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From the ballad The Wife of Asan-aga’ (translated by A Pennington and P Levi)

Montenegro is certainly not short on literary tradition, and one of the earliest printing presses in the Balkans was established at Obod, near Cetinje, in the 1490s, under Ivan Crnojević’s son Ðurađ.

The ballads and epic poems of the Kosovo Cycle constitute one of the great treasures of European folk literature. These first came to the attention of Western Europe when a selection were published in the Italian edition of the Venetian traveller Alberto Fortis’ Travels into Dalmatia (1774), and adaptations were later made by Goethe, Walter Scott, Mérimée and Pushkin. The definitive editions are those by Vuk Karadžić, culminating in his magnum opus, Serbian Folk Poems (4 vols., Vienna, 1841–62). One of the best English translations of the Kosovo Cycle is that by Anne Pennington and Peter Levi, Marko the Prince (London: Duckworth, 1984).

The magnum opus of Petar II Petrović Njegoš, Gorski Vijenac (‘The Mountain Wreath’), written in 1846 and published in Vienna in 1847, remains the Montenegrin national epic.