Avdo Međedoviƈ

Avdo Međedoviƈ
14 x 9 inches, oil on canavs, 2018

Avdo Međedoviƈ (1875-1953) was an illeterate epic balladeer from Montenegro, part of the Ottoman Empire and later Yugoslavia. His repertoire included several poems that counted well over 1,000 lines, similar in length to Homer's (9th century BCE, Greek) Iliad and Odyssee. The British Homeric scholars Milman Perry and Albert Lord in the 1930s, seeking to find credble evidence of their hypothesis that Homer's works were the result of oral transmission (of much older traditions,) found in Međedoviƈ living evidence on the memory capabilities of illeterate communities, and their sustaining traditions. The  now fast disappearing tradition of oral poetry was in the twentieth century still found and recorded in parts of eastern Europe and in Anatolia. Despite numerous academic approaches to reconstruct how Homer would have sounded almost three-thousand years ago, I believe the Međedoviƈ recordings come much closer.