The Mountain Wreath

1847 poem and play by Petar II Petrović Njegoš

The Mountain Wreath is a poem and a play written by Prince Bishop and poet Petar II Petrović Njegoš. Njegoš wrote The Mountain Wreath during 1846 in Cetinje and published it the following year after the printing in an Armenian monastery in Vienna. It is a modern epic written in verse as a play, thus combining three of the major modes of literary expression. It is considered a masterpiece of Serbian and Montenegrin literature.

According to Montenegrin folklore, the massacre was carried out on Christmas Eve, however there are disagreements of the date of the massacre, stretching from 1702 and 1709–1711. The main driver was Bishop Danilo Šćepćević, native of Njeguši, who was elected as bishop in 1697 and consecrated by Arsenius III Čarnojević in 1700 in Secu. Danilo gathered the chieftains and ordered them to exterminate "native Turks" who refused to be baptized. Serb historian Vladimir Ćorović states that the action was directed by Vuk Borilović and the Martinović brothers, along with several bureaucrats. At Christmas, before dawn, they killed the Muslims of Cetinje. Thousands were massacred, but only one of the bishop's men was wounded. In the following days, many Muslims were expelled from surrounding settlements. Men, women and children were slaughtered.

Historian Srđa Pavlović points out that The Mountain Wreath has been the subject of praise and criticism, frequently used to support diametrically opposing views. Regardless of their political agendas, ideological preferences or religious persuasions, every new generation of South Slav historians and politicians appropriates Njegoš's work hoping to find enough quotations to validate their own views. Michael Sells, an American professor of Islamic History and Literature of Serbian descent, shares a similar view, stating that the poem, a required reading in all schools in pre war Yugoslavia, is notable for its celebration of ethnic cleansing. In his view, it "denotes Slavic Muslims as Christ Killers, and plays a significant role in ethnic conflict and Bosnian War of the 1990s", pointing out that The Mountain Wreath is memorized and quoted by radical Serb nationalists of the 1990s. According to British Jewish reporter and political analyst Tim Judah "there was another side to The Mountain Wreath far more sinister than its praise of tyrannicide. With its call for the extermination of those Montenegrins who had converted to Islam, the poem was also a paean to ethnic cleansing it helps explain how the Serbian national consciousness has been moulded and how ideas of national liberation are inextricably linked with killing your neighbour and burning his village." Regarding the claims about the poem's influence in ethnic cleansing, Pavlović argues that it suffices to say that, at present, some 20% of the Montenegrin population is of Islamic faith, and that Montenegrins of the Islamic faith and their socio cultural heritage have been in the past and are at present an integral part of the general matrix of Montenegrin society, as seen in Montenegro demographics. Pavlović argues that Njegoš the politician was trying to accomplish the restructuring of a tribal society into a nation in accordance with the concept of national awakening in the 19th century. Pavlović proposes reading The Mountain Wreath as a tale of a long gone heroic tribal society whose depicted state of affairs had little in common with the Montenegro of Njegoš's time and has nothing in common with contemporary Montenegro. However, The Mountain Wreath does speak volumes about political, social, cultural and economic conditions in Montenegro during the early 19th century, and about Njegoš's efforts to advocate the ideas of pan Slavism and the Illyrian Movement. "The Mountain Wreath" is an important literary achievement and cannot be viewed exclusively as national literature because it deals with issues much broader than the narrow margins of Montenegrin political and cultural space, and in Pavlović's view, should not be read outside the context of the time of its inception, nor from the perspective of one book.