These are the gold coins Kalabić left to Budimir Gajić’s daughters when he and OZNA officers disguised as Chetniks were searching for Draža Mihailović!
Two British one-pound gold coins are now, after exactly eight decades, coming to light and bearing witness that, on St John’s Day 1946, a group of OZNA officers disguised as Chetniks, led by Nikola Kalabić — as the man who left them to the children introduced himself — attempted to capture General Dragoljub Draža Mihailović. They would succeed less than two months later, while right now marks the 80th anniversary of the killing of the Chetnik commander, whose grave remains unknown to this day.
Even after eight decades, Serbia is no less divided over the character and actions of Draža Mihailović than it was then — he is either a hero or a villain. The controversies surrounding Mihailović himself, his army, and who captured him, where and how, remain among the most heated topics. A consensus appears to exist on only two things, or rather two dates — he fell into OZNA’s hands on 13 March 1946 and, following a death sentence, was killed on 17 July.
“I was in my cradle, only about twenty days old, when Kalabić came on St John’s Day 1946 and left a ducat there. He was looking for my father, Budimir Gajić, and through him for Draža Mihailović. My mother insisted that it really was Kalabić, although there are now stories that someone was pretending to be him,” Danica Blagojević, born on 28 December 1945 in Granje near Dobrun, tells Kurir in her flat in Višegrad.
From Mokra Gora, across the Kotroman border crossing, through Vardište and onwards, you can see Dobrun Monastery on the right, above the Rzav. On this road, during the night of 19 to 20 January 1946, two cars stopped and, according to later testimonies and documents, a group of OZNA officers disguised as Chetniks got out of them. Among them was Nikola Kalabić, commander of the Royal Mountain Guard of Mihailović’s Yugoslav Army in the Homeland (JVuO), whom OZNA had captured in December 1945. Another “Chetnik” that night was Slobodan Penezić Krcun, head of OZNA for Serbia.
“About fifteen ‘Chetniks’ arrived in the village of Granje, in front of the house of Milan Gajić, the father of Chetnik commander Budimir. The host, who was celebrating St John’s Day, admitted the unknown guests into his house at the first crowing of the cocks,” historian Predrag V. Ostojić, who was born in Rudo and spent years in the field speaking to witnesses — local villagers — tells us there.
As for what Ostojić heard and recorded here, historians Kosta Nikolić and Bojan Dimitrijević, who, as members of the State Commission for Establishing the Facts concerning the Execution of the Death Sentence against General Dragoljub Draža Mihailović, gained access to the BIA documentation on 26 May 2009, would maintain that it was true:
“We established that the credible version is the one according to which General Mihailović was captured by an OZNA for Serbia group with the assistance of Nikola Kalabić,” Kostić and Dimitrijević stated, and this became one of the versions of his capture and, for the time being, the official one.
It was then, Danica Blagojević tells us, recounting what her mother Milica had told her, that Kalabić left a gold coin beside her in the cradle, while another was held tightly by her three-year-old sister. Budimir Gajić’s third daughter, incidentally, would be born in 1947.
Danica grew up beside her mother knowing that she had a gift from Kalabić.
“When I was marrying Bogdan, my closest neighbour, childhood friend and contemporary, in 1968, and when the Blagojević family came, my mother had to observe all the customs, including putting rakija and money in a glass for her son-in-law. She had no money — where would she have got it from?! So she put in that ducat from Kalabić,” the daughter of Budimir Gajić, the head of Mihailović’s security detail during the final months of his life, tells us.
The gold coin is now with her son, to whom her late husband gifted it.
“Blagoje was always joking that it was not Kalabić’s ducat but a Partisan one,” Danica now says with a laugh.
The gold sovereign, as this one-pound coin is called, bears the image of the British king Edward VII on its obverse and a depiction of Saint George slaying the dragon on its reverse, and was minted in 1909. We were also given a photograph of an identical coin, minted one year earlier, which is kept by Danica’s elder sister.
From the road in Dobrun, there beside the mosque, we turn left. It is the day after St Peter’s Day. The sun is warm, the sky streaked with clouds. Idyllic. We pass the sign for Granje, above which lies the village of Bjeljajka. A week after that St John’s Day, Ostojić says, Kalabić would go there with the same group to visit Budimir’s brother-in-law, Vitomir Rus. That attempt failed as well.
We continue onwards. Only the occasional house stands beside the road. Mostly dilapidated. Deserted. But in front of one, a bent old woman wearing a headscarf is pushing firewood in a trolley. Above the road is a new holiday cottage. And a Serbian flag. We turn right. There, in Dobrunska Rijeka, stands the Monastery of the Holy Father Nikolaj. Draževina, as everyone knows it. Because it was built in 2009 in honour of the Chetnik leader.
A dilapidated kiosk stands at the turn-off itself. It greets visitors with the inscription “Welcome to western Serbia”. A small group sits in the shade. A chainsaw and a grass trimmer lie in the grass. A crate is sitting in the stream. The cold water of the Budimlija is chilling the next round. In the monastery courtyard, General Mihailović welcomes visitors in concrete and at life size. The letter B in his name has sagged to one side. Two elderly villagers were also supposed to be waiting for us.
“They would rather not speak after all. People are still afraid today; if it appears in the newspapers, there will be trouble,” we are told.
“Oh meadow, oh green meadow...” the group in the shade begins to sing. I set off towards them myself. When they hear there are journalists, there is a commotion. The largest of them runs to fetch a šajkača cap and cockade — how could he stand before a camera bareheaded? He is Boško Baranac, a local man of 55.
“These villages around Višegrad and Rudo are among the most afflicted areas. We have found information showing that, after 1946, the people of these two municipalities received sentences amounting to more than 1,200 years in prison. My grandmother was imprisoned simply because she had taken lunch to a Chetnik boyfriend from Tasići, who was later killed. And when Budimir Gajić killed himself with a grenade in 1947, the communists found his diary, which had almost entirely burnt, but the end of one page remained, on which the name Milka Babić was written. The sentence — 12 years in prison in Zenica. She told me everything: being beaten nearly to death, the torture. She was released after six years,” Baranac begins, and then continues:
“That is why, when my history teacher at the school in Dobrun asked me who had liberated Višegrad, I said, ‘The Chetniks.’ She slapped me across the face and sent me to the headmaster, who beat me.”
One member of the group squeezed into a car, another arrives and then he too runs away when he sees us. Here comes a third. Willing to talk. But only informally. Not for the newspaper.
“Do you know that this area did not receive electricity until the 1980s? And up there, in the hamlet of Vukovići, two people still live in two houses without electricity! In the 21st century!” Baranac continues, as bottles of cold, condensation-covered beer arrive from the Budimlija.
Behind the kiosk is a pile of empty cans.
“We are collecting those for a pensioner. He hands them in and gets a little money.”
They still have not managed to go up to Undrulja to mow the grass and cut back the branches. The Chetniks will gather on 17 July and there will be a great commotion. The kiosk is also fully stocked, with Baranac preparing souvenirs and T-shirts for sale. The decorations are waiting.
“I am unemployed, I have a chainsaw, and I only pray to God that I remain healthy and that my chainsaw does not break down,”he says, pointing to the “machine” waiting to be started.
And it gets its turn. Across the small bridge over the Budimlija, then beneath the monastery, then across the small bridge over the Undrulja stream and up a wide dirt road, through the forest for 300 to 400 metres. This is officially where Dragoljub Mihailović’s freedom came to an end. The people have also erected a monument. To the right, slightly lower down, two gravestones stand in a clearing. Three men rest beneath one of them — Major Dragiša Vasiljević, commander of the Višegrad Brigade of the JVuO, Captain Nikola Niko Majstorović and Blagoje Kovač — members of Mihailović’s escort whom OZNA officers killed on that 13 March 1946. Only Lazar Gajić escaped them. The second monument stands over the remains of Mihailović’s son Vojislav, who was killed on 22 May 1945. After the catastrophe of 13 May at Zelengora, when the Partisans crushed the JVuO, which would thereafter consist only of the pitiful remnants of some four hundred men wandering through the forests of Bosnia, the younger son of the Chetnik leader would also be killed at Bulovi near Rogatica.
“Uncle buried him at the edge of a field belonging to a Muslim family, who passed that knowledge down from generation to generation. Do not ask how we dug him up, how long I kept the bones or how we managed to conduct DNA analysis and bury Voja here, where his father fell because of Kalabić’s betrayal,” Baranac tells us as we sit while resin from the pinewood drips onto the newly covered tables.
Mihailović, who had by then long since been abandoned by both the Allies and King Peter II, and who in 1944 had become the former Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command of the Yugoslav Army and former Minister of War, would manage briefly to cross into Serbia in late September 1945. There he would lose his final illusion that there was any hope of an uprising against the communists. The aforementioned capture of Kalabić followed, along with the final act of this drama.
“After Kalabić’s capture, a group of OZNA officers was organised and tasked with capturing Mihailović. As early as the beginning of January 1946, twelve operatives began preparations under the strictest secrecy. They were housed in Kosovska Street in Belgrade and were not allowed to go anywhere, so that they would grow pale as though they had been in hiding for a long time. Kalabić then arrived and taught them how to imitate Chetniks,” Ostojić says.
As those two attempts beginning on St John’s Day yielded no results, OZNA also formed the so-called second group of operatives to provide logistical support to the group in the field, which arrived in Višegrad on 25 February. Officially, it was there to conduct meteorological research, and its members included Lieutenant Colonel Jovo Kapičić.
“The OZNA officers did not know where Mihailović was, so every day they tortured, arrested and killed people in this area,” Ostojić says.
Meanwhile, in mid-February, he descended to his final hiding place — the village of Repuševići and a dugout beside the house in which Milan Mile Knežević, a refugee from across the Drina, lived.
Lent that year began on Monday, 4 March. The following evening, in secret, three Chetniks came to the home of the priest Dobrislav Dobro Popović in Štrpci and led him on foot for hours while he was blindfolded, so that, on the evening of 6 March, at a location unknown to him, he could give Mihailović Holy Communion. The archpriest later recounted that the Chetnik leader had told him that he was preparing to leave and therefore wished to receive Communion, but also that Vasiljević had said to him: “I do not know what will happen to us. Kalabić is somewhere nearby. He is making contact and sending messages; I find all of it suspicious. I do not know what to do, because Draža is insisting that they meet.”
On the same day that Mihailović received Communion, the OZNA officers tried their luck for a third time.
“This time, the group tasked with capturing Mihailović, officially commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Svetolik Lazarević and also including Kalabić, disembarked in the strictest secrecy at Kraljeve Vode — present-day Zlatibor, NB: author’s note — and set off on foot towards Bijela Brda, moving from safe house to safe house, according to the report by Vladan Bojanić, head of the Third Section of OZNA for Serbia, contained in the BIA documentation,” Ostojić says.
They presented themselves as Chetniks, with Kalabić doing most of the talking, but the local people revealed nothing. As soon as they left each house, Budimir Gajić arrived to ask about them.
“I found it slightly strange that this group was moving about so freely in the snow, but I said nothing; I neither dared nor wanted to ask... I saw two of them slaughter a young ewe at dawn. I found it strange. It was Lent,” Radenko Vidović, who led the false Chetniks to Ravanci, a village on the slopes of Varda where Mehmed Pasha Sokolović was born, told Ostojić in 1998.
The OZNA officers managed to establish contact with Budimir Gajić.
“On the evening of 11 March, near the village cemetery in Ravanci, Gajić and Blagoje Kovač met Kalabić and his escort. The situation was tense, and Gajić was suspicious. The following evening, 12 March, in Repuševići below Ravanci, nine months after parting in the village of Zakmur near Foča following their escape from the encirclement at Zelengora, Kalabić and Mihailović met. The accounts of survivors from both sides confirm the time, place and participants in the event, although I treat the details with caution. I can state with certainty that it was decided that Mihailović would set off towards Serbia with Kalabić’s group that same night,” Ostojić says.
The movement of a total of 18 men, he states, would begin after midnight on 13 March towards the Dobrun–Uvac road. The guide was the Chetnik Lazar Gajić. They proceeded cautiously, along a path patched with snow that descended steeply towards the Undrulja stream.
“Not far from the road, in Undrulja, the disguised OZNA officers suddenly captured General Mihailović and killed Vasiljević, Kovač and Majstorović,” Ostojić told us.
The scent of freshly picked wild thyme fills the air there in Undrulja. And that story not meant to be told, begun down below, takes on new forms. Fates, unrest and hopes open up... But Baranac raises his hand and brings us back to the story we came for:
“You see, there used to be a turn-off here beneath the rock. Lazar Gajić was leading the column there; he was shot in the arm during the exchange of fire when they tied Uncle up, but he managed to escape. He later said that Budimir had warned him even earlier: ‘Uncle, something is not right here, these are the Reds! Betrayal!’, and that this was why he was not in his immediate escort, but formed the right flank with Srpko Medenica and another six or seven Chetniks. He also said that they immediately noticed that Kalabić’s wrists were red from handcuffs, and that one of those standing guard by the house in Repuševići said: ‘Comrade, give me a match so I can light up!’ And I believe that it was the real Kalabić! They knew him from Uncle’s escort as well.”
Ostojić states that they led the bound Mihailović along the stream bed towards Dobrun. From there, the road led to Belgrade.
“That is the whole truth. The stories about an aircraft that the Americans and British supposedly landed near Rudo on 13 March, which carried Mihailović away and then handed him over to OZNA, and some alleged CIA documents, have nothing to do with reality. There is not even a theoretical possibility of an aircraft landing on that steep terrain, and no one ever testified to it. There is an almost unbelievable consistency between the accounts of those who took part in the operation — the OZNA officers — and the witnesses from the area, the local people with whom I personally spoke,” Ostojić says, adding that Kalabić was later killed and that the location of his grave is unknown.
Aleksandar Leka Ranković, the Minister of the Interior at the time, sent Tito, who was on an official visit to Poland, a message announcing the triumph. Tito then personally informed Stalin. Ranković also had the honour of publicly announcing the news in the National Assembly of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia on 24 March. Interestingly, on 21 April 1946, Borba published news that a group of soldiers and commanders of the Yugoslav Army had been decorated, but without stating the reason. The list included those presumed to have captured Mihailović: Svetolik Lazarević, Slobodan Krstić Uča, Milovan Pejanović, Živa Čiklovan, Janko Dimić, Mile Bulajić, Dragoljub Vasović, Radenko Mandić, Raša Nešovanović, Mane Trkulja and Zvonko Sitarić.
“Nikola betrayed me. To save himself, he betrayed me. I did not even have time to reach for my grenade, it happened so unexpectedly,” the convicted and influential member of the Ravna Gora movement Stevan Moljević wrote of his final meeting with Mihailović in prison in his unpublished manuscript, which Ostojić reproduced in his book The Capture of General Mihailović.
At last, our group gets down to the work it came to do.
“We are relaxing a little. The fast has only just ended, and when it is a fasting period, for me there is neither alcohol nor cigarettes, just as there is none on Wednesdays and Fridays,” Baranac says, taking the chainsaw:
“I also worked as a carter, but I had to sell my oxen to put my son through university. Thank God, he has only three examinations left. As long as my children, all four of them, and my grandchildren are alive and well, I will manage somehow.”
I leave. With only one thought. About everything that remains unwritten and all those stories that will never come out. And while Chetnik songs once again blare out this 17 July, flags fly, cockades flash, and photographs burst out everywhere, accompanied by both cheers and condemnation, beneath it all there will still remain ordinary, small lives and difficult inner struggles. Why do we still look at where someone comes from and who they were born to so many years, even decades, after everything; whether they have a faith, and which one... When will history become history?
REFUSED RAKIJA — ‘NO, THANK YOU, I’VE HAD MY SHARE’
Amid the shooting and running, the OZNA officers took the bound Mihailović into the house of Janja and Petar Perišić, a little way down the road. It still stands there today, deserted and locked, and until recently, we are told, the chair in which Mihailović sat on that 13 March was also still inside.
“Unknown bearded men, Chetniks, burst into the house. They were agitated and seemed frightened to me. They posted guards around the house and brought one of them, a shorter man wearing glasses, inside and seated him at the table. I served rakija to those in the house, and the man with glasses said to me quietly: ‘No, thank you, I’ve had my share.’ At the time, I did not know who he was. Once day had broken, jeeps arrived in front of the house, and the Chetniks climbed in and left towards Dobrun. Afterwards, troops in lorries passed by heading uphill,” Janja once told Ostojić, while Baranac says that people in the village have been talking for decades about how the Perišić family had their own signals:
“If the Chetniks were coming, Petar would say to Janja: ‘Make coffee’, and if the Partisans were coming: ‘Put the coffee on.’ And when they burst in with Uncle, she asked him whether she should make the coffee or put it on, to which he replied: ‘I don’t know; nothing is clear to me.’”
MILICA GAJIĆ: ‘OH, GOODNESS, WHAT WOULD YOU NEED THAT FOR? I WOULD ONLY POISON YOU’
The search party caught up with Budimir Gajić in December 1947.
“Some kind of swelling appeared below my father’s knee, and he could no longer run when they chased him in Oskoruše, so he threw a grenade beneath himself. They then took my mother to identify whether it was Budimir. She recognised him, but she refused to say so, and they beat her, knocking out two of her teeth. They did not even allow anyone to approach him; dogs tore his body apart. My husband and I erected a monument to him in the cemetery in Granje, even though not a single one of his bones is there,” Danica Blagojević says, also mentioning Silent Island, a small memorial that we passed shortly before entering the monastery:
“They came out of nowhere, took away my father’s brother Marinko, his sister Vitorka and their relative Petar to Undrulja and killed them there. Simply because they were Gajić’s.”
When she was left completely alone with three little daughters, Milica Gajić had to part with two of them.
“Our aunt, my father’s sister, took my elder sister to Belgrade, while my uncle took the younger one, and I remained with my mother. My mother knew how to sew; she had received the sewing machine as part of her dowry, and she sewed everything for the local people and neighbours. She did not ask for money, but for flour, kajmak, cheese... We had a cow, and my mother kept her hidden. However, a tax collector found her and took her from us in payment of tax,” Danica Blagojević says.
She grew up hiding who she really was.
“My father was a legend to everyone up in the village and the surrounding area. But my mother would simply shout for us to run whenever the police were coming. I was little, so I would shout: ‘Here come the pizanis, here come the pizanis!’, meaning the Partisans. My mother also told me that when people asked whose child I was, I must not say I was Budimir’s, but Milica’s,” she says, and then recalls:
“At the school in Dobrun, the first and third years were together in the same classroom. My future husband and I were in the third year, and my brother-in-law was in the first. The teacher asked who our greatest enemies had been. The two of us remained silent, because we did not know whether we dared to say, and my brother-in-law said: ‘Our greatest enemies were the Partisans.’ We thought he knew the answer, but the teacher said: ‘Sit down! Who told you that?!’”
Her mother, who lived until 1998, did not speak much about it:
“When I read the book Traces of Dead Brothers, I was beside myself with crying, because it says there how the OZNA officers raped my mother while they were trying to capture my father, how they turned her upside down and hung her by her head and then by her braids. I asked her why she had never told me that, and she said: ‘Oh, goodness, what would you need that for? I would only poison you.’”
BONES MOVED AFTER HALF A CENTURY: A TOOTHBRUSH WITH THE CHETNIKS
Lazar Gajić managed to evade the search parties for a year, until March 1947, when, Baranac says, he came here to light candles for his comrades:
“UDBA killed him 500 metres further uphill. We dug up his bones in 2000, when his wife Lenka died, so that, in accordance with her final wish, we could bury them together. With the bones, we found an aluminium toothbrush bearing the inscription ‘Made in England’, a fork and a spoon.”
ZORAN ILIĆ, NUMISMATIST: ‘IT IS WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD’
“The gold sovereign, which has a face value of one pound, weighs eight grams — precisely 7.98 grams — and has a fineness of 917 parts per thousand, meaning that it contains 91.7 per cent gold, and it has always been worth as much as its gold content. Today, that is €800–820. Gold coins were minted in large quantities at the time and were held by virtually everyone throughout Europe, so a great many have survived, which is why they have no numismatic value,” numismatist Zoran Ilić tells Kurir, adding that this is not a ducat, because a ducat contains 98.6 per cent gold and weighs 3.49 grams.
THE FINAL ACT — THE CAPTURE
1. The group tasked with capturing Mihailović got out of two vehicles in the Kraljeve Vode area on Zlatibor and headed towards Ribnica and then onwards to Jablanica, arriving in the evening of 6 March at the house of Momčilo Bakić in Jablanica, where it spent the night.- 2. Before dawn, it moved to the village of Brezovac, where it spent 7 and 8 March in the house of Božo Gazdić.
- 3. On the evening of 8 March, the group arrived in the village of Rakovići and spent the night in the house of Joksim Raković.
- 4. Before dawn on 9 March, it moved to the village of Budimlija and settled into the house and outbuildings of Milan Anđić.
- 5. It arrived at the house of Radomir Marković in the evening of 9 March and remained there throughout the night.
- 6. It arrived at the house and outbuildings of Tikomir Vidović in Vidovići at daybreak on 10 March.
- 7. Before midnight on 10 March, the group set off towards Ravanci and, at daybreak, reached the house of Slobodan Stanić, after which it settled into the house of Marko Kiridžić in Gornji Ravanci. In the evening of 11 March, near the village cemetery, which was 200–250 metres from those houses, the arranged meeting between Budimir Gajić and Nikola Kalabić took place.
- 8. Kalabić’s group, accompanied by Budimir Gajić and his group, arrived in Repuševići in the early evening of 12 March, at the house of Milan Mile Knežević, a refugee from the village of Kočarim across the Drina, where General Mihailović was staying.
- 9. After midnight on 13 March, Mihailović, accompanied by his personal security detail and Major Vasiljević, set off with Kalabić’s group towards Serbia. He was captured at Undrulja, along the stream of the same name leading towards the Dobron–Uvac road in Dobrunska Rijeka.
- 10. The capture group led Mihailović towards Dobrun and temporarily settled into the house of Petar and Janja Perišić, where it waited for vehicles to transport him towards Belgrade.
TORTURE IN A HOUSE IN RUDO UNDER KRCUN’S DIRECTION
The house in the very centre of Rudo was the scene of horrific torture in March 1946, in which Krcun personally took part. In a dispatch sent on 8 March, Ranković informed him that they had information that Draža was in Štrpci with Father Dobro Popović, and the following day Krcun tortured the priest, the owner of the house Pavle Miković and Neđo Jakovljević there. Miković himself told Ostojić about it many years later: “As soon as he appeared, Krcun struck me in the temple with the grip of a pistol, after which I lost consciousness. They shoved a woollen sock into my mouth. While I was lying on the floor, one of them poured water into my nose. I felt as though I was going to suffocate.... When they took us out of the cellar, even my own sister did not recognise me.”
Today, Pavle’s son Gorda tells us:
“When he still would not speak after the sock, they boiled eggs, took them straight out of the boiling water and placed them beneath his armpits, where the tissue is most sensitive. Those were the torments of Jesus. They pushed a red-hot iron rod used for cleaning a rifle through Father Dobro’s thigh. Not even the fascists did that. Krcun invented all the methods of torture; he was Mengele.”
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