Zelić! – The Project

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1. The Project

   • The inter-confessional polemic that during the 18th and 19th centuries engulfed the Serbian Orthodox community living in the Dalmatian area close to the Triplex Confinium – the triple border point between the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire – is a matter that has been intensively studied by historians, although with considerable differences regarding approach and results.

     For instance, Nikodim Milaš, author of the first history of the Orthodox Serbs of Dalmatia (Pravoslavna Dalmacija, 1901), laments the absence of tolerance toward the Serbian population, whose confessional identity was repeatedly put at risk by local Catholic bishops trying to impose union with the Catholic Church (“Uniatism”). A different point of view was proposed by Mile Bogović (1982), who claims that these initiatives were not part of an official campaign for union at the behest of the Roman Church, the Habsburg Empire, or the Republic of Venice, but rather originated from the personal initiative of influential local personalities (eg. the Catholic bishops of Zadar Vicko Zmajević and Matej Karaman). Finally, the works of Drago Roksandić (2004) and Egidio Ivetić (2009) have shown that behind the confessional matter lay deep political and economical implications as well.

     The confessional element was the differentia specifica in the foundations of the difficult relationship between the Croatian Catholic clergy and the immigrant Orthodox Serbs, who had moved to northern Dalmatia after the Ottoman-Venetian wars (1645-1718).

     During the major part of the 18th century the Catholic bishops and prelates of Dalmatia strove to extend the authority of the Roman Church even to the Serbian Orthodox clergy and its community, in order to suppress any possibility of having an Othodox bishop enthroned in the region. Besides the activity of the Catholic clergy, the Orthodox Serbs had to endure the initiatives implemented by the great European powers that governed the region – in particular by Venice and the Habsburg Empire – who tried, more or less systematically, to eradicate the confessional variety of their subjects.

     As regards Venice, the integration of the Orthodox Serbs into the social system of the Venetian Dalmatia was not merely a local issue, but a converging point in the relationship between the Republic and the Orthodox subjects (Greeks and Serbs respectively) during the entire 18th century. Documents pertaining to the period prove that the attitude of the Serenissima towards the Orthodox people, which was often described by historians as diffident or plainly intolerant, was actually oscillating. Furthermore, it greatly depended upon the actual historical circumstances that the Republic had to face, and on both the political skills and the sensitivity shown by the Venetians governor-generals (Provveditori in Dalmatia e Albania) towards the confessional issues.

     Far clearer was the position of the Austrians: it was a precisely designed project to bring the Orthodox in the arms of the Catholic Church, elaborated in Vienna at the beginning of the 19th century and directly involving Emperor Francis I, a veritable spiritus movens of this initiative. The Habsburg Empire desired to put an end to the interference of the Russian tsar in matters regarding the Orthodox population of the region.

     From their own point of view, the Serbian communities that settled in these regions demonstrated a firm resolve to defend their cultural heritage and their identity, and they perpetually sought legitimacy for the Orthodox Church in the territory of Dalmatia. After several futile attempts, carried out during Venetian rule, the Orthodox Serbs obtained an Orthodox bishopric in Dalmatia only in 1809 during French rule. The following year, Napoleon nominated Benedikt Kraljević the first Orthodox bishop in Dalmatia. However, the foundation of the bishopric did not resolve all the tentions between the two confessional groups; if possible, it intensified them even further.

     A native from the Zadar hinterland, Zelić started his ecclesiastic career as Superior Abbot of the Serbian monastery of Krupa and later became one of the key protagonists in the events connected to the confessional dispute. First as Vicar General of the Serbs of Dalmatia (1796-1810), and later as Vicar Bishop of Cattaro (1810-1811), Zelić served as the official representative of the Orthodox Church in Dalmatia throughout the changing rules of Venice, Austria and France. Through his work, he eagerly strived to uphold the confessional identity of the Orthodox population under his jurisdiction, hoping to achieve further cultural emancipation for his compatriots.

2. Zelić and His Žitije
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3. Realisation of the Project

   • The research activity connected to the project moved along several lines.

     In the first place, it concerned the cataloguing and digitalization of the corpus of archival documents related to the figure of the Serbian Archimandrite Gerasim Zelić. The documents thus discovered in the Serbian (Archives of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Sremski Karlovci – ASANUK) and Croatian (State Archives in Zadar – DAZD) archives were obtained either as photographic reproductions or as scanned files.

     This primary corpus consisted of over 650 written documents in Serbian, Italian, Greek and Latin, which were examined, reviewed and classified according to their origin, language and contents. This very process allowed us to determine the final corpus of over 130 documents, which were deemed relevant as they documented the interaction between Zelić and the inter-confessional polemic in his native Dalmatia.

     The documents cover a period between January, 1794 and September, 1830. The greater part of the corpus consists of the private correspondence of the Serbian Archimandrite, while another large part are diplomas obtained from the Venetian, Austrian and French authorities that successively ruled in Dalmatia.

     The oldest document (ASANUK, MPA 328/1835: 295-296), dated Zara, January 6th, 1794, is an epistle of the Governor-General of Dalmatia and Albania Alvise Marin (1792-1795), that confirms Zelić in his appointment as Superior Abbot of the monastery of Krupa – a title Zelić had obtained a year before. The most recent document (ASANUK, MPA 328/1835: 33-34), dated Novi Sad, September 11th, 1830, is signed by three young theologians, Nikolaj Plavša, Alexij Zelić and Grigorij Radulović. It is a declaration that the three signatories have used the money allocated to them by Zelić, to pay for their studies. In doing so, the three young theologians followed the bequest made by the Serbian Archimandrite just before his death, which had occurred the year before in Buda.

     About 80% of the transcribed documents have not been published previously, with the exception of those noted by Zelić in his autobiography (Žitije), published in Budapest in 1823.

     The selected documents were digitalized using the TEI P4 format, one of the basic digital standards for preserving data pertaining to the humanities, which proved to be extremely appropriate for the digital transcription of older and non-standard language varieties, as the manuscripts in question contain.

     The documents were fully transcribed, according to internationally accepted philological criteria. Each transcripted document is introduced by a summary in Dublin Core format comprising dating, provenance, language and a brief synopsis of the contents.

     The digital aspects of transcription was constantly checked by the supervisor of the project, Han Steenwijk. As regards problems related to the philological aspect of documents written in Serbian prior to its standardization, great help was obtained from two other members of the research team, Rosanna Benacchio and Rosanna Morabito.

     Once the digitalization of the archival materials was complete, the corpus was studied as direct evidence of the religious and social life of the Orthodox Serbs and their polemical confrontation with the Catholics. The results of this research activity and the analysis performed on the archival documents were collected in a series of papers.

     
     

     The second part of the project dealt with the comparative research of the collected documents and the documentary material existing in Zelić’s autobiography Žitije.

     According to the literary tendencies of the age, the work of the Serbian Archimandrite comes across as artistic prose based upon the facts of real life. On the one hand, this synthesis of documentary records and fictional writing was the result of Zelić’s willingness to meet the taste of the reading public, who desired to find a faithful record of the great events of time in literary works. On the other hand, Žitije can be regarded as a typical memoir, in which Zelić strove to legitimize his actions and choices in the eyes of posterity. The quest for “verisimilitude” thus became one of the structuring elements in the creation of this work, a piece that became one of the first examples of the “documentary-artistic” prose in Serbian early modern literature.

     The comparative research of the collected manuscripts and the documents cited in Zelić’s Žitije enabled us to reach some interesting conclusions related to the function of the documents in the autobiography, as well as to their usage on behalf of the author himself. For instance, Zelić referred to Serbian documents always in their entirety and faithful to the original, while in the case of documents in Italian or German he consequently offered only its translation into Serbian, sometimes with significant imprecisions.

     It should be noted that the archival documents were compared to the first edition of the autobiography, published in Budapest in 1823, as it is the only edition that dutifully followed the instructions of its author. The decisions made by the editors of the subsequent editions (1886, 1897-1900, 1988), have resulted in a significant reduction of the body of documentary material, which was (wrongly) deemed redundant and therefore mostly excluded from the principal text body. Actually, a comparison between the first and the later editions is carried out in the study entitled Preplitanje dokumentarnog i fiktivnog: uloga istorijske građe u autobiografiji Gerasima Zelića.

4. Final Conclusions and Possible Further Research

   • The analysis of the archival documents has confirmed their great historical and cultural value, and helped shedding a light on certain aspects of the confessional history of Northern Dalmatia.

     First as Vicar General of the Serbs of Dalmatia (1792-1810) and later as Vicar Bishop of Cattaro (1810-1811), Gerasim Zelić maintained a correspondence with the Venetian (Vincenzo Dandolo, Governor-General of Dalmatia and Albania), Austrian (Emperor Francis I) and French authorities, as well as with many other eminent ecclesiastical dignitaries of his time (Bishop Benedikt Kraljević, Archbishop Stefan Stratimirović, Bishop Petar J. Vidak).

     Therefore, within the corpus of archival documents presented here, it is possible to discern three important themes:

     1. Documents related to the dispute between Zelić a Benedikt Kraljević, who was appointed by Napoleon as first Orthodox bishop of Dalmatia in 1810. Apart from the letters of the two prelates (autographs in the case of Kraljević and copies in the case of Zelić), among the discovered documents also figure letters addressed to the Austrian authorities by the representatives of the Serbian Orthodox community, who demanded the removal of Kraljević due to his closeness to the Uniate church. These documents confirm that the relationship between these two prelates constituted a focal point not only in the career of Zelić (who in the end decided to be relieved of his duties and withdrew to Krupa monastery), but also in the much broader context of the confessional dispute in the Dalmatia.
     2. The correspondence between Zelić and Stefan Stratimirović, Archbishop of Sremski Karlovci from 1790 to 1836. Apart from representing the largest number of documents, this correspondence is particularly interesting as it shows the situation of the Orthodox Church in the Dalmatian area. In addition, it documents the creation of a special fund at the Archbishopric of Sremski Karlovci, which was financed by Zelić himself. Thanks to this fund, young Serbs coming from the Dalmatian Orthodox community were given the opportunity to study theology in the renowned institutes of Sremski Karlovci. This second theme also encompasses the letters of the young theologians Nikolaj Plavša, Grigorij Radulović and Alexij Zelić (a nephew of the Serbian Archimandrite), who could study theology in Karlovci thanks to Zelić’s foundation.
     3. Documents in connection with the final part of Zelić’s life (1811- 1828). After being accused of calumny, due to several letters in which he urges the Dalmatian Orthodox population to rise against Kraljević, Zelić spent his last years under the constant surveillance of the Austrian authorities. He was primarily exiled to Vienna and later to Buda, where he remained until his death (1828). This third theme within the archival documents, therefore, mainly comprises the communications between Zelić and the Austrian authorities. In addition, it encompasses the pleas sent by Zelić to the Austrian authorities (usually to Emperor Francis I) hoping to resolve his position and to be allowed to go back to his native Dalmatia.

     The results of the research and analysis carried out on the documents are presented in the papers collected in the “Studies” section.

     In addition, on October 17th, 2016, in the Antique Archives Hall of Palazzo Bo, Padova a seminar entitled “Gerasim Zelić and his time” will take place where all the members of the research team will be present.

     Finally, the collected documents should represent material of great significance for linguistic analysis. Regarding this, particular interest was already expressed by the scholarly committee that is currently working on the Rečnik slavenosrpskog jezika (to be published by Matica Srpska, Novi Sad). They regard the collected archival documents as an important corpus of attestations relevant for the description of Serbian before its standardization (slavenosrpski).

5. Research Team and Credits

   • Project supervisor: Prof. Han Steenwijk
     Assignee: Monica Fin (PhD)

     Research team:
     The research team is composed of scholars of Serbian literary and cultural history of the 18th century, as well as linguists, historians and theologists. They are (in alphabetical order):

     • Prof. Rosanna Benacchio (University of Padova)
     • Prof. Dorota Gil (Jagellonian University of Cracovia)
     • Prof. Nikola Grdinić (University of Novi Sad)
     • Prof. Egidio Ivetić (University of Padova)
     • Prof. Persida Lazarević Di Giacomo (University of Chieti-Pescara)
     • Prof. Maria Rita Leto (University of Chieti-Pescara)
     • Prof. Rosanna Morabito (University of Napoli “L’Orientale”)
     • Prof. Vladimir Vukašinović (University of Belgrade)

     Credits:
     The project was financed by the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies (DiSLL) of the University of Padova.
     Special thanks should be extended to the Archives of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Science at Sremski Karlovci (ASANUK), as well as to the Zadar State Archives (DAZD), where the main research was carried out.
     The Biblioteka Matice Srpske of Novi Sad has given permission to use a digital copy of the first edition of Gerasim Zelić’s Žitije for comparing the manuscript documents to the ones included in the author’s autobiography.