The Serbian military cemetery in Thessaloniki - Zejtinlik has been guarded for the last hundred years by the descendants of the Serbian Mihajlović family from Grblje. Grandfather Savo, father Đuro and son Đorđe. Savo is a Thessalonian warrior, who collected the bones of his comrades in one place and kept them until his death. His priestly duty was continued by his son and grandson. The movie "The Last Guardian" was made about grandson Đorđe, and the state of Serbia awarded him an order for his special merits. And why is it that a Grbljanin guards a Serbian cemetery?
Thessaloniki can be reached from Montenegro in a single day. And whoever gets there will see the Serbian military cemetery with seven and a half thousand buried warriors. Their names give us the answer to the question - why does the citizen of Grbljan guard the Serbian cemetery? When we read those names and the origins of the Serbian soldiers buried there, it will be clear to us that the Mihajlović family is just one of the many families from today's Montenegro, whose members voluntarily and bravely left their lives on the Thessaloniki front. If Grbljanin wasn't the guardian of that place, it would be Paštrović, and if it wasn't him - it would be Vasojević, or Pivljanin, or someone from Old Montenegro. Because - everyone was there.
Vujanovići, Rakočevići, Đukanovići, Krivokapići, Pejovići, Vraneši, Musturi, Bulatovići, Martinovići... and not to mention. There are more. Wonderful Montenegrins, brave Bokelje, Paštrović... These are mostly members of the Volunteer Battalion of Montenegrins from America, those Montenegrins who were not influenced by the ideologies of the dynastic and political conflicts of Karađorđević and Petrović, those whose patriotism was formed before their departure to America, those with authentic identity of Montenegrins from the 19th century. That patriotism took them straight to Greece, to Serbia's fight against the occupiers.
Some of them died on that famous battlefield, and some who arrived alive in Montenegro, as winners and liberators, are dying today, after their death, from the careless words and painful divisions of contemporary Montenegrins. However, their graves speak more and more powerfully than our dilemmas, and the power of those graves will last longer than the current Montenegrin wanderings.
That's why, when today someone discusses which army entered Montenegro in 1918 - he must remove the barbell from the eyes of the inter-dynastic conflict between Serbia and Montenegro, which was dirty and merciless on both sides, - and look deeper and beyond that. If he does that, without political and ideological prejudices, he will see that the army from the Thessaloniki front is our army! The same as the one who carried the Montenegrin flag. Both are the armies of our ancestors who came to the Balkan theater of the Great War from all sides. In other words, - the ancestors of today's citizens of Montenegro did not fight in the First World War only under the crown of Petrović, but with equal enthusiasm and patriotism under the crown of Karađorđević. They experienced that both rulers, both the one in Cetinje and the one in Belgrade, were only "two old Serbian kings" (as King Nikola himself wrote enthusiastically, for himself and his son-in-law - on the eve of the war itself). The fact that the aforementioned old men politically worked against each other and plotted, in the tumult of the struggle for power in the future great state - well, that must not cloud the noble emotions of our ancestors, who, in addition to their other feats, won on the Thessaloniki front, and then they entered victoriously not only in Serbia and Montenegro, but also reached Dalmatia and Slovenia, in accordance with the then valid Euro-Atlantic integrations.
The inhabitants of this country may not show democratic capacity and civic enlightenment at every moment - but there should be no doubt that they know who their grandparents and great-grandparents were, what identity they belonged to and on which battlefield, for which ideals, they laid down their lives . These data about ancestors, here in Montenegro, are remembered, not as administrative facts, but as emotions. Therefore, one should think carefully before telling the descendants of Montenegrin Thessalonica that their fathers' fathers were occupiers, on their own land!
How can the Serbs be the occupiers in Boka, when King Nikola himself, on the occasion of the great Montenegrin victory over the Austro-Hungarian army, in the first days of the war - raising the banner of his kingdom on the walls of Budva, on August 04, 1914 (!!!) honored with the words: "Thank you To the Creator, who granted me to see the realization of the dream of my youth: these great days of Serbian liberation"! For the old man, the Montenegrin king, his youthful dream came true: Serbian freedom!
And now, Nikola's army, which is fighting for Serbian freedom and which is lined up on the Obilić poljana, and which adorns itself with the Obilić medal (the army of the king on whose coffin we found the tricolor in 1989; the king who signed himself in Cyrillic, and in whose primary and secondary taught the Serbian language in schools - as his mother tongue) - that and such a Serbian army is not an occupying one, and the one from Thessaloniki, full of patriots from Katunska nahija, Boka and Paštrović, that army occupied Budva!
The author is the rector of the Cetinje seminary
Bonus video:
