Vladislav Titelbah, The House of Prince Miloš in Šarani, 1881 watercolour, 22 x 27 cm.
A watercolour painting from 1881 – The House of Prince Miloš in Šarani – is displayed as a part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum in Takovo. This is a gift from Dobrica Matković and the work of art of Vladislav Titelbah, a painter and a Mathematics teacher, who came to Novi Sad from Prague in 1871. With patriotic enthusiasm towards the liberation of the Slavic people, and under the influence of Svetozar Miletić and Polit Desančić’s ideas, Titelbah decided to move to Serbia (he came to Belgrade in 1876) and become both its loyal subject and citizen. Together with his regular teaching obligations, which he had as an art and a calligraphy teacher, he often travelled around Serbia and drew and described old clothing items, then jewellery, weapons, furniture and household items, architectural plastic, medieval frescoes (he made superb copies in watercolour technique) or he painted the lanscapes of Serbian towns.
Titelbah painted The House of Prince Miloš in Šarani in the same year in which he was included in a scientific project of the Serbian Academy related to the making of The Ethnographic Atlas, because of which he was elected as their regular member in 1885. The painted log cabin is actually the house of Marko Matković from Šarani. Marko was married to Marta Vukomanović, who was the paternal aunt of Ljubica Obrenović. Miloš, the future prince of Serbia, was forced to hide with his family from the Turks, in this house itself. To be more precise, following the failure of the First Serbian Uprising in 1813, the duke of the time, Miloš Obrenović returned to Rudnik from unsuccessful battles on Zasavica, which is why it was of the utmost importance for him to protect his family from the Ottoman retaliation. From his house in Brusnica, which was about to get a new tenant – Ašim Bey from Rudnik, Miloš moved his family to the Monastery Nikolje, to stay there with his godfather, abbot Hadži-Atanasije. After his failed attempt to take over Užice, he had to hide himself further, so he spent both autumn and winter of 1813 with his family in a cave above Šarani.
After that, the Obrenović family came to Đorđe Ljubičić in a place called Rošce in Kablar on St. Nicholas Day in 1813. Then they moved to the abovementioned house of Marko Matković. It was the place where Ljubica – with the help of her aunt Marta – gave birth to her daughter Jelisaveta – Savka on 16 March 1814. So, they stayed in her house even during Hadži Prodan’s Rebellion. Towards the end of March or at the beginning of April in 1815, ‘oborknez’ (a senior chief of a group of villages) Miloš Obrenović moved his family from Šarani to ‘a more hidden place’ – Crnuća.