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Updated: September 28, 2025
Each year the Serbians had commemorated the anniversary of this event by mourning. Kossovo Plain is a high plateau, forty miles long and ten wide; from its rolling fields the forbidding crags of Montenegro and Albania are plainly visible, black in summer and white with snow in winter.
Their blood is not stirred by the memories of Kossovo, and they have no burning desire to die for Serbia. They would much prefer to be allowed to till their own potato gardens in peace in Connemara.
But the Turk was rapidly pouring into Europe. In 1366 the Bulgarian Czar, Sisman III., agreed to become the vassal of the Turkish Sultan Murad, and the centuries of subjection to the Turk began. After the battle of Kossovo the grip of the Turk on Bulgaria was tightened. Tirnova was captured, the nobles of the nation massacred, the national freedom obliterated.
Montenegro was the only Balkan state which they were unable to bring to obedience, and the struggle, which began after the battle of Kossovo, has, perhaps, not reached its final stage yet, though other enemies have supplanted the Turk.
The spandrils are filled with Gothic leafage, the bases and caps to the columns are early Renaissance, and the frieze is quite plain, with a dentilled cornice. The church is not interesting architecturally; the western façade is imitated from the cathedral, but it contains a crucifix brought from Bosnia by refugees after the battle of Kossovo.
There was something tragically significant that this last stand should be made on the plains of Kossovo, or the "Field of the Ravens," as it is sometimes called by the natives, on account of the great flocks of those birds that frequent it.
Both say the black border is symbolic of mourning for the losses at Kossovo, while the five lines are explained either as signifying the five centuries which have elapsed since that terrible battle or as symbolic of a rainbow the sign of hope that one day the glories of the old Serb empire will be restored. The red crown signifies "the field of blood," as the Hebrews have it.
By November 22, 1915, the Austrian lines had followed to within five miles of that point. Gallwitz and his Germans, in the meanwhile, operating on the left flank of the Austrians, was pushing southward, his object being to take Pristina, on the east side of the Kossovo Plain and about twenty miles southeast of Mitrovitza.
It seems to be a peculiarly Slavonic trait, this recalling of sad events in their history. The Serbs still celebrate Vidovdan, the day of their disastrous defeat at Kossovo, where their chivalry, the finest in Eastern Europe, went under in a sea of blood.
As the Greeks had pressed into southern Macedonia, so the Servian armies advanced through old Servia into northern and central Macedonia. In their great victory over the Turkish forces at Kumanovo they avenged the defeat of their ancestors at Kossovo five hundred years before.
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