Gusle
The gusle is a single-stringed bowed instrument of the southern Balkans, a round or pear-shaped bowl of maple or other wood covered with a skin, with a single horse-hair string played with a horse-hair bow, used to accompany the chanted epic poetry of the South Slavs. The singer, the guslar, plucks or bows the one string as he recites long heroic songs of battles, outlaws, and ancestral heroes, and among Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins the instrument is inseparable from the living tradition of oral epic that Milman Parry and Albert Lord made famous with their studies of formulaic com