Updates
8. October 2025.
Column: Connecting Century to Century
To the people who dig the earth and feed us with bread, Petar Momirović, a man of extraordinary ordinariness and everyday strangeness, was born in 1907 in Jagodina. His life path was full of temptations, and his scientific work was versatile and extensive. The shepherd of the family whose last name he bore, he traveled the path of life from a shepherd to a scientist. He started out in the world from a poor churchman's home full of children, worked as a professor of religious studies, served in the palanquins, defected to Sarajevo, and finally, in 1955, settled in Novi Sad and took a job at the Provincial Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments. There he finally encountered what an invisible hand had guided him to through the storm of life – art and history. By education, he was a theologian and art historian, and in science, an ethnologist and historian, and a tireless protector of antiquities. At the Institute, he participated in the investigation of the history of the Braničevo diocese, discovered the imperial doors of the Slepče monastery, studied and described the ancient churches of western Bosnia, wrote studies on the Fruška Gora monasteries, Gomionica, Bođani, and interpreted collections of Old Slavic manuscripts from Čajnić to Srem. He was the editor, proofreader, and proofreader of the journal "Materials for the Study of Cultural Monuments of Vojvodina", and with Oliver Milanović Jović as co-author, he published a work indispensable for learning about Serbian Athos, the book entitled "Fruška Gora Monasteries". From 1963 to 1986, he tirelessly catalogued the monumental and artistic treasures of museum and gallery collections, including works in church and private ownership, thus becoming the author of the first six volumes of the manual "Inventory of Paintings and Sculptures in Museums and Art Galleries of Vojvodina". He was a man of incomprehensible diligence, perseverance, energy and dedication. His working day lasted 15 hours. “I tried to repay the people who dig the earth and feed us with bread and who defend us from evil.” He listed, arranged and, according to modern library and archival principles, processed the collections and libraries of the monasteries of Bođana, Mesić, Gomionica and the Franciscan monastery in Bač. In Montenegro, after the earthquake, he worked on the processing and protection of the monumental heritage in destroyed churches and studied the manuscript books of the Cetinje monastery. However, due to the negligence and disinterest of institutions and individuals, Petar Momirović was not destined to live to see his life's work, which he, with his own hand, wrote day and night for years. "He wrote down old Serbian records and inscriptions from Vojvodina for 22 and a half years in the original orthography and the morphology and syntax he had found. He collected 10,141 records directly from the original secular and sacral monuments, and each of them is a trace of past times, thoughts, sorrow, joy, longing and hopes of the people. He did everything to ensure that the "Records" appeared during his lifetime, but fate, which was never too kind to him, and the scarcity of the 1990s, made sure that this did not happen. Rejected by all relevant institutions due to lack of funds, he invested his entire savings intended for his funeral (2,000 marks) into printing the book. He died in 1993. years. A year after his death, the first, two-volume edition, financed by the author, was published, in a total of 25 copies. Momirović bequeathed one copy of this precious source of data for our socio-cultural and political history, and especially for the history of language, to the Provincial Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in his will. Today, we keep it with reverence in the Institute's library. Photo: Jagodina Local History Museum and Archives of the Provincial Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, Petrovaradin
