In August 1914, Montenegro went to war with Austria-Hungary, and two emigrants reported to King Nicholas from America:
- Are we going to get there or are we going to hit? odowood!?
This anecdote vividly illustrates the eternal desire of Montenegrins, wherever they may be, to come and defend their homeland from various invaders when needed.
Even at the beginning of the liberation wars, in 1876, there were Montenegrins in the Montenegrin Army who came from America.
Emigration is a global phenomenon. People have been emigrating for decades; especially from the Balkans; especially from Montenegro. There is almost no place on the globe where Montenegro is not present.
The barren land, wars, poverty and hunger, and even various injustices, forced Montenegrin men and women to leave their homes and seek better living conditions.
Among the first settlers of the vast expanses of North and South America were Montenegrins. Today, they can be found in various places in Canada, the United States, South America, Australia, and many European countries. They are also found in Africa and Asia, in Tierra del Fuego, New Zealand, the Philippines, New Caledonia, and even on the distant Falkland Islands, where a Montenegrin herded a flock of sheep... They bravely conquered the world with the desire to earn money and return. But they usually stayed forever. They did, as they said, "the hardest work", in dark mines, cutting down forests, building railroads...
They flocked most to America. The song was: "America, dewy flowers/ there is no one who does not want you/ not even a child of two years/ not even an old man of a hundred years."
They went out into the world with sadness in their hearts, because in the years of scarcity, "with nothing to do... people's hearts grew cold."
They never forgot their feelings towards the Montenegrin state and nation.
The longing for Montenegro does not subside.
...Old Milivoje Djukanovic over fifty years in Australia. He proudly shows me, in his Sydney home, as a relic, the “Mountain Wreath”, printed in Chicago in the 1920s. Suddenly he stands up, pulls a chair up to the cupboard, clings to it, and reaches for a cardboard box resembling a shoebox. He opens it pompously; inside the box are three pebbles and a lump of Montenegrin soil!
His eyes shone with a special brilliance.
- When I die, they'll sprinkle this on my grave! - said Milivoje.
Work in the mines is proverbially difficult. Montenegrin writer Janko Đonović, in his anthological poem “Blacks and Montenegrins”, says: “In the blaze of the morning sun/ which rises warmly/ over the American mines,/ they pass through empty, wide streets,/ between leafy avenues of trees,/ like shadows, dry, bony,/ with their bags on their shoulders/ and hot bread in their bags,/ Blacks and Montenegrins./ ...And when at the throats of underground pits/ the yellow light of the coal stove/ fades,/ Blacks and Montenegrins/ the earth returns - both black and black.”
It is well known that twenty thousand Montenegrins worked in America before World War I. A famous message from a battalion commander who cried out to the Minister of War in Cetinje in 1903: "The boys have left for America! I am missing half of the battalion."
They sent their hard-earned money to their families back home. From 1906 to 1912, sixteen million perpera arrived in Montenegro. And in just one of those years, Montenegrin emigrants sent as much money as the Montenegrin state budget.
In the heart of Lovćen, the "holy altar".
A Montenegrin from the vicinity of Cetinje put his savings in his cap. When the ship was sailing from the Port of Kotor, he stood up, looked in the direction of Lovćen, took off his cap as a sign of respect, crossed himself and said something quietly. All his savings fell into the sea, but he leaned on the ship's railing and continued to look at Lovćen...
...Winter has arrived; Detroit has turned white, and in the spacious restaurant “Vladimir's” in the Farmington Hill neighborhood, the brothers Sarcevic, Vladimir, Nikola i vojo, are busy preparing to welcome guests. The restaurant is usually sold out a year in advance; a real factory.
Glasses and plates clink in the huge kitchen, where Vuksan Juncaj, an Albanian from Malesia, Vladimir Šarčević's "right-hand man" for years, is leading the preparations for the grand banquet.
I'm sitting, vaktile, in Vladimir's office, full of memories that remind him of Montenegro and his native Gluhi Do. The phone rings. Detroit residents are calling to reserve a table and celebrate some family anniversary or business success. There are also regular customers; and "sons of sons."
- The restaurant has twelve to thirteen hundred chairs - Vladimir Šarčević tells me. - The main room has seven hundred seats; the upper room has three hundred. There are two more rooms in the back, and the smallest room, called "Montenegro", has eighty seats...
His father, Rade Sarcevic, at the age of sixteen, with his brother Peter, He came to America from Deaf Valley in the early 20th century. He was a miner in Hazelton, where his sons were born.
- And he was under Taraboš! - Vladimir remembers. - He was carrying ammunition as a fourteen-year-old...
Just before World War II, the father sent his sons to Montenegro to see their homeland, so that they would not be reborn.
- Yes, my father wanted us to be Montenegrins, so he sent us to Crmnica, so that America wouldn't "eat us" - says Vladimir Šarčević.
- We lived a nice life in Gluhi Dol, my father made a little money, we had fruit trees, vines, and pastures in the village. And then World War II came and I joined the partisans, then I stayed in Italy with the American and British armies for two and a half years and returned to America at the end of 1946...
Another war awaited the stout Crmnica native!
- I spent two and a half years in the Korean War. I didn't fight, but I was in the rear, in Texas, from where we were sending troops to the front - says Vladimir. - I've never had a better time in my life. I had a good salary, I was young, I became an officer at the age of twenty-six. A man is a gentleman in the American army. I was at a base in Texas. Texas is nice, except it's hot. But Texas has the most beautiful women. They ask me where I'm from, and I tell them I'm from Montenegro. And then they ask where that state is in America? I tell them, here, near Detroit...
I mention the Šarčević brothers because, in early 1971, they were among the founders of the highly respected American-Montenegrin cultural and educational society “Lovćen” in Detroit, which brought together numerous Montenegrin emigrants. Interestingly, the “Lovćen” Regulations emphasize that “the name and headquarters of the Society cannot and must not be changed under any circumstances.” The first president of “Lovćen” was Vladimir Šarčević, and later also a long-time honorary president. “Lovćen” events were regularly attended by high-ranking representatives of Detroit, congressmen and senators from Michigan.
The Šarčević brothers, together with Đuro Drešić, they once raised fifteen thousand dollars for the construction of a road and lighting in the village of Gluhi Do. That is just a fraction of their charity...
The doors of the restaurant "Vladimir's" are always wide open for special emigrant events.
When you ask Montenegrin emigrants when they left, they get angry and say that they never left, but that "that place over there", i.e. Montenegro, has always been home to them!
They sang: “From distant America,/ A Montenegrin knight rushes/ Will he come to battle angry?/ He asks at every port,/ On which side of Montenegro/ The cannon and rifle echo./ Are we dying or winning,/ Is our banner high?/ Carefully sailing across the ocean,/ The Montenegrin falcon asks...”
And one hundred years ago, in 1915, five hundred volunteer emigrants who were on a mission to earn a living, set off at dawn from America and Canada to Montenegro to fulfill their sacred duty to their homeland and defend it from the enemy. The Italian ship “Brindisi” with volunteers, loaded with food, weapons and ammunition, at dawn, when the much-desired Montenegrin mountains were already visible in the misty distance, half a kilometer from the coast and the Albanian port of Medova, encountered a mine!
A violent explosion split the ship in half... Morning broke under Medovo. Break! Screams! Cries for help... As happens in tragic, dramatic situations. There were non-swimmers.
One volunteer, a swimmer, forcibly took the lifebelt from his companion and gave it to an American woman, who went with them to fight for the freedom of Montenegro.
Most of them were killed by the explosion.
On that November winter morning, 328 emigrant volunteers met their deaths. 164 volunteers survived.
In Cetinje, at the Palace, flags are flying at half-mast...
King Nikola spent his last days in Montenegro in the castle in Kruševac, Podgorica, where he received the survivors of the sinking in the spacious palace park, who greeted him enthusiastically. He greeted each of them. He took a chair and sat among them so that they could tell him about the catastrophic shipwreck. Tears welled up in his eyes...
Twenty-four years later, with their contributions, emigrants erected a monument to the volunteers in 1939 in Cetinje in front of the Wallachian Church, also famous for its original fence made of gun barrels.
The idea was conceived in early 1930, when a Montenegrin emigrant Milos Radunovic, who lived in Sacramento, California, published an article in the "American Srbobran" entitled "A Debt of Gratitude" in which he raised the issue of erecting a monument.
On a high pedestal, encrusted with three commemorative reliefs, soared the slender Lovcen villa with a victorious sword in her right hand and a laurel wreath in her left, for fallen victims.
The monument is the work of a maestro Rista Stijović (1894 -1974), a native of Podgorica's Old Town, a student of Paris, a leading figure of lyrical sculpture.
- I think the female body is perfectly shaped. A man can always express himself there. The male body is beautiful too, but men have strength, and I'm reluctant to make a male body, because I don't like strength. I've also made a lot of animals, because the form of animals is just as perfect as that of women - the famous sculptor Risto Stijović once told me.
The Lovćen Villa looms brightly; in Cetinje, Montenegro.
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