НЕОДРЕЂЕНА МЈЕСТА У БИОГРАФИЈИ ЈЕЛЕНЕ БАЛШИЋ
UNSOLVED PLACES IN THE BIOGRAPHY OF JELENA BALŠIĆ

Summary/Abstract: There are still a lot of unsolved events in the life of Jelena Balšić, kritor, ruler, and the first Slavic woman writer from the territory of modern Montenegro. Historians talk about her in excursion when they write about three rulers – two of her husbands, Zeta’s prince Đurađ II Stracimirović Balšić and Bosnian duke Sandalj Hranić Kosača, as well as her son Balša III Đurađević Balšić. In historiographical works, on the one side, Jelena Balšić is idealized, while, on the other side, her socio–cultural and psycho–anthropological profile is overshadowed. Concerning this, there are only a few papers that talk about the last years of Jelena Balšić, one is from Đuro Tošić (Tošić 2004), and the other from Mladen Ančić (Ančić 1987) which denies, using documents, the claim that Jelena Balšić met Sandalj Hranić Kosača while her first husband was still alive. In an attempt to show the biography of Jelena Balšić, her spiritual side is often overlooked. Numerous hypothetical reconstructions of the events from Jelena Balšić’s life are based on reducing unknown to known. It is often claimed that Jelena Balšić married Sandalj Hranić Kosača as a way to protect Zeta, which was ruled by her son Balša III, from the Bosnian side, but the circumstances of her marriage are mysterious. There is also a mystery about Jelena Balšić’s residence after the death of her second husband. The year of her first marriage and the birthday of her son are still unknown, and that makes the question about his age at the time of his father’s death and the conjoined ruling of Zeta with his mother, hard. There is also no solid evidence that Jelena Balšić wanted to become a nun after the death of her first husband, and that she became a nun after the death of her second husband. Those are a few of the unsolved places in the biography of Jelena Balšić which we look at in this paper. The best sources about the life of Jelena Balšić are archives of Ragusa, Kotor, and Venice, as well as the manuscript Gorički zbornik (1441/1442) which contains the correspondence with the priest Nikon of Jerusalem. Looking at the biography of Jelena Balšić without looking at the Gorički zbornik is the same as reducing her life to a fraction.

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