Miloš Milojević

Miloš S. Milojević (1840–1897) was a Serbian lawyer and historian. His work has been described at "at a ridge between history and literature", mostly for his travel-recording genre.

Biography

Miloš S. Milojević, son of a parish priest, was born at Crna Bara (Bogatić) in Mačva, Serbia, on 16 October 1840. He graduated with a law degree from Belgrade's Grande École in 1862; studied philosophy, philology and history at the University of Moscow, from 1862 to 1865. Milojević returned to Serbia in 1866, worked for the government judicial system, and later taught at high schools in Valjevo, Belgrade and Leskovac.

He died at Belgrade on 24 June 1897. He was buried in Novo Groblje.

Historiography

In 1887 his old fashioned approach to historiography was challenged and debated by Ilarion Ruvarac and Ljubomir Kovačević and eventually proved erroneous through critical methods, though not all of his scholarship was marred by their victory. He travelled to the Kosovo and Metohija region in 1871-1877 and left three volumes of data and maps which testify that Serbs were the majority and Albanians the minority population. His demographic-statistical structure, however, matched an independent census taken by the Austrian authorities at about the same time. Because of his ideas about Greater Serbia and Serbisation, he is also known as Mad Milosh in Bulgaria. In all fairness, Bulgarian historians also had pretentions on the same territory which resulted in the Second Balkan War.