Word: komitadji
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...American woman last week joined an anti-Nazi Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that operated in the Balkans before Adolf Hitler was born. It was a secret band of Serbian and Bulgarian patriots who called themselves Chetniks (home guards), were scornfully referred to as Komitadji (guerrillas) by their Turkish overlords. Pledged neither to give nor accept quarter, the Chetniks plotted assassinations, harassed the Turks, kept the pot of Balkan independence boiling. In World War I the Serbian Chetniks circulated behind the enemy's lines, blew up bridges, destroyed communications, fanned revolts among Austria-Hungary's Balkan minorities. Denied...
...writing a guidebook, studying native folklore in Albania when the Iralians seized it. She has since been living in Yugoslavia. One day last week she walked into a peasant hut on the outskirts of Belgrade and stood before 70-year-old Kosta Pechanatz, leader of the Chetniks. A veteran Komitadji, stationed on the Salonika Front during World War I, Kosta Pechanatz got a French aviator to drop him in Serbia, there made so much trouble for the Germans that it took three Army divisions to quiet things down...
...Orient Express, a service which cuts shipping time for packages across the Balkans from weeks to hours, everything has been carried, from a coffin crammed with counterfeit banknotes to a notorious suede moneybag containing only a Moslem potentate knew what. Every threat of Balkan war, every komitadji bandit raid near the steel rails, every chronic Bulgarian earth tremor means costly problems to the trilingual Frenchmen in creased, drab uniforms who somehow always get the Orient Express through...
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