The word mazija ?steel; forging ingot; a kind of ordeal which required
plucking red-hot iron from a cauldron of boiling water? is common in the
western part of the Shtokavian dialect continuum. Its area includes the
Zeta-Raska, the Eastern Herzegovinian and the Younger Ikavian dialect, the
first of the Old Shtokavian and the other two of the Neo-Shtokavian type.
There are no attestations of this word earlier than the first half of the
18th century. So far, it has been mainly believed to share a common origin
with the homonymous mazija ?oak gall? from Turkish maz? id. This stance is
hardly acceptable in view of the fact that not only the meanings of the two
words but also their geographical distributions strongly diverge, mazija in
the oak gall sense being limited to the Kosovo-Resava and Timok-Prizren
dialect areas of southern Serbia. The comparison with French maz?e ?refined
iron?, is even more doubtful, because this term has been attested only since
1824 and with no known etymology, The true origin of m?zija < maz?ja
(gvozdja) should be sought in the late Greek (5th century AD) ????(?)? ???
??????? ?iron mass shaped by a blacksmith?; the plural form ????? ???????
occurs in a Greek charter issued in 1347 by the Serbian tsar Dusan to the
Great Lavra on Mt Athos. Curiously enough, in two Serbian founding charters
of the same epoch there is a parallel passage where among other yearly
incomes granted to the monastery iron ingots are mentioned, designated here
by the gen. pl. nad'('), with complements gvozd(i)ja ?of iron? and m?r?nyh'
?of a standard weight?. The term is Slavic nada or nado, derivative from