Dossier

A SHORT HISTORY OF GALLIPOLI SERBS
The Feat of Enduring
We know them as exiles from Srem, the Surguns. When Turks conquered the Srem despotate and Belgrade in 1521, the Serbian population from Srem was forcedly evacuated, but not to Constantinople with the Belgradians. They populated nine places on the edges of Trace and the entrance of the Gallipoli peninsula, most of them in Bayramic. For half a millennium, they survived many tremors, turmoils and wars, plundering and exoduses, departures and returns. However, they never stopped being Serbs and speaking Serbian at home. After the Balkan wars, they finally had to retreat to their motherland, which no longer existed. Their last sparkles are burning away in our gloomy times. ”If only, my son, there were anyone to mourn us, even that would be enough.”

Text and Photo: Miloje Ž. Nikolić

Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520–1561), in his first campaign against Europe, stopped under Belgrade in early summer 1521. It was originally planned to fight against the Hungarians somewhere in Southern Hungary. Since it did not happen, the sultan decided to conquer Belgrade and the Srem despotate.
In order to conquer Belgrade more easily, they first invaded Šabac, then entered Srem and took over Zemun, Kupinik, Bareš and Slankamen. On August 1, the sultan ceremonially entered Zemun, and from there watched the battles under Belgrade. The defenders resisted furiously, but finally surrendered on August 29, 1521. To reduce his casualties, the sultan accepted the otherwise uncommon surrender of the city and promised to spare the defenders. He let the warriors and a few Hungarians sail away, but the Turks stopped them and slaughtered them near Slankamen. They gathered the civil population, mostly Serbian, under the conquered city. Not far from them, the Turks brought imprisoned people from the Srem despotate. The people were allowed to take their sanctities with them.
The imprisoned Serbs set off from Belgrade to Constantinople on September 9, 1521, where they arrived after fifty days of walking, with military escort. They took with them the relics of St. Paraskeva (today kept in Iasi), holy empress Teophana, the miracle-working icon of the Virgin of Belgrade and other sanctities. The guards allowed people to kiss the sanctities and give mandatory contributions. The procession of exiles often stopped, because Serbs kept coming out of the forests to kiss the icons and see their brothers for the last time. Those touching encounters continued all the way to the Serbian ethnic borders, long after Serdica (present Sofia, Bulgaria). Far before the city, the patriarch of Constantinople came out with the people. They were carrying crosses and icons, but this did not ease the sadness of Surguns, since there was a linguistic barrier between them.

BETWEEN TRACE AND GALLIPOLI

The Turks separated the exiles before Constantinople. The city population from Belgrade populated the area next to Theodosius’ Walls behind the Second Hospital Gate, later called Belgrade Gate after them (Belgrad kapi). The rural population from Belgrade populated the place next to a nearby lake, where they maintained the sources of the Constantinople waterworks. There they founded the Belgrade Village. Exiles from the Srem despotate inhabited the villages on the edge of Trace and the entrance part of the Gallipoli Peninsula, in the Malkara-Evreshe county. This area was unpopulated. It seems that the Serbs also founded several new settlements. By the way, the climate there is Mediterranean, and the soil is fertile and convenient for agriculture. The arrived exiles populated Bayramic, Bolavadi, Evren, Geigeldi, Geldzik, Halachderesi, Karadza, Teke and Ucdere. According to the first census from 1530, there were 343 homes in the villages, 111 unmarried men and 104 widows. Based on that, we assume that the exile group from Srem consisted of more than 2.000 souls. Strange thing is that there were many widows, about 18 percent. This was probably related to the warfare in Srem. The names of Surguns were: Radica, Pavle, Radoslav, Radovan, Marko, Vuk, Radul, Milko, Dimitrije… They densely populated Ucdere, Bolavadi, Gelcik and Bayramic, and were mostly engaged in agriculture. The main crops were wheat, barley, oat, lentil, chickpeas, sesame, millet and cotton. They raised sheep and pigs, later cattle and horses. They were hardworking, so they also farmed lands in surrounding desolate villages.
Censuses before early XVII century indicate the beginning of islamization, as well as certain mixtures of the Greek population with a part of the exiles from Srem. Those who mixed with the Greeks were lost in the mass. Pressures of local authorities and surrounding Greeks, their fleeing in the XVII century and coming back, made them forget the otherwise weakened old customs and traditions. There was not a single trace of Srem in their memory. Others, however, who held together and didn’t mix, managed to preserve the language, customs, legends and awareness of belonging to the Serbian nation.

WARS, WANDERINGS, DISPERSING

Part of the exiles from Srem, probably in mid-XVII century, escaped to Serbia. When the battles of the Great Viennese War (1683–1699) were transferred to Serbia, they joined the fighting against the Turks. The defeated Habsburg army abandoned their allies, including Serbs from Gallipoli. They set off with the Austrian army, but the Turks caught up with them and imprisoned part of them near Jagodina. They separated them again, taking one group to the desolate estates in the Pirot area and the other one to Niš, where they populated the neighborhood still called Jagodin-mala today.
At the very beginning of the next Austro-Turkish war (1737–1739), the people of Pirot, that is, Serbs from Gallipoli, started an uprising and liberated their nahi. The Turkish army from Sofia penetrated this area and took a cruel revenge. The population of the Pirot area then moved with the Austrian army to its territory. Soon after, in 1740, Turkey abolished the Serbs and allowed them to return. Part of the Gallipoli Serbs returned to devastated Serbia and settled in the village of Temnić near Jagodina. Those who didn’t stay in this place returned to Bayramic, so that is why they believe their origins are from Jagodina.
According to the XVI century Turkish censuses, there were several priests who arrived with the Surguns from Srem. When they passed away, Greek priests and teachers arrived in Serbian villages. They held church services and lectures in their language. The people wisely responded to this denationalization attempt. They learned Greek in order to understand church rites, but didn’t want to speak a word of it outside of church and school. In order to survive in the Serbian environment, priests and teachers had to learn Serbian. The proverb of the Gallipoli Serbs: ”The priest sings Greek in church, and we speak our language at home” was created at that time. The processes of denationalization and melting into other nations are long and painstaking. It is proven by the fact that exiles from Srem, more than two thousand souls, settled in nine villages in 1521, held them for a long time, but in the eve of the XX century remained only in one: Bayramic. This settlement is large and probably all those who didn’t want to be greekized or islamized came to live in it. Exiles from Srem lived in Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek environments. Bulgarians from the vicinity called them Surguncheta or Srpcheta, and Greeks called them Bulgaro-Servi or Bulgaro-Serbs.

REVENGE FOR THE BALKAN WAR

The mild Mediterranean climate and fertile soil enabled the Serbs a good life with hard work. Their wealth was remarkable compared to the surrounding nations. However, it all stopped at the beginning of the First Balkan War in 1912.
At that time, about 120 families lived in Bayramic, including several Greek sons-in-law. Long before that, Serbs used to marry Greek girls from surrounding villages, who fit into their husband’s environment. The military defeats of the Ottomans in the Balkans annoyed the Turkish population, who took revenge by killing and plundering their Christian neighbors. At the end of 1912, the Turks planned to slaughter the Gallipoli Serbs in Bayramic. Luckily, Tzintzar Janja from Bayramic discovered the plan and informed his neighbors. Before the week determined for the slaughter, the villagers moved to the mountain above the village and thus saved their lives. The next day, the bashi-bozuks raided the village, plundered it, burned down the Church of St. Paraskeva, the school, shops and several houses. They killed the old people who didn’t move to the mountain. Then they collected cattle and smaller animals and killed pigs around the village. This attack made great damage to Serbs, and frequent raids of criminal groups made the lives of people of Bayramic difficult and bitter. Poverty struck the formerly wealthy village.
A short pause, as an overture for future suffering, took place at the beginning of 1913 and lasted until August 10 the same year, when the Peace Treaty of Bucharest was signed, marking the end of the Second Balkan War. According to the Treaty, part of Trace and Gallipoli Peninsula were located within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. The surrounding Turks immediately began attacking Bayramic. Realizing that their biological survival is at stake, the Gallipoli Serbs sent a delegation to Constantinople consisting of Tasa Lambov, Andra Đurić Karađozović and Pandalj Vuksić. They addressed Serbian, Russian and Greek embassies. The Serbian emissary, supported by the Russian consul, succeeded in receiving an approval and passport for moving. The powerless local Turkish authorities were not supportive of the migration, but at the same time couldn’t or didn’t want to prevent criminal attacks on Bayramic. After a great plunder in the autumn of 1913, the village representatives set off to Ursha, where the municipal authorities were seated. The Turks received them badly, mad at them for wanting to move, and, after an argument, gave them an ultimatum to move in three days. The scared villagers of Bayramic took only their necessary belongings and left to the nearby Gallipoli port. They rented a Turkish boat to transport them to Thessalonica and gave a deposit to the boat owner. While waiting to board the boat, an officer from the Serbian consulate informed them that the Turks were planning to slaughter them on the open sea. Thus, they stayed in the port, waiting for the Russian boat from Constantinople, which transported them to Thessalonica port.

ENDLESS WHIRLPOOLS

The Serbian consulate staff welcomed them warmly in Thessalonica and settled them in the barns on the Serbian part of the port. They stayed there for a month and were then transferred by train to Skopje, temporarily settling in the village Adzelar Skopski. The authorities gave them pieces of land in the village of Ibraimovo. The stone for building houses was provided, but the beginning of the Great War in 1914 prevented the construction works. Then began an era of being pushed from pillar to post, suffering, tortures, dissolving and deterioration of Gallipoli Serbs.
After occupying Skopje, the Bulgarian army separated newcomers from Turkey into two groups. One was taken to the Pirot area and the other to the vicinity of Aleksinac. Those taken to the Aleksinac Morava valley were settled in the villages of Bujmir, Supovac, Drenovac, Lužani, Grejač, Došnica and Nozdren. The worked as servants and sharecroppers, for a half or one third of the crops. The locals treated them badly, considering them Turks due to their way of dressing.
Greek units participated in the final battles for liberating Serbia in 1918, and one of them passed through the Aleksinac area. A Greek soldier informed the Gallipoli Serbs that Trace and the Gallipoli peninsula were passed to Greece, so they chaotically set off towards Thessalonica. They were sick of suffering on someone else’s land when they had their own, more fertile. They arrived in Thessalonica in early 1919, where they heard the sad news that their homeland was not liberated after all. Upon their arrival to Thessalonica, a typhus epidemic struck them and killed many of the exhausted people. The remaining part of the group arrived in Bayramic in 1920. Many of them stayed in Skopje, while a part was in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where they moved after the first departure from the Gallipoli peninsula. Upon arriving in their desired Bayramic, the Serbs quickly started renewing their desolate estates. They bought cattle and household items with the remaining money, but in vain. More unfortunate times were coming.
After the Greco-Turkish war (1919–1922), Trace became part of Turkey again, and difficult times began for Gallipoli Serbs. They spent all their remaining savings in Bayramic but had to rush from it as quickly as they could. In their second and final escape, they couldn’t take almost anything, because the Turks ruthlessly attacked the village. They didn’t even have the time to take the church bell, so they put it in the church well. Many didn’t even have the time to take all their children. A man in Pehchevo told us that his father was grabbed by his older sister, while the other sister was left behind. They managed to take the icon of St. Paraskeva, which they still keep today.
In that chaotic escape, one group managed to get a boat in Gallipoli and thus arrived in Thessalonica, while others ran away on foot. The bridge over the Marica was crowded with masses of people, so the impatient ones continued upstream, thereby increasing the old Serbian colony in Plovdiv, which disappeared in the meantime. Most of them did somehow reach Thessalonica. Greek authorities offered them estates to stay there, but they didn’t want to. They addressed the Serbian consulate and asked to settle in their old homeland. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians accepted their request and settled them in the village of Pehchevo, in then Southern Serbia. They arrived in December 1922 and settled in dilapidated, abandoned Turkish houses. Each of the 75 families that arrived received five hectares of agricultural land.

THE SUFFERINGS OF SURGUNS DO NOT END

Their troublesome migrations, which began in the autumn of 1913, ended in late 1922. That year was the end of their tedious pushing from pillar to post, but not the end of their sufferings. When they set off from Bayramic in 1913 towards the Gallipoli port, each family owned several four-oxen carriages with tarps. One of the carriages had a stove with appropriate firewood and a few dishes for preparing food and eating. Other carriages transported bedsheets, clothes, shoes and family valuables. Children rode in the carriages, while the oxen were driven by grown men. When the oxen get tired and the children hungry, the procession would stop. While children grazed the oxen, men collected firewood and women and girls prepared and cooked food on stoves. They would usually stop in the afternoon, spend the night in the same place, and continue at dawn. We assume that they also organized armed guards.
Đorđe Mihailović, one of the participants of the tedious journeys, kept an oxen carriage in front of his house in Pehchevo with a built stove until the middle of the previous century. He had never, under no circumstances, accepted to change his last name into Mihailov.
The Gallipoli Serbs had to adjust to new climatic and social environments. Bayramic was located next to the Aegean Sea with very fertile land. They were engaged in cultivating and selling various Mediterranean cultures and cattle breeding. Gentle and short winters enabled breeding large and small cattle. They have always been hardworking people, so they were wealthier than people from surrounding villages. On the other hand, Pehchevo is located on a mountain, between 900- and 1.000-meters altitude. The climate is much harsher and the land incomparably more infertile. Furthermore, the pieces of land were much smaller than in Bayramic, where families owned tens, even hundreds of hectares. One family possessed as much as eight hundred hectares. On top of everything, the local population was very unfriendly because they were given more fertile Turkish land in the upper part of the village. Arguments were frequent, so the gendarmery had to intervene several times to prevent mass conflicts. The unpleasant situations with new neighbors seemed benevolent compared to the cruelty of Bugarashes, disbanded Bulgarian commits who were active there until the beginning of World War II. The brutality of Bugarashes is testified by the fact that, in the 1930s, in only one night, they slaughtered all priests in the Berovo county, where they lived.

TWO OCCUPATIONS AND DESERBIANIZATION

World War II, from April 1941, caused new sufferings to the remaining Serbs from Trace. The Bulgarian occupational forces implemented an agricultural reform, taking away the little land they owned and giving it to the domicile population. Without estates, they tumbled into poverty. They were under constant surveillance of foreign occupiers, who used every opportunity to mistreat and beat them. Since the very arrival of the Bulgarian occupational authorities, they began changing their last names, which was the first instance of Bulgarization. So, for example, the Karakašović family became Karakašov, Galazović Galazov and so on. Some refused to change their last names regardless of cruel beatings.
To prevent being interned in Bulgaria, the Gallipoli Serbs had to send a delegation to Sofia. The delegation was lucky, because they found Tasko from Razlog, whom they met in 1912 when he passed through Bayramic as a soldier. He managed to get them an interning ban, but not the returning of confiscated land and stopping the forced changing of family names.
After World War II, the confiscated land was returned, but the changing of family names continued without any approval. It happened that two brothers were given different last names. For example, one Kostić was changed into Kostovski and another into Kostov. Kojović became Kojo and so on. This can be seen nicely at their cemetery in Pehchevo.
Serbian science paid some attention to them, but insufficiently, while the state behaved like an evil stepmother. They were first visited by ethnologist Jeremija M. Pavlović in 1923, Milenko Filipović in 1937, linguist and dialectologist Pavle Ivić between 1950 and 1953, ethnologist Marija Pavlović in 2016.
The Gallipoli Serbs wrote official letters to the Yugoslav royal government about their estates in Bayramich, but never received any reply. They found out from their neighbors, who settled in Bulgaria and Greece, that they were paid compensation for the estates left behind. They were informed by the press about the invitation to Aegean Macedonians, who left their estates in present Greece in 1913, to apply at the Institute for Protecting Yugoslav Property Abroad, for damage compensation. They immediately wrote an official letter to the same Institute, which replied that the Kingdom of Yugoslavia resolved the issue in an agreement with Turkey, but they didn’t know why the compensation wasn’t paid to them. Regardless of everything, Federative National Republic of Yugoslavia passed a Law on Compensation of Damages for the property left in Turkey. The Law was published in the Official Gazette no. 45/1974. According to this Official Gazette, the interested people had to submit applications to the Institute with a list of immovables they left in Turkey by June 15, 1947. Each interested party was paid half in cash and the other half in bonds. At the time, Pehchevo belonged to the Berovo municipality, which didn’t inform them about the mentioned law. The omission happened because Gallipoli Serbs didn’t have their representatives in the municipality authorities.

SWALLOWED IN SILENCE

After the negative response of the stated Institute, Serbs from Trace sent an official letter to the Federal National Assembly in Belgrade in 1950. They described their migrations and sufferings from 1913 to 1945 in detail. They explained why they didn’t apply in time, asking to be compensated for the estates they left. They enclosed the published study Gallipoli Serbs written by Milenko Filipović, the reply of the Belgrade Institute for the Protection of Yugoslav Property Abroad, applications for the estates that remained in Turkey for the 75 families and preserved deeds in Turkish about their property in Bayramic. They never received any response from the FNRY Federal National Assembly.
They continued living and working exposed to programmed assimilation. The older generations fought against it. Resistance to denationalization, spiced up with complete lack of interest of communist Serbia, led to divisions unseen up to then. Besides the solid Serbian core, there appeared another one, which, suddenly, started promoting their Macedonian past and future. A third group appeared too, claiming that they were Greeks, although they didn’t know a single Greek world. Grecophiles, aspiring to become Grecomans, emphasized that they had Greek great-grandmothers from neighboring villages of Bayramic. Their insisting on mentioned unbased claims indicates the recognizable Serbian spite, caused by sorrow due to the behavior of their motherland. Their motifs are unimportant, but worthy of attention is the interest of the Greek state to adopt them. The Greek ambassador from Skopje visited them, their children went to summer vacations at the Greek seaside free of charge. A story has been going since a long time ago that a Greek language school will open in Pehchevo. Opposite to that, according to our knowledge, the Gallipoli Serbs are unknown to politicians from the Serbian minority in Macedonia.
Corresponding to the 2011 census, only twelve Serbs are listed in Pehchevo, and a few of them have already passed away by now. So, Macedonian and Grecophile groups remain.
Besides Pehchevo, Gallipoli Serbs today live in Štip, Skopje, maybe also in other cities, while in Serbia they live in Belgrade, Novi Sad and elsewhere. Some are in Bulgaria, Plovdiv, Sofia and other places. In Greece they live in the vicinity of the city of Alexandropoli in Trace, and God knows where else.

SILENT BELLS OF GALLIPOLI

When we visited Gallipoli in the spring of 2018 with a television crew, we stopped on the crossroad of the village before Bayramic. Our local associate Murat Savash (Šabanović) stopped at the nearby inn. He returned with an older man who presented himself as Balta Bulgarian, Muslim from Bayramic. After introductions, he turned to the writer of these lines and said: ”I’m a Bulgarian born in Bayramic. While building a mosque in the place of your church in the 1960s, my father and I found a church bell in the well. We took it to Gallipoli, where it’s still hanging in front of the municipality building.”
After finishing the TV filming, two middle-aged women came by dressed in shalwars, but without headscarves. When they heard where we were from, they immediately joyfully started speaking in Bulgarian, inviting us to their homes. They were surprised by our refusal, so the older one started explaining why they were inviting us:
”Our Serbian brothers, come to our homes. We want to thank you for all the good you have left us. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers settled in Bayramic in 1928. They entered the houses you have abandoned, and other buildings, gardens, fields, orchards, forests and woods. We are still drinking water from the three fountains in front of the village you left us. The three windmills you left behind have been working until recently. You are the first Serbs we’ve ever seen, and we want to treat you and show our gratitude and respect for everything you have left us.”
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to accept their kind invitations. If we did, who knows what else we would have heard about Bayramic.

(The author is a historian, master of sciences, researcher in the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in Valjevo, now retired)