Private Day Tour: Origin of Serbian Cyrillic

Private Day Tour: Origin of Serbian Cyrillic

Why have we created a tour dedicated to such a simple thing, Serbian alphabet? If you were in our region about 30 years ago, you should remember that almost the whole Yugoslavia spoke Serbo-Croatian (or Croatian-Serbian in Croatia) language. However, now we have in the very same areas Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, and what is the weirdest – we all perfectly understand each other. So, linguistic question is much connected with political one, that’s why it makes sense to pay attention to the origin of our language.

We will leave Belgrade in the morning and drive to West Serbia. On the way to our destination there is an interesting place where we will make a stop. That is mountain Gucevo where you will be able to see the traces of the first trench battle of the WWI and to hear some informative stories about that battle.

After the stop we continue driving till reach the village Trsic – the natal place of Serbian alphabet and modern Serbian language. Right here in 1787 the reformer of our language, Vuk Karadzic, was born. It was he who implemented the best grammatical rule: “read as it’s written, write as it’s spoken”. In Trsic we will explore Vuk’s house-museum and learn about his childhood and Serbia of that time.

Then we are going to drop in a nearby household for a typical Serbian home coffee-break, after which we go on to local monastery Tronosa. There used to be a school where Vuk went to primary school and where he started to learn language and folklore and to dream about its improvement. By the way, we can stroll to the monastery by foot through a beautiful forest around an hour or, if you are not a great hiker, another option is to arrive there by car.

Having visited the monastery and enjoyed in its spectacular beauty, we return to the household Misic, where a delicious homemade local lunch is already waiting for us. And after lunch and some curious conversation with our hosts it’s time to get back to Belgrade.