In recent months, and years, we have been witnesses to revival of old and generation of new myths about Kosovo: not only in the 19th, but also in the 20th and now at the beginning of the 21st century Kosovo has again taken the vital position in the fate of Serbian society and each individual within it.
The trouble is that constant production of the myth and its ingraining in the minds of the people is not the exclusive task of nationalists, as it was in Slobodan Milosevic's era, but is deployed by the so-called parties of democratic provenance. Only a fraction, a socially marginal number of politicians and intellectuals (and the author of the texts is proud to be counted as one of them) are opposed to that.
We have been slaves of the myth about "revival of Dusan's empire" and union of all Serbs that can only be realized with fulfillment of Kosovo covenant for two full centuries and we have sacrificed to it much of our European destiny and progress of civilization.

Tangible things, like normal life of individuals and material development of a society, have been sacrificed in the name of a myth and the beyond, the metaphysical and irrational. The idea of a Normal Society has been completely brushed aside to make place for the

myth of the Great State. When Kosovo and its majority non-Serb population, with Turkey's defeat after the First Balkan War, reentered Serbia's state and legal framework (1912) after many centuries, "the heart of Serbia" did not receive the attention worthy of an elevated myth: it was and remained ethnically the least Serb-populated region of Serbian state and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, later Yugoslavia, and was economically its least developed part. Truth to be said, many advocated the plan to turn Kosovo Serbian, including, in the best Nazi manner, Vasa Cubrilovic, in his famous lecture on St. Sava's day in 1937, proposing the way to execute "the final solution". The way to it was to decisively and finally "drive the wedge and break the Arnaut 1 triangle", the eminent professor and former member of Young Bosnia group advised, by "having komitas 2, allegedly without knowledge of our authorities, raid and burn their villages and kill civilians, and Arnauts will then move out". He added: "there will be
		Illustration from the book Art klinika - Prva petoletka, Novi Sad 2007

some outcry, but if Stalin can today move entire people from one end of Russia to another, why can't we do something similar with Arnauts". There was no mention of material development of Kosovo, "the heart and soul of every Serb". The glorifying aura was therefore lifted from the myth, and the myth itself was emptied of its lofty contents. All that was left was its political essence: a fight for Territory, ethnically clean, Serbian.

Wars have been waged for the territory, innocent people were killed on both sides and Kosovo was really lost back in 1999. Today even formally, politically and ethnically so (two million Albanians and 150,000 Serbs).
Most Serbs, in fact, have no real emotional connection with Kosovo, they never set foot on Kosovo's ground, and the connection, if it still exists today, owes its origin exclusively to the strong media campaign.
Thus today, in April 2008, the few democratically oriented persons demur to say publicly that Kosovo is not the heart of Serbia. To say that Kosovo is not Serbia, but definitely a new state in Europe. To speak out loud that Serbian government is conducting a policy of inducing violence, riots and cabal in northern Kosovo in order to provoke Albanians to respond to Serbian violence with even stronger violence of their own. That the authorities dissipate unjustifiably the money of Serbian taxpayers in the crazy and fantastic hope that "Kosovo will again be Serbian". To declare that young swimmer Milorad Cavic is no national hero because he wore demonstratively (at someone's suggestion?) a T-shirt with Kosovo is Serbia slogan on the victor's rostrum at the European Championship. To explain that he is just a manipulated young man, as are many others, who felt the whip of Kosovo myth on his own back when he was disqualified from competition, which caused him inexcusable sports and moral damage. Citizens of Serbia, once again hostages to the myth in the two centuries of Serbian modern history, can be easily "disqualified" from the process of Europeanization and modernization at the very beginning of 21st century, and sentenced to wait for a new chance, maybe in the next century. If the Myth does not resurrect again, of course.

	Zlatoje Martinov

1 Arnauts - Turkish word for Albanians
2 Komitas - Macedonian revolutionaries