One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [6]
The field saw a lot of bloodshed, terrible violence between Muslims and Christians, with casualties on both sides. The small province of Kosovo still reels from the battle. The leaders of both armies died in the conflict. The battle on Kosovo Polje secured Slobodan Milošević’s power over the crumbling Yugoslav state in the late eighties. Serb children still draw pictures of it, lamenting Serbia’s loss, the cause of all their present woes. The myth of the battle, the myriad interpretations of the story, of the massacres and war crimes, could easily hurtle the province of Kosovo back into civil war. This is remarkable because the Battle of Kosovo was fought on June 28, 1389.
The soccer game stops. Play makes room for history, and the children begin to tell the story. Marko went to the bench near our patch of field and grabbed a drawing from the table. We’d been drawing pictures before the soccer ball came out and hadn’t had time to talk about them. The drawing belonged to Miroslaw. He was the littlest one in the group and better only than me at soccer. The pause in play must have been a relief to him. He reminded me of myself in middle school, always hoping the ball wouldn’t come my way. Miroslaw was eleven years old, with red cheeks and bright eyes, another child star born to the wrong epoch. Like many children, he stuck his tongue out of the side of his mouth as he drew. He beamed when Marko held his picture up.
It was a medieval scene. Rival armies faced each other beneath a stone tower. A man’s head rested on a pike. A frightening figure stood beside him with an axe. The drawing gave off a melancholy feeling, part Edward Gorey, part Caravaggio (Figure 1). The children began to tell the story, suffused with laughs and shouts.
“The Muslims came to take the Serbs’ land,” Marko said.
“Murat,” the girl, Katja, added, citing the name of the Turkish Sultan who led the Ottoman army onto Serb land.
Not wanting to be shown up—it was his drawing after all—Miroslaw quickly interjected the name of the leader of the Serbs, a noble called Lazar, a near saint in their eyes. The other youths repeated the two names, Murat and Lazar, and they sounded heavy with the repetition, shorthand for centuries of meaning to which I was not privy, to which I would never really be privy; this was not my story, as soccer was not my game. I don’t know when, but at some point as they told the story, we started kicking the ball again. Mostly they kicked it to each other and let me listen and watch. Murat and Lazar, they said again. Murat and Lazar, who met in battle on Kosovo Polje. The words sailed with the ball across the grass.
There were other names, Vuk Brankovic, the traitor, and Milos, the hero. There are countless versions of this story, and they vary widely depending on who is doing the telling, an Albanian or a Serb. As these children told the story, it went like this:
Murat and his armies invaded Kosovo, which was the holiest land for the Serbs, the birthplace of the Serbian Orthodox religion. Monasteries and churches dotted the region. Many of them still stand today, though fewer after the 1998 war and the riots in 2004 that left much of the nation’s treasures smoldering. Prince Lazar raised an army to defend the Serbian kingdom, but one of his noblemen, Vuk Brankovic, made a deal with the Turks.
“He was a traitor,” Marko said with venom. “Without him maybe….” But he didn’t finish the sentence, the distant look on his face led me to believe he was imagining a Kosovo controlled by his people for six hundred years, a Kosovo where he was not in the minority, penned into fortified enclaves for his own safety, subject to the whims and rages of politicians and mobs. I wanted to ask him what he was going to say, but never got the chance. Eager Miroslaw continued with the story.
During the battle, a brave knight named Milos managed to trick his way behind Turkish lines. Pretending to offer himself in service to Murat, he knelt to kiss the sultan