Inok Sava

Inok Sava ( - c. 1530 – after 1597), was a Serbian monk, scribe and traveller who published a Serbian Primer (syllabary) in 1597. Of rare books designated by the National Library of Serbia, Inok Sava's Prvi srpski bukvar (First Serbian Spelling Book by Inok Sava) is considered among the rarest.

The first Serbian book to be published in Serbian Cyrillic to teach children the ABC was a primer called Bukvar. The Alphabet (Bukvar), printed at the Giovanni Antonio Rampazzetto Press in Venice in two editions in 1597, was composed by Inok Sava under the patronage of Stefan Paštrović. There was an earlier Азбука or Читанка (ABC (Reader)), the first Ruthenian language textbook, printed by Ivan Fyodorov in 1574. The primer featured the Old Church Slavonic or so-called Cyrillic alphabet as well.

Biography Inok Sava was a contemporary of printer Ivan Fyodorov, who published the Russian Primer in Lviv, Imperial Russia, in 1574 and another Primer four years later (1578) in Ostrog, Crown of the Kingdom of Poland.

Printing came late to Zeta (Montenegro), the first Montenegrin printed books – Cetinje Octoechos—appearing in 1494 some 55 years after Johannes Gutenberg printed the Bible on his newly-invented, mechanical movable type in 1439. Following the invasions of Serbian lands, leaders began to think of the needs of the people living in the conquered territories, and ordered churches and monasteries of worship and learning to be built and books to be provided for them. Most of the available manuscript copies of books were riddled with copyists' errors. Hieromonk Stefan Paštrović came to the idea to have the manuscripts corrected and printed into books like those which exist in northern Venice. He set out to find his relative Inok Sava, a monk at Visoki Dečani, and to send him on that mission.

We know little about Inok Sava except that he was born in Paštrovići and was associated with Visoki Dečani as a travelling monk, a gatherer of alms, milostinja in Serbian. Such a monk was usually referred to as putnik, meaning traveller. Inok Sava was well educated and familiar with Ivan Fyodorov's work. He also had the good fortune to improve on Fyodorov's primer.

The first page of the syllabary has the Serbian alphabet, followed by vowels, then the syllables, the names of all the letters, etc. The syllabary of Inok Sava originates from the time when very few European countries and cultures possessed their own teaching aids for school children. The syllabary fascinates the most with its teaching methods because it was the first in Europe to have applied the principle of phonetic reading. However, this syllabary remained neglected and somewhat forgotten. Meanwhile, the Serbs learned literacy from imported books, either published in Imperial Russia or the territories belonging to the Holy Roman Empire, as the Austrian Empire was once called. These Serbian primers were based on Old Church Slavonic and Slavonic-Serbian, a common language of all the South Slavic people of the Balkans. Bukvar by Teodor Janković Mirijevski, 1776) and newer methods of learning.

Pages from Азбука or Читанка (Azbuka or Čitanka), the first Serbian language textbook primer, published by Inok Sava in 1597.