Battle of Adrovac

The Turks began artillery preparations at around 8 am on September 1, which lasted until 12 noon, and then the infantry launched an attack on the entire front. At around 1 pm, they tried to cover the Serbian right wing on Peskovit Laz. Using their reserves, the Serbs reinforced their position on Peskovit Laz, took Saramanska kosa and thwarted the Turkish attempt. In the prolongation of the battle, the Turks forced the Serbs to withdraw at the end of the day to the line between the village of Trnjane and the bridgehead on the left bank of the Morava, north of the village of Žitkovac. The Turks did not pursue them, and the Serbs withdrew to the Krevet positions the next day.^[1][2]

From 1875 to 1878, about 3,000 Russian volunteers, including 700 officers, went to the Principality of Serbia to help the Serbs fight the Ottoman Empire. Many of them became commanders of the large Serbian military formations, and many died and were revered in Serbia as national heroes. In particular, Count Nikolay Rayevsky (1840–1876) willingly joined the army of Russian General Mikhail Chernyaev, and as a commandant of a detachment of the Serbian army fought in the victorious battles of Šumatovac and Aleksinac. His death at the battle of Adrovac at the age of 36 allowed the Serbs to portray Rayevsky not only a heroic warrior, but also a young man sacrificing his life for a beloved country. It should be pointed out that Serbs have been drawn to the idea of some scholars that Leo Tolstoy made Rayevsky a model for Count Alexei Vronsky – the tragic lover of Anna Karenina – which made the figure of Rayevsky appear even more tragic. He came across to be a noble man with a broken heart, longing for death in a battle. Serbian myth thus associated him with a great number of their own Serbian heroes who – like Prince Lazar in the Battle of Kosovo – chose the heavenly kingdom and death in the field of glory.^[6]

Pera Todorović, one of the first modern Serbian journalists, dramatically described in his Diary of a Volunteer the battle of Adrovac and the death of another Russian volunteer: We saw Russians taking […] poor Kirillov from the battlefield. […] We kissed his gory forehead. […] An old Russian man standing next to me kissed Kirillov and said: “Good-bye, old friend […]. You served an honourable Christian mission”. It is worth mentioning that on the place where Rayevsky was killed, the bishop of Niš, with the help of the Serbian Queen Natalie, built a Russian church with frescos commemorating the hero (1903).^[6]