Abstract
The contribution is devoted to the representations of Marko Miljanov (1833-1901), chieftain of the Kuči tribe from the present-day Montenegrin-Albanian borderland, general and writer. The author borrows his approach from transnational history.
Miljanov has been traditionally regarded as the most exemplary epitome of "Montenegrin humanism and heroism" (čojstvo i junaštvo). At the same time, he has also been appropriated as a figure of the wider Serb national pantheon on (disputed) ethnic grounds.
In the Albanian milieu, he is perceived with ambivalence: as a war enemy of Albanian national aspirations but also as a friend of Albanians and occassionally even as an ethnic Albanian. The author underlines the fact that Prague in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century represented the most important center of the cult of Marko Miljanov beyond the Balkans.
Czech Slavophiles, especially the writer, journalist and translator Josef Holeček (1853-1929), presented a highly idealized image of Marko Miljanov from the 1880s onwards. In 1912, the representations of Miljanov as an examplary Slavic warrior and humanist influenced the early ideological foundations of the Czech Scout movement (Junák).
In the 1930s and 1940s, the deeds and virtues of Miljanov found another respected admirer and interpreter - the leading German Slavicist Gerhard Gesemann (1888-1948), professor at the German University of Prague in the interwar period. After the Second World War, the representations of Miljanov's life, virtues and ideas encountered in the works of Prague authors writing in both Czech and German provide a good example of a process known as "repatriation of a cultural transfer" in the jargon of transnational history, largely thanks to modern translations of these literary and scholarly works into South Slavic languages.