“On Wednesday morning, [the Turks] surrounded the palisade (trench), first the cavalry… From eight in the morning until noon the battle lasted and several hundred Turks fell, while many Serbs were also killed and wounded… The Serbian cavalry, while the infantry fired from the palisade, stood in Žabar… On that same day of battle, many Serbian infantrymen also jumped out of the palisade (trench), struck the Turks and pursued them… The Turks fled toward the Sava…”
This is how Sekula Gavrilović, a participant in the Battle of Mišar and one of [Karađorđe’s standard-bearers], testified about one of the greatest victories of the Serbian rebels in the First Serbian Uprising, which began on this day in 1806. Gavrilović gave a detailed account of the battle four years later to Isidor Stojanović, but it was published only posthumously in 1848.
The battle, which was immortalized by [Filip Višnjić] in the famous folk epic poem “The Battle of Mišar” with the renowned lines: “Serbia cannot find peace,” and later depicted on canvas in a monumental composition in 1938 by Russian painter Afanasiy Ivanovich Sheloumov, took place after the Ottoman Porte, on the advice of Napoleon Bonaparte, decided to settle accounts with the Serbian rebels according to a war plan developed by French officers. In addition, among the artillerymen on the Turkish side were Napoleon’s soldiers.
After the uprising spread, the Turks decided to punish the rebellious Serbs. In Bosnia, they raised an army of 40,000 soldiers led by Suleiman Pasha, who headed toward Šabac, while Karađorđe commanded around 9,000 rebels. They confronted the Turks near the village of Mišar, on elevated ground that gave them a strategic advantage and the ability to observe every Turkish move.
The Serbs further strengthened their position with a trench in which Karađorđe deployed his best marksmen. The rebels withstood the attack of the vastly more numerous Turks, followed by an assault by the Serbian cavalry led by Pop-Luka Lazarević and Prota Mateja Nenadović. The remnants of the defeated Turkish army withdrew to Bosnia after suffering heavy losses. The battle ended toward evening with a magnificent victory for the Serbian rebels.
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Source: Novosti; Foto: Afanasije Šeloumov