Jovan Santric

Jovan Šantrić (Serbian Cyrillic: Јован Шантрић; Peć, Old Serbia, Ottoman Empire, 1874 - Prizren, Kingdom of Serbia, 18 July 1915) was a Serbian teacher and activist in Old Serbia and the Macedonian Struggle. He was one of the founders of the Serb Democratic League in the wake of an important First Assembly of Serbs in the Ottoman Empire, held from 2 to 11 February 1909 in Skopje, at a time when Serbs had a significant majority population in this part of the Balkans but no national rights.

Biography

Jovan Šantrić was born in Old Serbia in the city of Peć in what is today the disputed territory of Kosovo (still a contentious international political zone to this day), then part of the Ottoman Empire to a well-to-do Šantrić family. His father was Jevrem Gligorijević-Šantrić, Sultan Abdul Hamid's silversmith in Bešiktas who eventually left the district after the Young Turk Revolution and returned to his ancestral home in Peć to be closer to his cultural roots, the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, and people. Jevrem's brother Panteleimon Šantrić, a diplomat in the service of Imperial Russia at the time, was shot in the back of the head in 1911 by an Arnaut while walking in downtown Peć. From 1903 to the beginning of the First Balkan War in the Ottoman Empire the position of Serbian and Russian envoys was extremely dangerous. That period of lawlessness and anarchy resulted in the First Balkan War.

Education and Career

Jovan Šantrić completed six grades of the Greek and Serbian elementary school in Bešitktas. According to Ottoman estimations of 1882, the district of Beşiktaş had a total population of 28,777, consisting of 10,753 Muslims, 9,248 Greeks (the word Greek meant those of the Eastern Orthodox confession like Russians, Serbs and Macedonians and not necessarily only Greeks) 4,897 Armenians, 3,057 Jews, 601 Catholics, 203 Bulgarians and 18 Latins.

Jovan Šantrić enrolled and graduated from the prestigious Galatasaray Lyceum, the school personally recommended by Stojan Novaković, an old friend of Jovan's father. Šantrić's classmate at Galatasaray was Bogdan Radenković.

After graduating, Šantrić taught at the Constantinople Serbian High School from the 1899/1900 school semester. From 1902 to 1906 he taught at the Skoplje Serbian High School and the Thessaloniki Serbian High School.

He was actively involved in the national movement of the Serbs in the Ottoman Empire, a dangerous preoccupation. After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, he was a delegate to the First Serbian Conference, held the week of the 10 to 15 August 1908 in Skopje, at which the Serb Democratic League was founded in the Ottoman Empire. He was elected the following year as a deputy from Priština in the Assembly of the Ottoman Serbs in Constantinople. In 1911, he became a member of the Court of First Instance in Prizren. He worked on a Serbian-Turkish dictionary together with Gligorije Elezović.

Jovan Šantrić died in battle during the First World War on 18 July 1915 in Prizren.

See also

• Serb Democratic League
• Bogdan Radenković,
• Đorđe Hadži-Kostić,
• David Dimitrijević,
• Aleksandar Bukvic,
• Milan Čemerikić,
• Velimir Prelić,
• Sava Stojanovic
• Vasa Jovanović and
• Gliša Elezović
• Grigoriy Shcherbina

Sources

• Novakov, Alexandra Z. Middle Serbian School in the Ottoman Empire (1878 – 1912). Doctoral Dissertation. Novi Sad, University of Novi Sad. Faculty of Philosophy. Department of History, 2014. p. 323. (in Serbian)
• Serbian Democratic League in Otomaskoj Tsarevini. Manifesto - Record - Organization. Skopje, "Serbian Club" Edition, 1908. p. 6.
• Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian National Encyclopedia, book 4. Belgrade, 1929, p. 361.

References

• Translated from Bulgarian Wikipedia: Йован Шантрич