Saint Bishop Nikolay, who entrusted his Serbian Orthodox race for the rest of the century, said that Serbian history was written only by men and about men. He hoped that the time would come when it would be written more carefully and fairly, so that the great role and beneficial influence of Serbian women on the entire fabric of our glorious history could be brought out and clarified.
And indeed, with the first beats of a military, wedding or any other march, our women danced, reaching to the very bottom of human suffering, to truths and stars. Raised heads, hunched backs, wounded souls. Without thinking about whether they can, whether they want to, whether they are afraid. Their prayer and defiance, their pain and sacrifice, complement our epic songs.
I am often transported from my sleep by that rhythm of the foremothers, who, being born at this crossroads between heaven and earth, first learned to fight. Immediately after, to love unconditionally. That love, which they nurtured in their bosoms, must have been a gift from the Lord himself, otherwise it would have been impossible to withstand all the adversities with which the Serbian woman struggled from the moment she laid her nest here. There is no generation that has not given birth to give children to the motherland. Who did not pull from her heels to pull her child out of the mire of misery, to clothe him with Saint Saul, to educate him and prepare him for the world, and all so that he would return home from the world.
How many sparks of Divine love she awakened in the children, who will become the God of the world. How many scientists changed the course of history with their inventions, just because their Serbian mother did not give up in order to make the impossible possible for her child. How many of them carried both a child and a rifle on their backs. Not to mention harnesses, tilled fields, kilometers walked.
How many of them fought against the attacks of the Ottomans, Arnauts, Bulgarians, Hungarians. By refusing to wear burkas, to deny Christ. Those who sang and jumped from the cliffs into the abyss, in order to preserve their honor.
I believe that our nation is one of the few that has a branch of its lineage torn between two galloping horses. Bosiljka Pasjanska died a martyr's death, because she did not want to submit to Arnaut.
Serbian women. Women who sacrificed themselves and their children on the altar of their motherland, guarding their hearth, Krsna Slava and family name, as the greatest sanctities.
All of them overnight became squatters, widows, mothers with black headscarves, on whom the survival of an entire nation depended, each with their own pain and the common one. With a prayer on his lips.
It is our obligation and moral duty to remember them with great respect and to mention them in prayer at every opportunity. That by walking in their footsteps, we feel the pain of our people, wherever they live, with a deep and sincere need to always and everywhere be there for help. That by imitating them, we should be at least like them. That we raise children in the spirit of the Gospel, living the Svetosava and Kosovar vows, so they will become new Čučuk Stans, Olivers, Yefimjes, Nadeždas, Milunkas. That the sacrifice of a Serbian woman, about whom excellent world writers wrote poems, should be studied in schools, that the streets be decorated with the names of Mileva Škrljić, Draga Janković, Milica Stojadinović.
There remains hope, firm and steadfast, for our long-suffering people. Hope that the new pages of Serbian history will be written in capital letters. Hope and living faith, because from the holy root the tree is also holy.