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The epic hero
Marko represented as a king in mourning for his father Vulkashin,
fresco on the entrance gate of the monastery of the Archangel Michael,
Prilep, Macedonia. |
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Bulgarian historians
did not fail to point out that, in epic songs collected in Bulgarian land,
Krali Marko has generally the role of a positive hero, who defends his territory,
family, allies, people and christians. Similarly, Serbian historians have
long given an ambiguous image of Marko Kraljevic, either a negative hero,
vassal of a Turkish sultan, or a positive hero, a christian knight, brother-in-arms
of the Serbian knights sung in the pieces of the Kossovo cycle. There are,
indeed, very few established data to which the epic pieces collected and
published by Bulgarian and Serbian erudite institutions refer in their way,
and there are also few vivid epic pieces of oral tradition, like those I
have collected and recorded (...). In the confused events of this period
(1371-1395) King Marko appeared assuredly as one of the most significant
actors of that great history that took place in those times not only in
Prilep and Serres, but in the whole Balkans and fixed their destiny for
centuries. 
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