In 1912 Czech statesman Thomas Masaryk noted how the Serbian soldiers who arrived at Kosovo wept, automatically removed their caps, fell to their knees and kissed the sacred ground where the destiny of our fathers was written. The Scots glory in Culloden, the French glorify Joan of Orleans, but Kosovo represents the defeat of an entire nation, the beginning of five agonizing centuries on the Cross, and a turning point in European history. However, throughout those five centuries of darkness the Serbs continued to look toward the bright light of Easter, toward the hope of a national Resurrection. With every war we always see the obvious physical destruction, we see the pain of human suffering. The songs that will never be written, the books that will never be read, the art works which will never be painted.
War is also the death of culture.
Western Europe takes immense pride, and rightly so, in the preservation of their majestic edifices, their marvelous art works, their places of historic interest dating back to the early middle ages. The glorious evidence of the Serbian golden age of medieval times was completely erased and lost from memory because of that fateful day at Kosovo. The only evidence remained in the Kosovo cycle of songs sung by generations of bards and in our Serbian Orthodox Churches and Monasteries which preserved what they could of that eternal connection with the past -just as other European cultures have done over there. Saint Sava, his father Stefan Nemanja, Tsar Lazar, King Milutin, Tsar Dusan, and all the other members of the Nemanjic Royal Dynasty were builders of Churches and Monasteries. Those were their living legacies left to the Serbian people.