We don’t hear much from Montenegro, which is a small nation in southeastern Europe. It’s on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, directly across from Italy. It’s quite a new country; it became independent, along with Serbia, just in 2006. There wasn’t any sort of revolution or anything; the people who live there just voted.
Although the country itself is new, the area has a long history, and has been known as Montenegro (“Black Mountain”) since about the 15th Century. It’s right next to Serbia, and several times in history the two current nations have been a single unit — sometimes a “principality,” sometimes an occupied territory (by the Ottoman Empire), and if you go back far enough (which is WAY back to at least the first century BCE), it was “Illyria.” The ancient Greeks knew all about it.
In 1813, on November 13, in the village of Njeguši, Petar II Petrović-Njegoš was born. He was born into the (or “a”) ruling family at the time, and became the leader of the country when his uncle, Petar I, died in 1830. He was a combination political leader and spiritual leader, and they called him the “Prince-Bishopric,” but he’s mostly knon as “Njegoš.”
As a political leader he reformed the tax system (everybody hated his new ideas), restored an old-but-lapsed alliance with the Russian Empire, and worked toward uniting Montenegro and Serbia (roughly speaking, that is; neither Montenegro nor Serbia exactly existed at the time). But that wasn’t what he’s mostly remembered for. He’s mostly remembered as a writer.
His best-known work is Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath). It’s both an epic poem and a play, and recounts the arguably historical occurrence of a Christmas Day massacre in the early 1700s. Nobody is quite sure whether it really happened, but either way, Gorski vijenac is a masterpiece of Serbian and Slavic literature, and has been used as the “national epic” by countries in the region — Montenegro, Serbia, and Yugoslavia. It’s quite an achievement by a prince who reportedly didn’t even learn to read until he was 12. Regardless, he began writing poetry at 17, and all of his epic poems are still classics.
Njegoš’ life is pretty well documented, and full of events and historical figures that western education mostly ignores, at least until it’s your focus of study in university. You can get a general sense of what life might have been like in that region at the time, though, from the story of the end of his life. When he was just in his mid-30s, he became ill with what turned out to be tuberculosis. But he had to endure a difficult journey elsewhere for any treatment; there was not a single doctor anywhere in Montenegro. He died of tuberculosis at 37.
