Summary
An interest in the monasterial libraries as the intellectual and cultural treasures began to grow in the first half of the 19th century, along with the birth of Slavic studies as a science. Their traditional function and reception from the community are slowly changing, thus they are becoming the subject of scientific interest. Besides, awareness of old Serbian books as the mark of the national identity is gradually being created, too. Therefore the need arose for more accurate description and listing of monasterial book collections. The practice of annual inventory of real property, including books as its obligatory part, inherited from the 18th century, necessarily had to get an upgrade in the form of creating real library catalogues. Such an idea matured sometime at the beginning of the 20th century within the activity of the Monastic Association of the Metropolitanate of Karlovci. One of the basic items on its agenda was the project of creating the central catalogue of the monasterial libraries in the territory of the Metropolitanate. According to the plan that was developed for this purpose, cataloguing was supposed to be performed by monks themselves. They were supposed to follow instructions put together by Ilarion Zeremski and Vikentije Vujić, in accordance with the relevant rules applied at their time. This cataloguing was initially designed to be retrospective, but it was supposed to turn into the current one later on. This paper presents the details of that project, which was unfortunately thwarted by the outbreak of the First World War. The Monastic Association has published only Description of Manuscripts of the Krušedol Monastery by Sava Petković (1914). Everything else that has been done on the eve of the great world war, plenty of yellow cardboard catalogue cards written with a feather, was left to languish in the monasterial archives awaiting researchers of cultural history. That is so at least if we judge by the archives of the Vojlovica Monastery, which were our inspiration and the starting point for this study. It is possible that even today traces of this work could be found in the monasteries of the former Metropolitanate of Karlovci. And how precious this central catalogue would have been, if by any chance it could have been completed, it became clear a few decades later, when taking into account the extent of planned destruction of the Serbian culture, which assumed genocidal proportions during the Second World War.

Keywords:
Metropolitanate of Karlovci, monasteries, libraries, Monastic Association, rules, cataloguing, history of Serbian libraries

Full text (269 KB)