Only Unity Saves the Serbs (more literally Only Concord Saves a Serb, Serbian: Само слога Србина спасава/Samo sloga Srbina spasava) is an unofficial motto used in Serbia and a popular slogan among Serbs, often used as a rallying call against foreign domination and during times of national crisis.
The phrase is an interpretation of what is taken to be four Cyrillic letters for "S" (written С) on the Serbian cross. These symbols are more commonly known to be "firesteels" (Serbian: оцила / ocila, and were taken from Byzantine heraldry in the Late Middle Ages.
Popular tradition attributes the motto St. Sava (12th century) the first Metropolitan of Žiča and Archbishop of Serbs of the Serbian Orthodox Church. According to the story, St. Sava called for the creation of an independent church in Serbia that would remain Orthodox, and uttered the phrase to urge the Serbian people to declare national autonomy and resist domination by the Roman Catholic Church.
The Serbian cross symbol has been frequently used in Serb heraldry.
The memorial park in Tekeriš, where the first battle of the Great War was fought, the monument has "18-VIII - 1914" and "Samo sloga srbina spasava" inscribed. A monument in Šamac, Republika Srpska, Bosnia-Herzegovina for the Serbs who fought and died in the Bosnian war, has the Serbian eagle in the center, the years which the war occurred (1992-1995) and the Serbian slogan: "Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava" on the left and right sides.
Famous quotes containing the words unity and/or saves:
“Hearing, seeing and understanding each other, humanity from one end of the earth to the other now lives simultaneously, omnipresent like a god thanks to its own creative ability. And, thanks to its victory over space and time, it would now be splendidly united for all time, if it were not confused again and again by that fatal delusion which causes humankind to keep on destroying this grandiose unity and to destroy itself with the same resources which gave it power over the elements.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)