Every summer, on one day of respite between working in the fields, we would go to Mogorić to visit my mother’s parents, sisters, and brothers. I looked forward to that day with impatience and joy, happy about everything that awaited me.
In Mogorić they knew we were in Vrebac, but the day of our visit was a surprise for them. Although Mogorić was not far away—just a neighbouring village—it was a long, ribbon-like settlement, and there were not many ways to send word through some traveller or passer-by.
On the morning of the visit, after breakfast, we began preparing our things and gifts. We travelled by cart, which Father had spruced up especially for the occasion. He tightened the sides and fitted benches for seating. Covered with colourful woven blankets and padded with sheepskins, the cart had a festive appearance.
Finally, we harnessed the horses, climbed aboard, and set off for Mogorić, about ten kilometres away.
The road was familiar to me. At Gradina we would turn toward the school, then left onto the dusty white road, pass the cemetery, cross the Ćelemijski Bridge, and continue straight toward Pavlovac.
As the horses trotted slowly along, I enjoyed the ride, curiously looking at the countryside that I rarely saw because our work never took us this way.
I eagerly awaited the moment when I would see Zir, the mountain about which I had long heard the saying: “If only I had cheese as big as Zir, I would eat it all my life.”
And then, after passing the turnoff for Zavodje, we entered Pavlovac. As we climbed the first rise in the road, Zir suddenly burst into view.
The enormous rocky mass was carved into the landscape as though it had sprung from the flat expanse of the Lika field.
We passed Gospinovac, the Pavlovac spring beside the road, then went beneath Šupljača, a hill with a hollow-looking rocky crown at its summit. At the exit from Pavlovac, we crossed the bridge over the Jadova once again and entered Mogorić.
The road carried us onward. We passed the cistern at Buljmize and reached Kovačica, a short but powerful little river with a rocky bed. Upstream from the bridge stood a wooden mill, while several hundred metres downstream, on the left bank, stood—though I only learned this later—the house where my grandmother Đuka had been born.
We continued along the road.
Around us were meadows and arable fields, with patches of gnarled oak woodland. Through the greenery, clusters of enormous rocks could be seen, their bases covered with thick green moss.
The stones that emerged beside the road and scattered across the fields sometimes looked like a dispersed flock of sheep, accompanying us all along the way.
We came to the village community centre, where there had once also been a school. A small square and crossroads were bordered by several houses and the ruins of an Orthodox church destroyed during the Second World War, through which dense green vegetation and undergrowth had grown.
We turned left and, soon after a sharp right-hand bend followed by a left, reached the village cemetery, the final resting place of my ancestors.
We stopped, went inside, and walked slowly across to the right, toward the fence where the Đaković family was buried.
After lighting a candle, Mother would always remember her late mother, whom she had loved deeply and remembered as a wise and sensible woman. She had sometimes known to protect her, or secretly slip her a crust of bread during those years before the war when poverty prevailed.
Later, after Grandpa died following a leg operation in 1963, because of gangrene and probably as a consequence of injuries suffered during the war, and after Grandma died suddenly after injuring her leg in the fields and apparently receiving inadequate treatment at the hospital in Gospić, we would still stop here.
We would also remember Uncle Milan—Brale, as we called him—who had been worn down by a hard and exhausting life and by the many hungry mouths he had to feed. Small, frail, and worn out from childhood, he had been drained of the last drop of his strength by the time he died.
We would always pause at this place and remember our dear departed ones.
Željko Narančić