Vol.1, No 4, 1997 pp. 292 - 292
In memoriam
VILOTIJE VUKADINOVIĆ
(1937-1997)
It was in the mid-December 1997, when Dr. Vilotije Vukadinović (Beloinje,
1937), scientist and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Niš, unexpectedly
and inexorably left this world. He was the professor of the Old Church
Slavic Language.
Most of his working period V. Vukadinović spent as an elementary-school
teacher. Deep in his essence, he had always remained a teacher, thus embedding
his own moral principles, his professional and working qualities and his
abundant knowledge into the spirit of numerous generations of students.
He was working in the schools of his homeland (the village Izvor near Svrljig,
Southeast Serbia), and later in Niš. He was a real teacher, in the true
sense of the word, and he was proud of his profession.
Vukadinović plunged into science working on the projects organized
by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the field of onomastic research
(he had studied more than 250 villages and settlements of Southeast Serbia,
and published a large study titled "The Onomastics of the Sokobanja Valley"),
and later in the field of dialectology. He had carried out research in
numerous points for the Serbian Language Dialect Atlas.
The title of his doctoral dissertation is "The Vernacular of Crna Trava
and Vlasina" (Serbian Dialectological Proceedings, Belgrade, 1996).
He had taken part in several Yugoslav conferences on onomastics (his
papers were published in the proceedings of the 5th and 6th Conference).
His reports were noticed at the meetings of the Workshop for Ethnological
and Cultural Studies in Svrljig (the traditional culture of Southeast Serbia
and neighboring areas), when he talked about linguistic aspects of certain
beliefs and customs of the Svrljig region (Ethnological and Cultural Studies
Proceedings, I, II, III).
Working on the Project "Lexicological Research in Southeast Serbia",
he treated a number of points for the cattle-breeding lexicon.
He created a monograph "The Toponyms of Zoonymic Origin" (Niš, 1996),
and the second part of this study should have been "The Toponyms Derived
from the Appelatives of Southeast Serbian Cattle-Breeding Lexicon".
He started to prepare the Dictionary of the Village Kalna (Crna Trava,
Southeast Serbia), based on the material collected by, now also deceased,
Stojan Gligorijević.
We hope that some of professional works started by Dr. Vilotije Vukadinović
shall be accomplished by his collaborates or his wife Zagorka, who is also
a professor of Serbian language and literature. Some of his ideas for further
investigation, known to us from our conversations with dear and always
cooperative Vilotije, shall represent a worthwhile project for his students.
Anyone who has ever known our colleague Vilotije Vukadinović shall
always respect him, his personal friends shall long mourn his death, and
the science shall be grateful for all that he did and deprived of all that
he could have done.
N. Bogdanović
