UVOD U EPSKU STEREOTIPIJU U OSMANSKIM POETIZIRANIM HRONIKAMA : OD BOJA NA KOSOVU DO OSVAJANJA BOSNE

The South Slavic literary tradition hitherto solely contained descriptions of the Battle of Kosovo from oral epic poetry composed by South Slavs. Stereotypical portrayal of the enemy constitutes one of the underlying features of those texts. In this paper, attention is paid to Ottoman poetry composed and recorded immediately following the described events, or soon thereafter. The texts of these poems are included in unique verse chronicles that describe the knightly early period of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. As the Battle of Kosovo has so far been described in numerous articles and books in South Slavic and other languages, the principal aim of this paper is to give some basic information about the method of stereotyping the enemy image in the Ottoman narrative of this battle, which took place in 1389. Signifiant overlapping of the narrative pattern in different recorded versions of the events in both South Slavic and Ottoman literary tradition apparently perplexes researchers, and prompts them to reflct upon the interweaving of fiction and reality in different existing versions of events. Conversely, the modes of this stereotyping shape the text of each poem separately and distinctively in terms of its imagology, casting it into a distinct form of imagologic identity, and uniting the various texts and their narrative of events. In order to depict the general mode of description of the enemy in Ottoman verse chronicles, I have included a description of the conquest of Bosnia in 1463; more precisely, the motif of King Stjepan Tomašević’s execution.