USKOKS OF SENJ: REALITY AND ORAL POETIC FICTION
The paper examines Uskok poems, especially those dedicated to the Uskoks of Senj,
primarily from the point of view of the relationship between epic poems and history. The
people of Senj worked from 1537 to 1617, fighting as paid soldiers or volunteers on the side
of the Austrian Monarchy, but also going on campaigns on their own, fighting almost to the
same extent with the Turkish invaders and the Christians from the wider region. In contrast
to the relatively short period of eight decades of their historical presence, the people of Senj
have survived in the oral epics in a very wide Balkan area over a long period of time covering
a wide anachronistic field. The paper presents an assumption that the Uskoks of Senj were
a warrior-patriarchal world, one that has created and spread oral epics. There were many
events in their real lives that were themed in the oral epics. In addition, those who jumped
from the mainland to the Austrian territory and settled in Senj probably carried some songs/
poems in their spiritual baggage, primarily those about Hajduks. And they were ready to
create new ones. Thus, the first known records are proof that the early poetic narrative was
suitable for depicting the Uskoks of Senj, and then that it survived in time and space. In
certain interpretations, to which the second part of the work is dedicated, it is shown on the
basis of anthological examples of poems, how the mythical, ritual and the historical intersect
in the poetics of oral epic poetry; how the anachronistic field of a particular poem is formed,
whether it is about gathering "power and dominance" in wedding processions,
about concentrating heroes around certain events, personalities or spaces important for national
history, or about opposing worthy opponents, and how it affects the aesthetic values
and meanings that are shaped in the poems; how different genre features intertwine in such poems (epic and epic-lyric poetry, for example); and form complex and witty, full of twists
novelistic plots. All this contributes to the meaning of the epic story: it seems that the past of
one’s own community is brought into a meaningful, paradigmatic order, which can serve as
a basis for future actions.
