Bosniak epic poetry (Bosnian: Bošnjačke epske narodne pjesme) is a form of epic poetry created by Bosniaks originating in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Sandžak region, which is a part of modern-day Serbia and Montenegro. Bosniak epic poetry developed during the Ottoman period. Historically, they were accompanied by the Gusle. History The first records of Bosniak epic songs, discovered and dated so far, come from the first decades of the 18th century. However, there is information about Bosniak epics from the end of the 15th to the end of the 17th century, which were hidden for a long time in little-known travelogues, manuscripts of various profiles, chronicles, and war reports. The Slovene Benedikt Kuripečić brought the earliest attestation about Bosniak oral epic poetry. The attestation originates from the year 1530, when Kuripečić, as a member of the Austrian embassy, on his way to Constantinople, passed through Bosnia and, near the walls of a small town called "Japra" together with other members of the embassy met the subaša Malkosthitz (Malkošić) accompanied by his 50 armed horsemen. "They sing a lot about his heroid ceeds in Croatia and Bosnia," says Kuripečić. Kuripečić's data explicitly states that the songs of the Bosniaks are created and shaped simultaneously with the poetry of other confessional groups in the neighbouring South Slavic areas. It is certainly a rarity in the epic tradition of the Slavs that a person enters epic tradition while they're still alive. Toma Maretić accounts in a mention of South Slavic folk songs "The first absolutely certain" evidence for Bosniak epic poetry in the 16th century. The Ottomanist Hazim Šabanović later verified that the subaša of Kamengrad from 1530 was Malkošić - Malkoč-beg, buried in Banja Luka, and that he had the personal name Malkoč. The inhabitants of the Croatian frontier called him "the most fiery Bosnian beg" which corresponds to what Kuripečić recorded about him. Slavic songs from the Ottoman era played a strong, inciting and artistic role in the Ottoman army, which included a significant proportion of Bosniaks. Evidence of this was left by the Hungarian writer Sebestyén Tinódi, an eyewitness and participant in the Ottoman-Hungarian battles, which he described in his chronicle in verse, which was published with the title in Latin (Chronica) in Kolozsvar, 1554. Milman Parry and Albert Lord Modern field studies of oral epics in the former Yugoslavia, organized by the American classicist Milman Parry