Bayezid and Olivera

• Dragi Mihajlovski

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After the bloody defeat of her father’s army at the Battle of Kosovo, the Serbian princess Olivera Lazarević, sister of Despot Stefan Lazarević, becomes the wife of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I—a man she ought to hate, the conqueror of her people and the destroyer of the world she once knew. Yet from this political marriage emerges a complex relationship marked by passion, attraction, mistrust, and guilt. Between the two protagonists unfolds a space where love and revenge, faith and desire, power and helplessness collide. From the solitude of a monastery cell, the aged Olivera reconstructs her life in the form of a confession: her father’s death, her arrival at the Ottoman court, her fascination with Bayezid, and the burden of sin that has haunted her for years. Told in a rich, poetic language and enriched with philosophical reflections and layers of history, Bayezid and Olivera is a compelling story of a woman caught between two empires and two truths—the historical and the personal. With this novel, Dragi Mihajlovski confirms his status as a lucid chronicler of the long-vanished epochs of the Balkans, delivering an intimate and moving tale of love, power, and the price of survival in a world burdened by wars and the fall of empires.

* * *

And slowly, as I listened to him speak of his incredible exploits, I felt as though I myself were falling in love. I was young, very young, and who could blame me if my heart softened before those stories that flowed like mountain water from his bearded lips, and if I began to believe him, to love him, to fall in love with him? After all, he was my husband—a strong and genuine man, powerful and full of confidence. Was it truly a sin to fall in love with one’s own husband?

* * *

Upon the wooden table I danced, I danced—God, how I spun and whirled, spreading all my feminine splendor throughout that wretched tent! I danced with sorrow, with pain, with grief, with despair. I danced with a dark longing for revenge. For my father, for my friends, for the soldiers, for those sufferers who had been sent by force, too early and unprepared, into the dark provinces of cruel Hades; for the once-glorious Sultan with whom I had fallen hopelessly in love; for our happy days and nights in Edirne and Bursa; for our defeated love. Terrible, mournful, and magnificent it was.

Excerpts from the novel

• ISBN: 978-953-369-073-5
• Dimensions: 128 x 190 mm
• Number of pages: 192
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2026
• Original title: Bajazit i Olivera
• Original language: Macedonian
• Translation: Borislav Pavlovski