Jovan Hadžić

Jovan Hadžić (pseudonym Miloš Svetić; Sombor, 8 September 1799-Novi Sad, 28 April 1869) was a Serbian writer and legislator. He signed his literary work as Miloš Svetić. He was an influential figure in the drafting of the Civil and Criminal Code of Serbia in 1844. The third European nation after France and Austria to have a codified legal system.

Jovan Hadžić is remembered as a founder of the Matica Srpska and as the most persistent opponent of Vuk Karadžić's orthographic reform. However, Hadžić was also a poet and translator, a legislator in the Principality of Serbia, as well as an active public figure. Having established a commendable reputation through his early poetry, many people thought him to be a worthy successor of Lukijan Mušicki. As a student in Pest, Hadžić founded Matica Srpska in 1826, modeled in part after the recently established but dormant Magyar Tudós Társaság (Hungarian Scholarly Society) which eventually became the Hungarian Academy of Science. In addition to books, it published journal Serbski Letopis, founded two years earlier by Georgije Magarašević, Pavel Jozef Šafárik and Lukijan Mušicki in Novi Sad, where Magarašević was professor and Šafarik the director of the Serbian gymnasium there.

Vuk Karadžić foresaw that the biggest battle in the future would be the battle for orthography. Hadžić wrote Sitnitze jezykoslovne (Language Details) in 1837, in which he attacked Vuk's reforms. He signed it with a pseudonym, Miloš Svetić. Once a supporter of Vuk, Hadžić was now an opponent, like Metropolitan Stevan Stratimirović who died a year earlier (1836). Vuk responded to Hadžić in kind, two years later. Other events at the time worked in favor of the vernacular, converging to make 1847 a decisive year. Vuk's translation of Novi Zavjet (The New Testament) appeared that year, demonstrating that the language he proposed was able to express higher thoughts, indeed.

It was written by Jovan Hadžić, a reputable lawyer and writer of the time, chief lawmaker in the Principality of Serbia from 1837 to 1846, mostly engaged at the office during the rule of the Defenders of the Constitution. He shaped the law immediately after the uprising against Turkish rule, at the time of the restoration of Serbian statehood and a quiet revolution. Responsible for the establishment of constitutional order in Serbia, he had to solve the problem of legal discontinuity and create the law that would, on one hand, correspond to particular circumstances existing in society and, on the other hand, correspond to the principles and standards that had existed for centuries in continental Europe. He was successful, because the rules formulated in their legislative projects still apply today.

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