Milica Stojadinović-Srpkinja

Milica Stojadinovic-Srpkinja (Serbian Cyrillic: Милица Стојадиновић Српкиња, pronounced [mîlitsa stɔjadǐːnɔv̞itɕ sr̩̂pkiɲa]) (1828, Bukovac, Petrovaradin – 1878, Belgrade) was arguably the greatest female Serbian poet of the 19th century.

She was born to a family of a Serb Orthodox Church parish priest, and received acclaim for her patriotic poetry already as a teen; she expanded to other aspects of Romanticist poetry as she grew older. In her hometown of Bukovac her character was shaped; here she imbibed that passionate love of country scenes and country life which neither absence, politics nor dissipation could uproot. Here she learnt to understand the ways and thoughts of the peasant folk, and laid up that rich store of scenes and characters which a marvelously retentive memory enabled her to draw upon at will. The progress of her mind during these early years well deserves to be recorded.

Education, in the strict sense of the word, she had very little. Except for a lower Gymnasium education, she was mostly self-taught, and yet she was greatly appreciated in her lifetime by poets and writers much more soundly academic than herself, such as Petar II Petrović Njegoš, Branko Radičević, Ivan Mažuranić, and Ljubomir Nenadović. When Njegoš first met her in Vienna, he said: I'm a poet, she is a poetess. Were I not a bishop, Montenegro would now have a princess (quoted from Milovan Djilas's Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop, published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1966, p. 242).

Her first book of poems—Pesme (Poems)—was published in 1850, and, later on, two expanded editions were issued in 1855 and 1869. She also wrote a diary entitled U Fruskoj gori 1854 (In Fruska Gora: 1854), in three volumes, published in 1861, 1862 and 1866. She spoke German fluently, and even translated articles from German magazines for Serbian newspapers. Milica is considered the first woman war correspondent in Serbia. On the 15th of June 1862 she was a witness to a what began as a skirmish but developed into a major conflict between the Serbian Gendarmerie and Turkish troops at Belgrade. The incident at Čukur Fountain (Čukur česma) began when a boy with a jug was shot and killed by a Turkish soldier which resulted in the bombardment of the Serbian capital by Turkish artillery ensconced in the Kalemegdan fortress.

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