"The Bokel navy in archival documents" is the name of the collection that was promoted on Saturday at the Maritime Museum of Montenegro in Kotor, as part of the Kotor Municipality Day celebration.
Aleksandar Dender, president of the Board of Directors of the Bokel Navy, Snežana Pejović, archivist of the Kotor Historical Archive, spoke about the collection, while the speech of the absent admiral of the Bokel Navy, Prof. Dr. Antun Sbutega, was read by Slavko Dabinović, librarian of the Maritime Museum. The number of documents found in the collection is 777, on more than 1.000 pages, and testify to the rich history of the Bokel Navy, which is over 12 centuries old. The Ministry of Culture of Montenegro and the Municipality of Kotor helped with the printing of the collection.
The President of the Board of Directors of the Bokelje Navy, Aleksandar Dender, especially thanked the archivist of the Kotor Archives, Snežana Pejović, and her colleagues, who did a huge and very complicated job of collecting, researching, transcribing and translating documents, most of which are unknown until now, especially from the recent history of the Bokelje Navy. as well as to Dubravko Stamatović who prepared the book for printing.
"The collection will surely become a database for all future researchers of the history of the Bokel Navy. The special value of the collection is that the presented documents will eliminate many dilemmas and misconceptions in the interpretation of the history of the Bokel navy," said Dender.
The Admiral of the Bokel Navy, Prof. Dr. Antun Sbutega, said that these are the most important documents from the early Middle Ages to the present day, which directly and indirectly concern the Bokel Navy, as well as the overall political, economic, maritime, cultural, religious and social history of Kotor, Boka, Montenegro, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.
"These documents testify to the importance and numerous functions of the most important and oldest brotherhood in Kotor, Boka and the entire region and the most important institution of civil society throughout the centuries. They testify to how much the Navy and Boka were integrated into Western European and Mediterranean civilization and how much they participated in the development processes. The members of the Navy were literate, polyglots with world experience. The Navy has had its own Statute since the Middle Ages, it was a democratic institution with an Assembly. The documents bear witness not only to her successes but also to the problems they faced... Since a large part of these documents has so far been unavailable and unknown to the scientific and professional public, their publication will change some aspects of the previous interpretations of that history, including the list of admirals and vice admiral." - said, among other things, Admiral Sbutega.
He particularly emphasized the fact that "with a high degree of certainty we can expect that at the beginning of next month, at the conference in Paris, the Bokel Navy will be declared an intangible cultural asset of humanity, the first of its kind from Montenegro," that is, it will be entered on the List of World Intangible Cultural Heritage under the patronage of UNESCO.
"I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this, the expert team of the Ministry of Fashion led by Milica Nikolić and the Navy's work team, as well as everyone who supported our candidacy," said Sbutega.
Snežana Pejović, archivist of the Historical Archive of Kotor, said that in the collection they found documents in one place that were not known to science until now and are available to the public in an integral form. All errors in earlier readings of the document have been corrected, thus some important errors in previously published data have been corrected. Thanks to this research, all admirals of the Bokel Navy were identified in an accurate way.
"This collection of documents represents a pioneering step in the unification of written documents about the existence and activities of the Bokel navy throughout the ages. With it, we have only scratched the surface of this important topic. We expect that the published documents will generate scientific interest in further research processes related to the Bokel navy." - said Pejović.
Bonus video:
