Draft:Jovan Arandjelovic (Chetnik)

Jovan Aranđelović (Serbian Cyrillic: Јован Аранђеловић; 1892-1949) was a Serbian freedom-fighter in the 1903 Old Serbia and Macedonia campaign to liberate the southern Balkan territory from the Ottoman yoke.

Biography

Jovan Aranđelović was a well-educated Serbian Orthodox priest who, at the time of the Ottoman occupation, also worked as a village schoolteacher, tutor, and was an ardent civic nationalist at a time when the Turks were trying hard to convert the Christian population to Islam. With more success among the Albanian population, they were able to persuade Arbanasi who were a majority in some mixed villages to collude with the "authorities".

This and other abuses perpetrated against the Christian population forced Aranđelović to join the Serbian Chetnik Organization and begin the task of dismantling the hegemony of the Turkish Empire in the Balkans for once and for all. The collective and combined launch Ilinden among the Chrisitans of Old Serbia and Macedonia kick-started a series of battles that continued sporadically until the Balkan Wars and the Great War that decimated populations on both sides of the political spectrum.

One of the first people who understood the importance of Crvena Reka as a settlement on the international road and railway was the former priest of the Spaja parish, Jovan Aranđelović, whose name today bears the name of the Crvena Reka Elementary School. He is the most responsible for the construction of the church and school, the basis of the spiritual and cultural superstructure of the nation and the central facilities of the future settlement.

He was born in 1892 in the village of Veta. He finished elementary school in Donja Studena and high school in Niš, where he was an active member of the 'Sokol Society" Legion of Honour. He stopped studying at the theological-teacher school in Prizren after the second year when the war against the Turks broke out. He joins the company led by Duke Vojislav Tankosić and participates as a Chetnik in the front lines in the Battle of Merdare in the First Balkan War. After the Balkan Wars, he was demobilized as a volunteer paramedic. After completing his interrupted education, he came as a teacher to the village of Pavlica near Raška and then in 1914 he moved to the village of Divljana near Bela Palanka.

In the same year, he participated in the First World War. After the withdrawal of the Serbian army, the hospital company in which he served was disbanded and Lieutenant Sergeant Jovan Arandjelovic crossed Albania's Prokletije mountains with forty brave fighters. During the retreat, he took on the task of protecting the Serbian army in the hills above Lješ with his company. The entire company arrived on the island of Vido, where they took care of the seriously wounded and typhoid patients. In January 1916, he moved to the island of Corfu, and in 1918 he participated in the breakthrough of the Thessaloniki front. After the war, he managed the inventory of the entire Moravian Military Hospital. As soon as he was demobilized in January 1919, he was appointed a teacher in the villages of Veta and Toponica. The following year, he got married and was ordained as a priest of the Spaja parish.

He also built a church home in 1936, which is still the home of the priests of Crvenoreč. After his early death in 1949, Jovan Aranđelović - comita warrior, teacher, priest and MP was buried in the church he built and where he served God, and on the eightieth anniversary of its construction, the primary school in Crvena Reka changes its name and takes the name of its founder as an example future generations.

Legacy

Today there is a public school in Crvena Reka named after him.