And rolled her sleeves above her snow-white elbows;
On her back she carries warm, white bread.."
They did not win the battle. In a textbook map made to show the scope of Ottoman conquests, there was no 'X' to even mark Kosovo as militarily significant. But 600 years after 1389 AD, at a convention in Los Angeles, a woman -- not even a Serb, merely a scholar -- recites in their own language this epic song about a young bride who has lost everything dear to the Turks: her groom, her country. The battle, the loss, carve a memory so deep that even in Greece children recite and sing it. By the time she is finished the hundreds of Serbians in the audience have tears streaming down their faces, an ache and a nationalism so palpable that she realizes suddenly, that if she were to now command them to go do anything -- they would do it, for the sake of remembering.
"Jao, jadna! hude ti sam sreće!
Da se, jadna, za zelen bor hvatim,
I on bi se zelen osuš
"O pity, pity! I am cursed so utterly
That if I touched a greenly leafing tree
it would dry and wither, blighted and defiled."
