The Mountain Wreath

The Gorski Vijenac is a poem set in eighteenth-century Montenegro and deals with the attempts of Njegos’s ancestor, Metropolitan Danilo, to regulate relations among the region’s warring tribes. Njegos constructed his poem around a single event that allegedly took place on a particular Christmas Day in the early 1700s, during Metropolitan Danilo’s rule: the mass execution of Montenegrins who had converted to Islam. The dating of the alleged event is a matter of some controversy. In the subtitle to The Mountain Wreath, its author tells us that the poem deals with a “Historical Event from the End of the Seventeenth Century".