THE PASTS THEY HAD LOST – SERBIAN SENSE OF HISTORY AND THE SHIFTING OF TIME IN THE KARLOVCI ARCHBISHOPRIC

Text topic: Visual Art as a Mass Communication Medium

Text author: Јелена Тодоровић

The issue of Serbian heritage in the case of the Archbishopric of Karlovci is inseparable from that of the collective self-identity of this 18th century ethnia in the Habsburg Empire. The creation and construction of the Serbian view of its past and culture was not unique, but belonged to the greater mechanisms of collective self-awareness current in the European states at the time. The Baroque man was the first individual who fully explored the power and influence of the past on the present events; also the first to search for the borderline which separates the past from history, the individual or collective experience from the record for posterity. Henceforth, the Baroque man realized the full potential of the rewriting and editing of the past, of the fabrication of history and its integration in the greater narrative of validity and legitimation. And employed for the glory of faith, the Church, and the absolutism. But what is the past? And how does it differ from history? What is memory in relation to the past? Even today this presents a highly contested field among historians and historiographers, far more complex than it was seen in the Baroque age. It could be said, that awareness of the past is common to all individuals, and that it shares both the mechanisms and its subject matter with the concepts of history and memory. But the past is only at the beginning of the creation of history, since through history we validate and clothe it in the mantle of recognition, necessary for its acceptance – we institutionalize memory.