Medieval Serbian literature

[1][2] During the Middle Ages itinerant scribe monks from the Balkans travelled to Kievan Rus and beyond and their Church Slavonic writings became a common literary language for centuries among all Slavs.

[3][4] The ritual genres were hagiographies, homiletics and hymnography, known in Slavic as žitije (vita), pohvala (eulogy), službe (church services), effectively meaning prose, rhetoric, and poetry.

Unlike the countries of Western Europe, Serbia traces its history, literature, artistic, religious and cultural heritage when Christianity became a state religion during the time of Constantine the Great and New Rome.

Its own literature was thus a necessary expression of social and national independence but at the same time integration in the spiritual ecumene of the Christian civilization through which it showed maturity and justified the political existence of the state itself on the world scale.

[6] With Saint Sava and others (namely Monk Simeon) there came works in the next century by prominent writers of the period, such as Domentijan and Atanasije, Grigorije II of Ras, Teodosije, Elder Grigorije, Antonije Bagaš, Lazar the Hilandarian, Pachomius the Serb, Gabriel the Hilandarian, Constantine of Kostenets, Cyprian, Metropolitan of Kiev, Gregory Tsamblak, Isaija the Monk, Grigorije of Gornjak, Rajčin Sudić, Jakov of Serres, Romylos of Vidin, Jovan the Serb of Kratovo, Gabriel of Lesnovo, Nicodemus of Tismana, Dimitar of Kratovo, Anonymous Athonite, Marko Pećki, and Demetrius Kantakouzenos, alongside important texts by women poets and writers, including Jefimija, Maria Angelina Doukaina Palaiologina, Princess Milica of Serbia, Saint Angelina of Serbia, Mara Branković, Olivera Despina, Jelena Balšić, Helen of Anjou, Simonida, Katarina Branković and others.

They fostered copying and literary work that by its excellence and production changed the history of the South Slavic literature and languages spreading its influence all over the Orthodox Balkans and Imperial Russia.

Throughout this time Serbs living under the Habsburgs, the Venetians and the lands of their Vlach co-religionists (Wallachia and Moldavia) were printing books, building monasteries, schools, hospitals, churches and kept the earliest of the Arts and Crafts movements busy painting icons and iconostases during the Renaissance—the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity.

The testaments to this are the many Serbian Orthodox monasteries, churches and libraries (institutions) found today in Hungary (Ráckeve and Serbian Kovin Monastery), Romania (Hodoș-Bodrog, Bazjaš, Sveti Đurađ, Bezdin, Zlatica, Kušić, Sveti Simeon, Šemljug, and others), Greece (Hilandar, Mount Athos and Meteora), Italy (Saint Spyridon), Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania that speak of their rich art and literature.

[10] The growth of the Renaissance Period occurred with the arrival of Serbian and Bulgarian hagiographers, literati, and artists who had escaped from their native lands when these were either threatened or occupied by the Ottomans.