Dositej Obradović

Dositej Obradović (1739–1811), born in Čakovo in the Banat, was a Serbian monk, writer and reformer. Taking the name Dositej at the Hopovo monastery in 1757, he left in 1760 and travelled widely across Europe and Asia Minor, where he encountered the German Enlightenment; his first book appeared in 1783.

Writing in the spoken vernacular instead of Church Slavonic, he became, with Vuk Karadžić, a father of modern Serbian literature. During the First Serbian Uprising he moved to Belgrade in 1807 as Serbia's first minister of education, founded the Velika škola in 1809, and died in Belgrade in 1811.