Kosovo Maiden
Figure in Serbian epic poetry

The Kosovo Maiden or Maiden of the Blackbird's Field is the central figure of a poem with the same name, part of the Kosovo cycle in the Serbian epic poetry. In it, a young beauty searches the battlefield for her betrothed fiancé and helps wounded Serbian warriors with water, wine and bread after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 between Serbia and the Ottoman Empire. She finally finds the wounded and dying warrior Pavle Orlović who tells her that her fiancé Milan Toplica and his blood-brothers Miloš Obilić and Ivan Kosančić are dead. Before the battle they had given her a cloak, golden ring and veil for the wedding as a promise of safe return, but they were slain and Pavle pointed to the direction of the bodies. The poem finishes with:
"O wretch! Evil is your fortune!If I, a wretch, were to grasp a green pine,Even the green pine would wither."
“Kosovo Maiden” enters the record as figure in Serbian epic poetry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kosovo, Maiden and Figure can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Kosovo Maiden” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Kosovo, Maiden and Figure provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 22, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1389.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kosovo Maiden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.