Vukašin Radišić
Vukašin Radišić (1810–1843) was a Serbian poet, writer, translator, diplomat, and professor of Greek. He was one of the first Serbian philologists to teach poetics. After studying classical languages in Belgrade and abroad, he began by teaching Greek. In 1836 Prince Miloš Obrenović appointed him professor of Greek and poetics at the Lyceum in Kragujevac, where he also led the choir. In 1837 he published the first Greek school textbook in Serbian, Greek Reading Room for Learned Serbian Youth.
In 1840 he published a Serbian translation of Katomyomachia by Theodoros Prodromos in the Belgrade journal Golubica, under the title Galeomyomachia. This is considered one of the first modern translations of a secular Byzantine poem into Serbian. He also wrote about Greek thinkers like Adamantios Korais.
Radišić worked as Secretary of the Serbian legation in Istanbul and was part of the Foreign Ministry's secret service. His Istanbul Letters describe how he introduced Michał Czajkowski to Toma Vučić-Perišić and Avram Petronijević, two exiled Serbs, whose plan to overthrow the government failed. In March 1842 his wife Mara and daughter Jelena died within nine days of each other, and were buried together in Istanbul.
After a dynastic coup, Radišić, a supporter of the Obrenović dynasty, was dismissed on 27 February 1843. He stayed in Constantinople for a time, then returned to Serbia in February 1843. Stricken by his losses and hard work, he died on 15 December 1843 and was buried in the central Belgrade cemetery near St. Mark's Church. He left 95 books to the Lyceum in Belgrade.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:56 (CET).