The Lay of Kossovo: Serbia's Past and Present (1389-1917)

Reissue of the book "The Lay of Kossovo" published in 1917 by the "Kossovo Day Committee".

Five hundred years ago our Allies the Serbians went down in the great Battle of Kossovo, which was the end of their triumph and the beginning of their glory. For if the Serbian Empire was mortally wounded, the Serbian nation had a chance to prove itself immortal; since it is only in death that we can discover immortality. So awfully alive is that Christian thing called a nation that its very death is a living death. It is a living death which lasts a hundred times longer than any life of man; and of what it meant to the Serbians I know of no possible literary expression. The nearest words for it are found, I believe, in a Serbian proverb, which I fancy I have heard, and which I am sure is too good for me to have imagined: “God never made a heaven until He saw the sorrows of the Serbs.”
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1916)