Jovo Stanisavljević Čaruga

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Jovo Stanisavljević - Čaruga (1897 – February 27, 1925) was an outlaw, or hajduk, in Slavonia in the early 20th century.

Stanisavljević was born of Serbian parentage in the village of Bare (located near Našice). His mother died when he was ten, and he went to locksmith school in Osijek. When the First World War broke out, he stopped his schooling and enrolled in the Austro-Hungarian Army.

He soon decided to desert from the front lines posing as an officer, and succeeded in that. Shortly afterwards, he killed a man who was courting his girlfriend, and after a local nobleman threatened to arrest him, he killed him too. He was eventually apprehended, tried, and convicted, and started serving his sentence in the Sremska Mitrovica penitentiary.

However, he managed to escape from prison and had a warrant posted on his capture. He went back home, but was unwelcome in the villages, so he started living in the woods. There he befriended the outlaw group Kolo gorskih tića (trans. a group of mountain birds) composed mostly of deserters, who all detested the rich Slavonian peasants and robbed them mercilessly, and were not afraid of killing people either.

The war was long over, but Čaruga and the tići were still pillaging the countryside, and became hunted by the Yugoslav gendarmerie. Eventually in 1922 he decided to leave for Zagreb, where he posed as a rich gentleman from Vinkovci and also continued his life of thievery. He would later return to Slavonia to continue stealing together with his group members.

On October 14, 1923, however, they attempted to rob the Eltz family estate in Ivankovo near Vinkovci. They killed one person at the site but another one sneaked out and called the gendarmerie. After the skirmish that ensued they managed to escape but without their loot. More importantly, the police got on their trail and soon captured them.

By February, 1925, Čaruga's trial at the court in Osijek was finished, and he was subsequently hanged in front of a crowd of 3,000.

His nickname Čaruga comes from the Turkish word čaryk for opanak. He's also been referred to as "Nikola Drezgić" and "Mile Barić", and affectionately yet wrongly as the "Robin Hood of Slavonia". Čaruga's demise attracted a lot of popular attention at the time, and numerous popular books, and a 1991 motion picture Čaruga by Rajko Grlic, have appeared since. He remains a well-known historic figure in the Balkans.