Svetlana Matić has been working for years on preserving the Serbian language and Cyrillic script, as well as traditions and national identity in Austria. The Cultural and Educational Community of Serbia presented a portrait of professor and writer Svetlana Matić, who has been creating and contributing to the culture of our diaspora in Vienna for a long time. The ceremonial presentation of the author of 17 books, who began as a writer of primers and a children’s poet while teaching Serbian to our children in Viennese schools, was held with a special program featuring the young pianist Evangelina Velousis and the Children’s Cultural Center Belgrade under the baton of Snežana Despotović, conductor of the RTS children’s choir.

As stated by the CEC Secretary General, Živorad Ajdačić, Svetlana has done a lot since then in the field of preserving the Serbian language and our culture in the diaspora around the world, and especially in Austria, by organizing various cultural events. As the president of the Wilhelmina Mina Karadžić Society, located in the Association of Serbian Clubs in Vienna, she authored four solo exhibitions: Wilhelmina Mina Karadžić, Viennese Traces of Serbs, Vrdnik Fairy – Milica Stojadinović Srpkinja, and Mileva Marić Einstein.

The presentation of the portrait was held on the occasion of marking seven decades of CEC, said Secretary General Ajdačić and added that ‘for her great contribution to preserving the Serbian language and Cyrillic script, as well as tradition and preserving national identity in Austria, Svetlana Matić has received all the important cultural state awards’.

As Svetlana Matić said after the presentation, in trying to organize anniversaries and writing about famous Serbs who had lived and worked in Vienna – Vuk, Branko Radičević, Dositej, Njegoš and others – she devoted special attention to the work of women. – Those who had made a special contribution to our culture and history were often neglected in the past, in patriarchal societies, and their traces are often lost. Considering the contribution of our advanced creative women on the world stage, in addition to the first Serbian poet Milica Stojadinović Srpkinja, who had collected material for Vuk, and Mina Karadžić, who had stayed with her father until the end of her life in Vienna and whose contribution to the translation of Vuk’s work is immeasurable, I also dedicated the book to our scientist Mileva Marić Einstein. Our first mathematician, who had only an oral exam left to complete her doctorate, remained forever in her husband’s shadow, unjustifiably neglected – she says. Matić’s book about Mileva Marić and the works Traces of the Viennese Serbs and Serbs in Austria, which she wrote with Marko Lopušin, were published by the Novi Sad-based publishing house Prometej.

At the end of the promotion, announcing the current Vienna exhibition on Nikola Tesla in Belgrade in July, Matić invited the children’s choir to sing Ovo je Srbija, and in return she recited a poem from the collection Majka to the children. – I remind the new generation of parents that through education from a young age, one acquires a love for preserving one’s language and traditions – she said.

Source: Politika

Photo M. Nikić