Jovan "Jovo" Stanisavljević (Serbian: Јован "Јово" Станисављевић), known by his nickname Čaruga (Чаруга ; 1897 – February 27, 1925) was a 20th-century Serb outlaw (hajduk) in Slavonia in the early 20th century.
He has legendary status in former Yugoslavia, as a "Robin Hood"-figure.
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Stanisavljević was born in 1897, into a Serb Orthodox family in the village of Slavonske Bare (part of Zdenci) in the Virovitica County, autonomous Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was named after his paternal grandfather, Jovan, who went by the family nickname of Čaruga. His father Prokopija was a peasant, and his mother Ika died when he was ten. His father remarried, and the household wasn't the same, he got beaten a lot, and later ran away from home to Osijek, where he would go to locksmith school. 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 unwelcomed in the villages, so he started living in the woods. There he befriended the outlaw group Kolo gorskih tića (trans. a band 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 çarik for opanak. He's also been referred to as his false names Nikola Drezgić and Mile Barić, and posthumously as the "Robin Hood of Yugoslavia" or "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 Grlić, have appeared since. He remains a well-known historic figure in the Balkans.