Epic Cities

Epic Cities. A Lexicon by Mirjana Detelić, a new publication of the Institute for Balkan Studies This book is the first attempt to form an idea of the number, type and distribution of cities in Serbo-Croatian oral decasyllabic epic. It contains 847 entries on cities (or, in linguistic terms – the same number of oikonyms) excerpted from the corpus. The corpus comprises the classical printed collections of epic poetry published – with the exception of the 18th-century Erlangen Manuscript – between the mid 19th century and the end of the first decade of the 20th century in the Serbo-Croatian speaking area, presently divided among four newly-formed states: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, whereby the decadent and substandard poetry of a later date is left outside the scope of scrutiny. A total of 1357 poems from 8 collections in 22 volumes are taken into account. Apart from a general bibliography and four indexes (I–Geographic names; II–Personal names; III–Names of peoples and states; IV–Concepts) at the end of the Lexicon, the book contains two appendices: 1. tabulated epic oikonym attribution; and 2. CD-ROM Cities in Christian and Muslim Oral Epic (Belgrade: Institute for Balkan Studies, SASA, 2004).
Finally, the book now offered to the readers is not a historical, geographical or geopolitical encyclopaedic gazetteer, but a study in anthropology and poetics extensively drawing on historical and geographical data gleaned from a number of specialized studies, all cited in the Bibliography.