How Prince Marko Became a Comic: Vekovnici at the Museum
Belgrade's Ethnographic Museum is hosting the exhibit 15 Years of Vekovnici through September 1, marking a comic series by Marko Stojanovic drawn by more than 250 artists over fifteen years.
In the building on Studentski Trg, where folk costumes, jewelry and household objects from 19th century Serbian villages have been on display for decades, the original pages of the comic Vekovnici have stood since Saturday. The hero on those pages is the same Prince Marko known from epic poetry, except here he has been drawn by more than two hundred and fifty different hands, and none of them owed the last one a matching likeness.
The exhibit 15 Years of Vekovnici opened on August 8 at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade and runs through September 1. It was set up as a companion program to the exhibition “Who Was Prince Marko,” so the same building, in the same month, holds two readings of one character side by side: one drawn from oral tradition and museum holdings, the other built up over the past fifteen years in comic panels.
The series was created by writer Marko Stojanovic. Over fifteen years, his personal project has brought together more than 250 comic artists from Serbia, the region and Europe, with episodes published in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic. Its source material is the legend of Prince Marko, filtered through history, mythology and fantasy.
The museum described the project in its announcement:
“Inspired by the legend of Prince Marko, history, mythology and fantasy, ‘Vekovnici’ has outgrown the frame of a classic comic series and become a recognizable cultural phenomenon.”
The wording is institutional, built for a press release, but the number behind it is not trivial. More than 250 artists across fifteen years works out to roughly seventeen new drawing styles a year applied to the same character.
What does the 15 Years of Vekovnici exhibit show?
The show is made up of original comic pages, illustrations, foreign editions and material documenting the series’ collaborations with individual artists, arranged to trace an arc from the earliest episodes to the international releases. For the run of the exhibit, the series’ volumes, including the newest ones, can also be bought at the museum gift shop, a detail that keeps the show closer to live production than to a retrospective.
The original pages are reason enough to come. A printed page is the finished product, and it hides the process, while the original shows the line at the scale it was drawn, with everything that stayed underneath the final ink. For a series built on rotating artists, that is the most honest way to see what is genuinely each artist’s own work and what is the writer’s construction holding it all together.
Why is a museum of folk culture hosting a comic?
The Ethnographic Museum is marking 125 years of work this year, and that context gives the exhibit more weight than its size would suggest. An institution whose job is to preserve material and intangible tradition is letting into its halls a medium that does not conserve that tradition but rewrites it, with no obligation to the canon.
The risk in a project like this is visible without any expert debate. A series that has passed through that many hands has no single visual signature and cannot have one, so its identity has to rest in the writing and in the character rather than the drawing style. Compress fifteen years of that kind of work into one exhibition hall, and there is a real danger the result reads as an inventory of contributors rather than a coherent reading of the material.
What saves it is the pairing with the exhibition on Prince Marko. Without that pairing, this would be an anniversary show for a publishing venture. With it, a visitor gets the epic source and its contemporary reworking in the same visit, and can judge for themselves how much of the oral tradition survived the trip into comic panels, and what got added along the way.
The exhibit runs through September 1, which leaves three and a half weeks in which the two readings still sit together. After that, Vekovnici goes back to bookstores and comic fairs, where it is usually found, and Marko on the original pages remains the one part of this story that cannot be printed again.
