Komita commander – hero Dimitrije Begović

Dimitrije Begović is one of the most important leaders of the Topličko-Jablanica uprising in 1917. In his report to the Supreme Command, Duke Pećanac ranked him among the seven bravest Komitas. Not only Begović heroism contributed to this, but also his sacrificing the life of his whole family at the altar of freedom. He was born in Dobri Do, where none of the Begović houses exist anymore. The Begović family was destroyed by their patriotism. All four brothers, as well as their immediate and distant family, 20 of them, laid down their lives for the freedom of their people. As a second lieutenant, he was wounded in the Battle of Cer. After treatment, the military authorities sent him home to Medvedje to recover. In Jablanica, together with other patriots, he formed numerous Komita organizations from which the Jablanica Komita detachment emerged. At first, he commanded the company, and on April 10, 1917, he was appointed commander of the detachment. The collapse of the uprising began in March 1917, in which two Bulgarian, one German, and one Austro-Hungarian division and a large number of Bulgarian Komita companies participated. The five times stronger the occupying army defeated and pushed the insurgents into the mountains. The punishment for the uprising was creepy. The occupying soldiers killed more than 20,000 Serb civilians, mostly women, old people, and children, and burned 55,000 residential and other buildings.

Sacrifice of the whole family

In the occupation massacres, the members of the families from which someone was in Komitas especially suffered. That fate did not escape the family of Dimitrije Begović either. The occupiers decided to blackmail him with the lives of his family members. Following a tip, they found his wife Milosava and four children, sons Miodrag (8), Milutin (6), and Milovan (4), and daughter Koviljka (2). After that, the Bulgarian colonel Todorov sent him an ultimatum: to surrender his company or his whole family would be killed. In a letter dated March 23, 1917. Begović answered him: „You have killed thousands of members of Komita families, you will also kill mine because I will never surrender. A Serbian officer does not surrender!“ His defiant words which radiate the dignity that should adorn every Serbian officer and freedom fighter have been remembered by the people of Jablanica and Toplica for a whole century. Infuriated by his firm demeanor which had a significant effect on raising the morale of the Komitas and the Serbian population, the occupying soldiers brutally tortured his family first, and then they shot Dimitrije Begović wife, who was seven months pregnant, ripped the male child out of it and impaled him on a bayonet, and then threw it into the fire they burned her and all four of their children alive. In the horror of inhumane dying the children became so tightly knit around their mother that not even after death could they separate them, so they had to bury them all together in one tomb in the village of Gaitan.

Betrayal and heroic death

The last occupation counter-offensive was nothing more than ethnic cleansing. Entire families were wiped out in order to discourage people from helping those who remained in the Komitas. Although scattered in groups, the insurgents continued to fight, dying one by one. Their end was also the end of the heroic epic of the people of Jablanica and Toplica accelerated by winter, illness, lack of ammunition, and treachery. Dimitrije Begović was also a victim of betrayal. One of the insurgents surrendered and said for the reward that there were 25 Komitas in three hiding places on Radan Mountain. In one of them was also Begovic. The occupiers urgently raised a large number of soldiers and on January 13, 1918, set off to the places indicated by the traitor. During the attack on the Komitas, there were twenty of them against one. The order of the occupying command was: to capture the Komita leader Begović alive so that they would torture and humiliate him in front of the Serbian people, and finally have him publicly executed. The moment of Dimitrije Begović’s death deserves special attention because it is an exceptionally heroic and patriotic act. The Komitas tried to break through the encirclement, in which a few succeeded, and Dimitrije was wounded and remained in the ring with several Komitas. Surrounded, Dimitrije’s comrades died quickly. Although wounded and alone, he fought for days and as an excellent marksman from his own of the lofty stone shelter killed a large number of occupying soldiers. Running out of ammunition, he decided on an act worthy of Stevan Sinđelić. Since the enemies were adamant about capturing him alive and continuously shouted at him to surrender, he answered at one point that he would surrender, but that as an officer he wanted to surrender exclusively to officers. The occupying officers were craving for the advancement that would come to them after the capture of Begović, and for the big prize money, so after Dimitrije’s offer, they pushed through from the background to the front lines wanting to capture the Komita leader personally. Having come out in the pre-dawn from behind the cover with raised arms, Dimitrije held in the hands that he had hidden in the sleeves of his overcoat two unscrewed bombs. The occupying officers were scrambling to get hold of him first. When they got close enough to him, Dimitrije activated the bomb explosives that he had hidden under his blouse. He and two other occupation officers were killed by the powerful explosion. Desperate with rage, the occupying soldiers cut off his head, impaled it and then carried it for days through the Serbian countryside exclaiming: „Here is the head of your Dimitrije Begović. There is no one left to defend you!“ In the act of his death, there is something Obilić-esque, even victorious, because he himself decided when and how he would die, and also something chivalrous because by dying he killed his equals. He died undefeated. The people buried him at the place of his death next to the mountain road, so that his grave would remind younger generations that everything, even more, is sacrificed for the sake of one’s people and their freedom from life. Unfortunately, nothing is known about Dimitrije Begović’s death and his wartime merits outside the narrow local frame. Time passed, other cruel armies passed through the paths of Toplica and Jablanica, new generations of occupiers ran rampant, and the area was devastated. Begović’s grave was forgotten over time, staying along the overgrown road in a difficult-to-access backwater. Not only in the Jablanica-Toplica region, for which the brave and self-sacrificing Komita Dimitrije Begović fought and for whose freedom he died and sacrificed his family, not a single street, school, or institution that would tell new generations the story of his heroism and ignite the necessary patriotism that we have less and less is named after him but also in the whole of Serbia his name is not in the huge lists of streets, institutions, companies and schools.

Sisters Revenge

Milica Begović, one of Dimitrije’s sisters who had also been a Komita from the beginning of the uprising, decided to take revenge on the traitor since there was no one on the male side to do it. She could not expect anything from the newly formed state in terms of justice. When it seemed that everything was forgotten, one day in 1921, three years after her brother’s death, Milica put on again the coarse black Komita clothes she wore all the time during the uprising, girded herself with crossed lines, tucked a scimitar and a revolver into her belt and galloped her horse to the village of Donja Toponica, where the man who had betrayed her brother was the best man at a wedding. Having burst into the wedding, which was held in a village tavern, she apologized to the hosts and asked them to show her the best man so that she could convey an important message to him. Unsuspecting, the hosts, who did not know her, showed him to her. Milica approached the traitor, asked his name, then pulled a gun from her belt and said: „This is for you, traitor and Serbian executioner, greetings from my brother Dimitrije Begović whom you betrayed“, after which she poured a whole load of bullets into his head and chest, and then cut off his head with a scimitar and put it in a bag. The guests scattered in panic, and Milica rode away towards Prokuplje, where she found the head of the district, the captain, to whom she addressed with the words: „Mr. Chief, today I killed a Serbian traitor and the executioner of my family, who betrayed my brother Dimitrije Begović, a Serbian officer. Here is his head in my feed bag. Do with me whatever you want, I’ve avenged my brother!“ Surprised by Milica’s bravery, the chief answered her that he would not arrest her for having killed the traitor that she should go home, take the traitor’s head to his villagers, and that he would call her, if necessary. Milica was never held accountable for the murder, nor did the authorities ever call her.

Epilogue

Over time, the lonely hero’s grave in the mountain was covered by vegetation and the oblivion of all authorities. To Dimitrije Begović, the only Komit commander to whom a monument has not been erected, and not even a hundred years later, the admiration of the people raised the oral memorial. In order not to remain only in memory that inevitably fades, his nephew Božidar modestly marked his grave in the 80s of the last century. Today, it is visited by rare mountaineers, a hunter, or a stray tourist from the nearby Prolom Spa. However, at the initiative of a group of citizens – patriots who founded the Association for the erection of the monument to Dimitrije Begović, the Museum in Prokuplje, with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia and the Serbian Orthodox Church, made a monument and paved the path from the road to Dimitrije Begović s grave last year. The author of the monument is a distinguished sculptor, academician, PhD Dragan Radenović, who also designed the Memorial Park of the Toplica Uprising, which is due to be realized soon, and the installation and the consecration of the monument to Dimitrije Begović is planned for this year.

Academician, PhD Dragan Simeunović