STATEHOOD DAY OF THE REPUBLIC OF SERBIA 2023.
We inform all professors, assistants, associates, and students that the School of Engineering Management and the Belgrade Dance Institute will not be open on February 15th, 16th, and 17th for the national holiday of Serbia’s Statehood Day. The first working day will be on Monday, February 20th, 2023.
Historian Nataša Kostić traditionally reminds us of the significance of this holiday:
By the Law on State Holidays of the Republic of Serbia, February 15th is marked in memory of two historical events. The first event was the beginning of the Serbian Revolution and the First Serbian Uprising (1804), and the second event was the adoption of the First Serbian Constitution, known as Sretenje Constitution (1835).
On that day (1804), in the late afternoon in Marićevića gorge near Orašac, the national elders gathered and decided to call upon the people to rise up and chose Đorđe Petrović as the leader. This marked the beginning of the Serbian people’s fight for freedom from Ottoman rule.
Twenty-one years later, the First Serbian Constitution was adopted (1835). At that time, while creating a free Serbian state by force of arms, the Serbian peasants decided to destroy the feudal order. Serbia was a land of peasants at that time, but the Serbian peasants accepted the ideas of the modern age and fought for them. The spirit of freedom of the Serbian peasants forced Serbian Prince Miloš Obrenović to open the constitutional issue. The great powers of the time, which still influenced the non-independent Serbia (Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire), did not allow the Constitution to take root in the Serbs, so they forced Prince Miloš to abolish it a month after its adoption. Three years later, the Serbs received the Turkish (hatišerif) Constitution.