I don't think it's Sovereignty Day in Montenegro?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/02/15 03:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/02/15/1680843.aspx

I have actually been doing this in my Outlook calendar since the very first time I tried to import holidays (Outlook 98? Maybe Outlook 2000? A while ago, in any case).

Now obviously Yugoslavia is no more. And of course neither is Serbia and Montenegro (though of course both Serbia and Montenegro both exist as separate entities).

I was intrigued about this, curious about the status of this holiday if the two countries that it was being listed under (one obviously added years before and the other more recently). I mean now that Montenegro had become its own separate sovereign country again, who did the holiday currently apply to, if anyone?

But after some digging around and talking to some Serbian folk within Microsoft, I found out a little bit of the backstory....

Sovereignty Day actually predates all of these countries -- according to the folks I talked to, it goes back to the First Serbian Uprising, which happened over two centuries ago.

(Though the Wikipedia article referenced seems to point out February 14th, 1804 as the day that the uprising started rather than the 15th. But given all of the different places that seem to agree on the 15th as the date, it looks like it is actually the adoption of the constitution after the Second Serbian Uprising that actually inspired the choice of day, despite the obvious interest and rememberance people had of the first uprising)

Clearly Yugoslavia was picking up a holiday that a constituent republic celebrated, and the fact that in Outlook this merged and did not "clear out" or change the holiday was just me being me (I never deleted any of the holidays I added), combined with Outlook being Outlook, all in an email account that existed on Exchange through continuous multiple versions and upgrades and migrations of client and server. :-)

Since I hadn't installed Outlook 2007 and hadn't seen any updates for Outlook 2003, it also kind of makes sense there was really no chance to update the holiday again, either....

And it is somewhat understandable (given that the federation between Serbia and Montenegro is no more, as Kieran mentioned previously) that this may not be quite the holiday in Montenegro that it would be in Serbia. If indeed it ever was beyond being so in name, of course....

But the fact that it would still be quite likely to be a holiday in Serbia is just as understandable, given the long history.

So in the end we can ignore the drive on a parkway/park on a driveway feel of the situation, and say that it makes a great deal of sense that one of the many interesting results of Montenegro having its sovereignty recognized throughout the world is that Montenegro kind of lost Sovereignty Day! :-)

And if one is not happy with the Outlook Holidays, he can always go and fine-tune them: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\1033\OUTLOOK.HOL"

(usual disclaimers: "Program Files" might have a different name, you might have installed Office somewhere else, your computer might explode, etc. :-)

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