in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries omitted the refrain. Bogišić
published Majka Margarita without the recurring verses, thus abbreviating it by
almost half, with the explanation that the missing passages contained nothing new
that had not already been stated in preceding verses. In the bugaršćice historical
characters and, more rarely, historical themes are indeed present, but they are
not used to express historical truth or for development of an epic plot. What was
stressed, then, was content, narration, but in the bugaršćica these are only present
for the sake of the motif. The bugaršćica plot never has the breadth or objectivity
of the epic, to say nothing of digressions, retardation, episodes, and other related
formal devices of the epic. This kind of poetry does not develop a plot in order to
narrate events, to glorify the past or, possibly, personages from an epic age. On the
contrary, if the heroes of epic poems do appear in the bugaršćica, then they are
melancholy figures.
In a number of cases, the bugaršćice make use of a plot, but only in order
to facilitate a more subtle psychological representation of the chosen motifs, and
to represent all the more strikingly the human emotions that lie behind it, either of
a positive or, more frequently, of a negative kind. In the bugaršćica about Marko
Kraljević and his brother Andrijaš in Hektorović’s work, for example, the two
brothers are bound by love for each other and by a joint love for their aged mother.
The brothers always share their booty in fraternal fashion until they capture three
fine horses,
210 JOSIP KEKEZ

which, naturally, cannot be divided equally. Greed makes its appearance as a motif,
and Marko is so carried away by it that Andrijaš suffers a mortal wound. Remorse
ensues and is followed by a renewed declaration of fraternal affection and love
for their mother, but there is no return to the former happy state. In another case
it is human vanity that destroys the happy community, as, for example, in the
bugaršćica of the Jakšić brothers, in which an attractive maiden loved by both
brothers decides in favor of one of them. The other, seized by vanity, is driven to
a tragically impulsive act and kills his brother. When he sees what he has done,
he kills himself. In the poem Kako Jele Arbanaška umori Turčina Mostaranina
[How Jele the Albanian Slew the Turk from Mostar] (Kekez 1978:124-26), Vojin
the Albanian and the Turk from Mostar are sworn brothers and friends. As they
drink wine together and pass the time in conversation, the Turk asks where Vojin
got the fine, delicate shirt he is wearing. When he replies that he “has his dear Jele,
his wife” who sewed it for him, the Turk blurts out wildly in typical bugaršćica
fashion that he desires the fair Jele. Vojin retorts in kind, expressing his desire for “a
fine Turkish lady from Mostar.” The Turk instantly orders the other Turks present
to hang Vojin. He then instructs them to entice Vojin’s Jele into his tent. But Jele is
in fact the typical proud, loyal wife, intelligent and independent, who embodies all
the virtues of the honorable spouse of the folk tradition, and she cunningly slays
the lecherous Turk. What is typical here of the bugaršćica is the negative human
content—the motif of lechery and the vulnerability of the psyche—that motivates
the balladic organization of the text and brings it to a tragic conclusion. In one of
the most moving examples, Majka Margarita, family unity has been undermined
by a brother and a son who have gone off into the world never to return again.
The bugaršćica is apt to treat a wide range of relationships between
individuals in everyday life, including those between master and servant. Here, too,
some unforeseeable chance event within an established orderly community brings
negative emotions and motives to the surface, disrupting mutual trust, often with a
tragic outcome, whether this is caused by the master—often the king himself—or by
the royal servant (by “servant,” we should understand also the king’s more elevated
subjects). Life at the royal Hungarian court is merely a setting for the depiction
of destructive acts against this cultivated and intimate background, with the aim
of stressing the tragic egoism of an impulsive deed. The subject of Kosovo is also
used to this end in the bugaršćice, but, in contrast to its position in the epic poem,
Kosovo remains in the distant background, while those events that characterize
human relationships in a restricted context are acted out in the foreground.
The bugaršćica either considers an interesting psychological subject
separately or combines it in a relationship involving other individuals:
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 211

relatives, family, friends, or members of some other closely knit group. The more
intimately bound the members of the group are, the more acute is the conflict, and
hence the more moving the ballad. Innate evil in an individual thus disturbs the
balance of the group. Even when the bugaršćica has recourse to epic characters
and themes, it is discriminating in its choice of epic material or in its use of factual
events as subjects. For example, the so-called local bugaršćica chooses only what
can be integrated into its poetic design and restricts itself to the level of detailed
psychological description. The long, slow-moving line is well suited for the
treatment of such motifs, and so are the repetition of verses and refrains, the use
of diminutives, which express intimacy, and so on. The long verses, which may
be repeated wholly or in part and, as a rule, have a refrain after every other verse,
are tonic in character, so that the structure of the verse, in conjunction with the
refrain, emphasizes even more the mood of cheerless melancholy and nostalgia.
This fondness for a tragic aesthetic system is part of the poetics of times long past,
although the bugaršćica was welcome on every occasion.
The bugaršćica verse line varies from thirteen to nineteen syllables, but
lines of fifteen and sixteen syllables occur most often; lines of twelve, nineteen,
and twenty syllables are also occasionally found. The refrain most frequently has
six syllables. It may occupy different positions between verses and sometimes
occurs only after a number of verses. Apart from those cases in which collectors
suppressed refrains, some bugaršćice did not have them at all. Poems in which a
refrain is present confirm that it is most often situated as in Majka Margarita:

Cvilu to mi cviljaše drobna ptica lastovica,

Ona mala ptica,
Cvilu to mi cviljaše drobna ptica lastovica,
Ona cvilu cviljaše Zadru gradu na pridvratju,
Ona mala ptica.

[Plaintively sang the little swallow bird,

That little bird,
Plaintively sang the little swallow bird,
Plaintively it sang before the gates of Zadar town,
That little bird.]

At the beginning of a poem, therefore, the refrain customarily comes immediately

after the first verse, and then after every other verse except at the end. Refrains
vary regularly within the same poem: sometimes a six-syllable syntagmatic unit
from the preceding verse is used as the refrain. The poem just mentioned begins
with a refrain after the first line and finishes with only a single line after the last
occurrence:
212 JOSIP KEKEZ

“I da ti si nikadare od suz’ lišca ne osuše,

Nit ćeš bratca dozvati, nit ćeš sinka dočekati,
Starice nebogo,
Nit ćeš bratca dozvati, nit ćeš sinka dočekati!”
[“And even if the tears on your face should never dry,
You shall never summon your brother nor welcome your son,
Wretched old woman,
You shall never summon your brother nor welcome your son!”]

The verses are based on clausal units and, as a rule, each unit is fixed in
speech as a linguistic and semantic whole; these rhythmically based units are then
linked up with one another. The bugaršćica verse is thus essentially associative in
character and origin, and in such cases it is difficult to break it into semantically
independent hemistichs or to define it by established metrical patterns. It is to some
extent trochaic, but also combines trochees and dactyls as well as other feet. It is
based on colloquial referents from a rural setting, and so the number of syllables
must be variable since the verse is founded on the principle of semantic and rhythmic
units that are composed of one or more condensed conversational formulas, whose
rhythm may be further intensified by change in word order.
In the bugaršćica the vocative is at times used in place of the nominative
case, not to fulfill the necessary syllabic requirement since the line does not depend
on strict syllabicity but rather to render the sentence more manageable rhythmically,
unless it has already been adopted from the heroic decasyllabic line, where that
phenomenon is a regular feature. In the final phase of the bugaršćica’s existence,
epic formulas inserted into the line served as a means of formulaic structuring.
The clause is also constructed with the aid of typically oral devices: pođe, stade,
side (inchoatives) plus infinitive (govoriti, pitati, udarati—“to speak,” “to ask,” “to
strike,” respectively). In the same verse the verb is used with its verbal noun, and
there are enclitic forms of the personal pronoun and additions such as ere, e da, još,
to which we cannot assign the function of filling out the line. They are included
in the verse as a constituent part of a metrical, syntactic, and rhythmic whole, or
as constituent parts of oral or conversational syntagms. The uninformed view is
that the bugaršćica would be just as effective without them. I mention here, too,
the unprofessional assertion, sometimes emphatically stated, that the refrain serves
merely to allow the singer a pause. The refrain is in fact one of the most important
stylistic and structural techniques of the bugaršćica, without which the aesthetic
effect of melancholy would not be fully achieved.
The stylistic features of the bugaršćica also include duplication of the
preposition, a structural device used in written verse from the Middle Ages down to
the present. Since medieval prose is rhythmic in character and
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 213

duplication of prepositions occurs only in Croatian poets of the early period and has
not been found in prose or anywhere else outside of verse, it is maintained that it is
present exclusively in poetry. The bugaršćica very often separates the preposition.
For example, instead of u cara čestitoga [to the honorable emperor], we find I oni
je upustiše u cara u čestitoga [they admitted her to the emperor, to the honorable
one] (Kekez 1978:162). In the same poem we find also: Pođi s Bogom, djevojko, na
tvoje na bijele dvore [Go with God, O maiden, to your, to the white court] (163),
which, outside of the bugaršćica, would read: Pođi s Bogom, djevojko, na svoje
bijele dvore [Go with God, O maiden, to your white court].
We cannot say that the bugaršćica’s poetic diction is select unless we mean
that it is the result of a process of abstracting linguistic data in the formation of
colloquial formulas and of combining numerous diminutives with the compositional
and stylistic technique of emphasis. Precisely because the language used is the folk
idiom, foreign words are relatively rare, being usually of Turkish and Italian origin,
a feature which is understandable in view of the geographical location of the genre.
It is also natural that such an age-old poetic tradition should have a good many
archaic words.
The classification of bugaršćice is identical with their poetic definition, but
if the terms of reference associated with the latter do not match those appropriate to
the former, it matters little in principle. This is also the reason why the classifications
proposed to date that do not take account of formal criteria have not met with
success and most often have misled the reader. This is particularly true of those
that are based on theme and character, since they give the subject of the poem a
historical or authentic dimension, attributing an exclusively epic character to it and
placing it in a diachronic context, where it does not belong. A classification based
on theme and character may to some degree situate the bugaršćica in areas where it
did not originate or was not prevalent. Subject matter cannot rationally be classified
chronologically (e.g., by century), because it is sparse and discontinuous; we are,
after all, dealing with individual texts. If we were to start with the collector, more
emphasis would fall on another important constituent (the literary-historical) and
less on the former characteristics of the bugaršćice. It is best in the end to opt for
certain internal features, that is, to take as a point of departure the manner in which
the poet handles his subject matter, forming it into a literary text, and to note the
changes that took place in this process. In this way less prominence is accorded to
externals and internal elements are safeguarded.
If we proceed thus, we can reach the following conclusions: bugaršćice are
ballads as a rule (in the course of time exceptions have
214 JOSIP KEKEZ

appeared); their subject matter is the internal human process, which, as a central
motif, governs the organization of the text and most often ends in tragedy. The only
exceptions are some of the local bugaršćice; in these examples, however, there is a
departure from the classical archaic bugaršćica and they should, therefore, be placed
in a special category. The structure of the bugaršćica is governed precisely by its
emphasis on particular, profoundly subjective human states of mind or behavior,
most often of an irrational kind or the result of natural causes. Even when there is
a departure from the tragic, the bugaršćica does not abandon inner psychological
workings and its melancholy tone. Moreover, thanks to its verse form, rhythm,
and refrain, or to the manner of the performance and the melancholy mood, the
basic characteristics of the bugaršćica described here become even more explicitly
lyrical.
In defining the genre, it should not be forgotten that the bugaršćica’s typical
lyrical content became consistently more permeated by epic elements in the course
of its history. This happened particularly at the time of its relative eclipse by the
ever more powerful heroic decasyllabic poem, whose themes, structure, and style
were characteristic of the epic period that was closely connected with the events
themselves, that is, the trauma occasioned by the Turkish invasion and presence.
Hence, if we take into account the original stylistic resources of the bugaršćica
in addition to what subsequently happened to it in the course of history, we
can identify four cycles of texts in the relatively meager material known to us.
Apart from expressly lyrical examples, a new group can be identified that can be
characterized by the infiltration of certain epic features. A third, more recent group
shows a greater influx of epic elements, so that we might term them “lyric-epic.” A
special group is made up of those with distinctly local characteristics. These local
bugaršćice are thematically linked to events in the localities where they originated.
The reference here is mainly to the Gulf of Kotor region—above all Perast—then
Dubrovnik, and certain other localities. They regularly give a factual account of
local events, but they do not choose just any set of events. They select those that
match the qualities of the bugaršćica as described above.
A case in point is the bugaršćica that describes an event that took place
in Perast in 1573. Its suitability as a bugaršćica subject may be deduced from its
original descriptive title: Kako Peraštani kazniše ispan-skoga vojvodu don Karla
koji osramoti dvije peraške sirote djevojke . . . [How the Citizens of Perast Punished
the Spanish Duke Don Carlos Who Dishonored Two Orphan Maidens from Perast
. . .]. An incident described in a bugaršćica from the Balović MS. is also from the
sixteenth century. The poem was composed towards the end of the seventeenth or
at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the subject is clearly well suited to
the requirements of the genre. It tells how many of the local people
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 215

perished and how love, sworn brotherhood, and the kinship of godparents were
destroyed because a maiden was dishonored. The poem is entitled Paštrovka
djevojka [The Maiden of the Paštrovićes] (Kekez 1978:230-32).
Typical examples of the lyrical bugaršćica persist all the way to the upper
limit of its chronological existence, but there is infiltration of epic elements to
some degree as early as the sixteenth century. Infiltration may have begun even
earlier, but we lack textual evidence for it. The influence of epic poetry was most
pronounced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its influence can be
seen in the example of the bugaršćica about Jele the Albanian and the Turk from
Mostar, referred to above. Verse, expression, and choice of motifs are handled in
the customary bugaršćica manner, but the text has obviously been influenced to a
marked degree by the epic principally in its plot, and to some extent in its verse line.
For instance, the long bugaršćica line may be based on a heroic decasyllabic line
or on a formula taken from it. Thus, many epics begin with the formulaic heroic
decasyllable Vino piju do dva pobratima [Two sworn brothers are drinking wine].
The first line of the bugaršćica in question reads Vino dobro pijahu do dva mila
pobratima [Two dear sworn brothers were drinking fine wine]. Some subjects are
shared by both the bugaršćica and the epic, but not, as in the previous example, as
the result of the epic’s marked influence on the style of the bugaršćica. Thus the
bugaršćica creates its own version of the epic poem Banović Strahinja [Governor
Strahinja] because the theme of female infidelity fits into its typical framework of
destruction of familial solidarity. The character of Strahinja is more appropriate for
its melancholy aesthetic system than it is for the epic. The Strahinja portrayed in
the bugaršćica is similar to the melancholy characters of our own time, whether
we encounter them in everyday life or in contemporary novels and films. There
are certain obscure passages in the epic, especially, for example, the question of
Strahinja’s pardon of his unfaithful wife, a matter that is frequently discussed but
never answered satisfactorily. In the bugaršćica the issue is sufficiently clear. It is
once more for its own intrinsic reasons that the bugaršćica deals with the problem
of political betrayal, as, for example, in Knez Dabisav izdajnički predaje Samobor
Turcima [Count Dabisav Treacherously Surrenders Samobor to the Turks]. The
bugaršćica Kad je Hodžulo, ban skradinski, poginuo s ostalim Skradinjanima [When
Hodžulo, the Governor of Skradin, Perished with the Other Men of Skradin] is in
fact a thematic variation of the epic Smrt bana Derenčića [The Death of Governor
Derenčić], which refers to the Krbava disaster of 1493. What is missing in the epic
and is present in the bugaršćica is the negative aspect of one of the national heroes,
who was in fact a coward, and was responsible for the death of one of his relatives
in the battle.
The mutual relationship between the bugaršćica and the epic is
216 JOSIP KEKEZ

evident from the manuscripts from the Gulf of Kotor region, which reveal
literal adaptations of bugaršćica subject matter. In the southern coastal area the
bugaršćica was influenced not only by the heroic decasyllabic epic but also by the
octosyllabic lyric, which was also current there, and elsewhere it was influenced
by the dodecasyllabic lyric. In the two nineteenth-century fragments from the
northern littoral already referred to, there is a somewhat pronounced influence of
lyric song in the Čakavian dialect. In a few cases, the influence of the lyric in the
mainland areas was so great that it eclipsed the typical features of the bugaršćica,
although only one text of this kind has appeared with bugaršćica subject matter
(Kekez 1978:94-95). Otherwise, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the octosyllabic lyric and especially the heroic decasyllabic epic became
dominant socially and in the context of performance until they finally displaced the
bugaršćica. But two centuries later, in our own time, both these formerly dominant
types suffered the same fate.
Two factors are, therefore, uppermost in a stylistic definition of the
bugaršćica: there are only relatively few of them and it is important to consider
them not statically but in the context of a diachronic process. Bugaršćice are fewer
in number than other extant oral forms not because they actually were sparser, but
because few have been preserved, and everything that is stated about them is thus
based on insufficient material.
Bugaršćice were popular on all occasions, even the most cheerful. Most of
the evidence suggests that they were sung at weddings, an impression confirmed
by information found in written literature. But it is also evident from texts of the
bugaršćice themselves, which have at the beginning or end—in bugaršćica meter—
usually two verses with an intervening refrain in which the host is exhorted to
continue the festivities. Even the first recorded bugaršćica of 1497 was performed
on a festive occasion, in spite of the fact that the mood of the poems is, as a rule,
melancholy and cheerless. Wherever people came together, the bugaršćica had an
audience. This again suggests how common the bugaršćica was and how widely
it was diffused throughout Croatian regions. Even wedding toasts and toasts in
honor of guests were sung in the bugaršćica form. The experience of mourning
and melancholy and the aesthetics of tragedy were essential to the poetics of earlier
ages, and in this respect the bugaršćica proved attractive to many. It must still
today be regarded as a very successful artistic genre, and here I part company with
the majority of those who have studied it and have concluded otherwise. On the
other hand, I do not claim that it was much more successful than the epic, for
example, as has been stated by some who go to the opposite extreme now that the
epic is relatively out of fashion. Every literary form, apart from its specific poetic
character, has a specific aesthetic system of its own, and we appreciate the fact that
our own age is inclined to favor the lyric in
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 217

general, and hence the bugaršćica, rather than the heroic decasyllabic epic that
was accorded mythological status at the time when the bugaršćica was first being
interpreted in scholarly circles.

Traces of the Bugaršćica in Written Literature

Like other oral forms, the bugaršćica left its mark on the language, style,
motifs, and themes of written literary works even in earliest times. If written and oral
literature had not come together at an early stage, as mentioned above—inter alia,
in the way they were collected—we would be the poorer for lack of an exceptional
genre of true aesthetic worth. Early Croatian writers relied on oral literature in their
own works, performed it, commented on it, and recorded it. The bugaršćica was
also involved in these processes. Interaction between written and oral literature
occurred in the earliest written monuments; that is, even medieval literature in its
origins and continued existence was sustained by the spoken word (Kekez 1977;
1978:44-45).
The stylistic device of prepositional duplication necessitated by the demands
of meter, referred to above, is a common feature in the early writers of the sixteenth
to the eighteenth centuries: Mavro Vetranović, Nikola Nalješković, Ivan Bunić,
Ignjat Đurđević, and many others (Kekez 1977). There is a strong tendency for
the preposition to be separated in this way in medieval inscriptions. Although such
texts—for example, those on the medieval tombstone (stećak)—are in prose, the
preposition is separated in syntagmatic units that impart a rhythm to the clause
similar to that of the bugaršćica. The preposition is separated in one of the oldest
Croatian monuments, the inscription on the stone from Baška on the island of
Krk (ca. 1100). It has recently been treated by scholars not only as an important
paleographic and cultural monument but also as a text founded on rhythmic
principles. Father Dobrovit tells how he and nine other priests built the church, in
a text in which the arrangement of words, the separation of prepositions, and the
rhyme and rhythm differentiate it from everyday speech. The conjunction da [that]
is also adopted from the bugaršćica for the same purpose and given a meaning that
is no longer current. It occurs in two proverbial formulations in the inscription on the
Baška stone, serving as an emphatic particle in the sense of thus, hence, but. In the
bugaršćica this stylistic element stands at the very beginning of the verse: in one of
Hektorović’s recordings alone, it occurs four times. This feature and others similar
to it, typical of the bugaršćica, are prevalent in a number of medieval texts and also
appear in Croatian Renaissance poetry. In the case of Vetranović’s double-rhymed
twelve-syllable verses, it is more the rule than the exception. Other elements of
218 JOSIP KEKEZ

the bugaršćica, especially poetic diction, diminutives, syntagms, and the like, as well
as general features of the bugaršćica, are all scattered throughout his works. In his
sixteenth-century Posvetilište Abramovo [Abraham’s Sacrifice], the dramatization
of a Biblical subject, the lament from Majka Margarita in adapted form is applied
to the tragic figure of Sarah. This is a bugaršćica that was not to be written down
by Baraković until the beginning of the following century.
The first Croatian poets recorded oral lyrics but also wrote many poems
themselves in that same style. The celebrated Slavist Matija Murko (1931:240)
said that the first bugaršćica in Croatian literature was some seventy years older
than the two transcriptions of Hektorović, which were traditionally regarded as the
oldest examples. Admittedly, it is written and not oral. The reference is to a poem
in long lines, “Odiljam se” [“I Take My Leave”], attributed to Džore Držić. It is
composed in sixteen-syllable lines on the model of other bugaršćice, with the same
refrain recurring after seven distichs, which is taken from the beginning of the first
and second strophes and is repeated also at the beginning of the last two verses. In
order to illustrate its bugaršćica style and mournful mood, it is sufficient to quote
the opening lines:

Odiljam se, moja vilo, Bog da nam bude u družbu;

plač i suze i moju tužbu da bi znala, moja vilo!
Odiljam se a ne vijem komu ostavljam ličce bilo.

[I take my leave, my nymph, may God go with us both;

if only you knew my sobbing and tears and sorrow, my nymph!
I take my leave, and know not to whom I leave your sweet white face.]

Držić skillfully exploits the external features of the bugaršćica and its balladic
melancholy mood, which is characteristic of the love poetry of that period.
We might likewise associate with the bugaršćica a fragment from the
dramatic ritual of the discovery and adoration of the Cross on Good Friday in the
so-called second Glagolitic missal of Vrbnik of 1462. At the beginning there are
instructions that the text must be sung mournfully in the manner of wailing women.
The bugaršćica can contribute to a plaintive dramatic performance of this kind
by its analogous mood, and it can thus play its part in shaping the text. From the
Middle Ages down to the present day this text has been intoned in Vrbnik on the
island of Krk to mark the day of Christ’s passion and death.
In addition to two bugaršćice, Hektorović interpolated a number of other
complete works from oral tradition. He also had recourse to oral literature in shaping
the content and style of his Ribanje. Baraković proceeded in similar fashion in his
Vila Slovinka, in which he incorporated
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 219

the moving tale of Majka Margarita, using various other elements of oral literature,
including some from the bugaršćica. In the heraldic documents composed and
published in Venice in 1663 for the use of the Ohmućević family—which valued
folk literature highly and recorded it—there is mention of songs: “come si canta
nelle poesie de detto conte Hreglia e delli suoi egregij fatti, ch’in lingua illirica
chiamano Popieukigne . . .” [“as is sung in the poems about the said Count Relja
and his remarkable deeds, which in the Illyrian language they call Popijevkinje
(popijevke) . . .”]. For some writers and ordinary people who had left their country,
the bugaršćica was a means of nostalgic communication with their native land
as was epic poetry for the emigrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Dubrovnik citizen and poet Jaketa Palmotić and Stijepo Gradić used to sing a
song about Marko Kraljević when they were in Rome. In letters written in 1679,
Palmotić quotes entire verses from bugaršćice. Juraj Križanić inserted verses from
the bugaršćice of his homeland as linguistic illustrations for the Pan-Slav grammar
he wrote during his Siberian exile. He also commented on the performance of
bugaršćice at court celebrations and incorporated verses with a bugaršćica flavor
in the few poems he wrote.
In his literary works Vitezović showed a great love of oral literature,
devoting critical attention to it and valuing its aesthetic qualities. One example of
such activity is his recording of the bugaršćica about Governor Derenčin, referred
to earlier. Petar Zrinski and the Popivka od Svilojevića, mentioned above, show
that epic heroes in an epic age meet the requirements of the bugaršćica as a lyrical
rather than epic genre. This is also clear in Vitezović’s epic, Odiljenje sigetsko
[The Szigetvár Farewell] (1684), where there is ample evidence of oral poetry
in general, and where bugaršćica syntactic patterns and versification are used to
articulate an emotional identification with the tragedy of Szigetvár and its principal
character (Kekez 1986b). Petar Zrinski refers to the performance of a bugaršćica in
Szigetvár, as does also Brno Karnarutić in his narrative poem Vazetje Sigeta grada
[The Capture of Szigetvár] (1584): Nikola Šubić Zrinski holds a great feast in honor
of the victors at which davorije are sung, that is, martial songs accompanied by a
war dance glorifying the triumphant warriors. The soldiers sing these songs in their
native Croatian tongue. That the reference may be to ancient bugaršćice can be
deduced from the fact that Križanić speaks in similar terms of their performance
and that for some earlier writers the term davorija is synonymous with bugaršćica.
At one point in Karnarutić’s poem, Zrinski also prepares a feast at which bugaršćice
are sung. The fact that the reference is to the performance of the same songs as in
Petar Zrinski’s and Križanić’s writings is evident from the fact that Karnarutić calls
them bugarkinje (Kekez 1986b:174).
220 JOSIP KEKEZ

In Dubrovnik in the second half of the seventeenth century, interest in oral

literature was revived, and the bugaršćica was admirably suited for the poetic
sensibility of the period. The smooth, gallant, and gracious style of the Arcadian age
restored the practice of oral recitation and thus the oral poem became fashionable.
This was also the era of encounter in matters of style between the literary north
and the literary south, both of which made use of oral literature (including the
bugaršćica) on a large scale and in the same manner, even when they did not serve
as models for each other. Franjo Krsto Frankopan in the north and Ignjat Đurđević
in the south are especially good examples of this phenomenon (Kekez 1981). A
fellow townsman and close friend of Đurđević, Antun Gleđević wrote the dramatic
work Porođenje Gospodinovo [The Nativity of Our Lord], in which shepherds
glorify the newborn Lord by singing a bugaršćica melody and refrain. Somewhat
earlier, Gundulić had demonstrated his practical and theoretical allegiance to oral
poetry and fondness for the bugaršćica in his Osman. He refers fairly often to the
bugaršćica, mentions its chief characters, and even explains its origins. In Gundulić’s
company we might also place his contemporary and fellow citizen Junije Palmotić,
the baroque dramatist, who, according to the testimony of Stijepo Gradić in the
year 1670, was given to visiting places where people gathered and took part in folk
dances. Palmotić would join in the kolo, or round dance, during which folk songs
were sung, and he himself would improvise poskočice, that is, folk songs for the
dance. Palmotić’s interest in oral literature is also manifested in his use of typical
characters from the bugaršćica in his dramas—a collection of Slovene, Hungarian,
and Bosnian gentlemen, for example (Stjepan Herceg, Janko Sibinjanin, Đurđe
Branković)—and also characters from the heroic decasyllabic epic; incidentally,
Gundulić also did the same thing. In other ways, too, the Croatian baroque, as we
have seen to some extent, was fond of recasting, adapting, and remaining close to
the form and content of the bugaršćica.
Until recently it was not believed that archaic bugaršćice were present in the
Kajkavian dialectal area. A case could not be made merely on the basis of the few
examples, referred to above, that show infiltration of Kajkavian linguistic features
and that stem from the border of Kajkavian and Čakavian dialectal areas. There
is, however, one epic, the Pjesma o Sigetu [Song of Szigetvár]—a title added later
since the beginning was missing—that has some bugaršćica features. It is found
in the Prekomurska pjesmarica I [Prekomurje Songbook I], which is from the end
of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. It displays some of the
features of a bugaršćica dealing with Svigetvár, from the Gulf of Kotor region
where we do in fact find a certain number of bugaršćice with Kajkavian dialectal
features. The Pjesma o Sigetu does not conform to the external features of the
bugaršćica—versification and form—but it does
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 221

reflect its internal characteristics: rhythm, poetic diction, syntactic constructions,

clausal structure, and the relationship of characters. A number of these features are
either general or coincident with those of the bugaršćica about the death of Nikola
Zrinski in Szigetvár. Since certain general imitations of the bugaršćica are found in
the Prekomurska pjesmarica I and in some other poems, and since the bugaršćica
served as a pattern for poems in the first published anthology in the Kajkavian
dialect and in Latin, the Cithara octochorda, published in Vienna in 1701, we may
conclude that the bugaršćica frequently circulated in the Kajkavian area. This
fact explains some hitherto obscure passages in the bugaršćica corpus (typical of
Kajkavian) and also offers a new view of its origins and historical development
(Kekez 1986a).
It is self-evident that early Croatian writers frequently encountered the
bugaršćica, for it is to them that we owe the preservation of texts. Persons who
wrote them down were certainly familiar with the genre and we have not listed
them in this section. Nor have we mentioned the numerous works, particularly
of writers from the coastal regions, in which the term occurs, or the majority of
lexicographical works in which the entry bugaršćica or the verb bugariti appears
(Kekez 1978:33-38).
In our own time Croatian poetry has frequently had recourse to the age-
old bugaršćica with a specific purpose, although it is some hundred years ago
that it vanished from oral tradition. As in earlier periods when written examples
were found, the bugaršćica is once more becoming part of written literature. Not
only does written literature use its poetic elements, but an entire body of poetry is
emerging that is modeled totally on the bugaršćica technique and that contains no
conspicuous elements of written literature, to which it otherwise naturally belongs.
This is the case in Dubravko Horvatić’s poem “Bugaršćica,” from his collection
Bašćina [Heritage], published in Zagreb in 1982, the opening verses of which read
as follows:
Zgorila je gusta česta, moj brajene, lug i gvozdi u dolini
i u onoj vilin-gori visokoj, moj brajene
kojuno sta prohodila i lipo sta drugovala, pisani vitezi.

[The dense young scrub is dry and withered, my dear brother, and
the young wood, too, and the mature wood in the valley
and in the high hills, where the fairies are, my dear brother,
where finely decked-out knights often walked by and enjoyed friendship.]

Horvatić’s “Bugaršćica” is cast in the long verses of the oral bugaršćica and
makes use of its archaic poetic diction, phrasing, morphology, syntax, and language
in general. It too is a ballad, but it synthesizes the national balladic tragic identity
and thus creates the customary melancholy
222 JOSIP KEKEZ

atmosphere of the oral genre in question. It employs motifs from a number of oral
examples of the genre, and, in addition, adopts a title documented by collectors
of and commentators on the bugaršćica from the sixteenth century right up to the
present.
Horvatić’s approach to the ancient bugaršćica is part of a general trend in
contemporary Croatian prose, poetry, and drama to make use of the language of
ancient settings. In this literature the language of ages past establishes a bond with
contemporary culture. This linkage has a dual function: it serves to place time and
space in an absolute context, interpreting history as the eternal recurrence of the
same phenomena; and it renders time absolute and space concrete in that it interprets
Croatian balladic history as a constant return to the same reality. These two variants
of one idea are typical, as I have said, of postwar Croatian literature, and a historical
identity is virtually created from oral factors, either factual or visualized in real
terms, but invariably ancient and primeval. As a rule they derive from the Middle
Ages, but sometimes they go back to the remote Croatian past, hypothetically even
to the first appearance of the human race, or the very beginnings of Croatian history.
The subject matter of the bugaršćica is an integral part of the most venerable
Croatian cultural data, and it is eagerly accepted and employed, especially in poetry.
Unlike the example taken from Horvatić, the bugaršćica is mostly used in modified
form. The bugaršćica entitled Majka Margarita thus appears in fragmentary form
in Josip Pupačić’s anthology of poems Moj križ svejedno gori [My Cross Burns
Nevertheless], published in Zagreb in 1971.
The use of the bugaršćica in postwar poetry is particularly well illustrated in
the collection Kameni spavač [The Sleeper of Stone] of Mak Dizdar, whose poetic
work is regularly inspired by medieval gravestones, or stećci—from which this
collection takes its title—or by the inscriptions and drawings on them or by oral
narratives, especially legends and related traditions. Thus, the entire anthology is
couched in the language (morphology, syntax, poetic diction) and reconstructed
style of the medieval period. This involves literal transcriptions of the gravestone
inscriptions referred to above and other epigraphs or the incorporation of old
documents and oral literature, including bugaršćice. In terms of versification and
communication, the bugaršćica in more or less modified form is used to shape
a number of Dizdar’s poems. The mode of expression and the stylistic devices
already identified indicate clearly the presence of the bugaršćica. Besides age-old
diction, rural speech, folk ideas, proverbial expression, and the bugaršćica’s use of
the conjunction da at the beginning of the verse, we find fairly common duplication
of the preposition, for instance, u tome kratkom u lijetu [“in that brief, in summer”].
The oral literary element represented by the bugaršćica in this poetry reconstructs
the language, thought, and life of the Middle Ages and
 BUGARŠĆICE: ARCHAIC ORAL POETRY 223

establishes communication with the present age. To render this reconstruction more
complete, Dizdar not only frequently uses duplication of the preposition but—in
contrast to the bugaršćica, which merely duplicates it—intensifies the medieval
oral style by repeating the preposition several times: u ovom dobrom u radosnom
u bijelom u svijetu [“in this good, in this joyful, in this white, in this world”]. Thus
the ancient bugaršćica finds its way into our own age, not merely as something
of historical and aesthetic value, but also as a device that shapes contemporary
literature. At the same time it is transformed from an oral to a written literary
form.2

University of Zagreb

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2
On this point see further Kekez 1983.
224 JOSIP KEKEZ

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