The first authentic encounters with the Orthodox faith in my not overly religious family were at my grandparents' Christmas lunch.
For years, it was unthinkable to miss going to my mother's parents for lunch at half past two. No matter how delicious and almost always perfect the pečenica was, two other things remained in my memory - reading the Lord's Prayer in Old Slavonic and "extracting" steam from the garlic. Lunch always started with grandma reading the Lord's Prayer from the church calendar, Old Slavonic would have made everything much more attractive to the boy who devoured the comics of Djordje Lobachev, and a few years later it was my honor to read the prayer before breaking the garlic. I got so good at it that those few sentences remained the cornerstone of my Old Slavic, despite the fact that I barely passed the colloquium in the same language in the first year of history.
Then it was time to "pluck" the garlic and wait to see if there will be any money in your piece. I realized quite early that it was not "luck" or "blessing" but a carefully orchestrated custom by my grandmother. Only once or twice did the money not go to the one to whom it intended "luck" in the new year. The criteria are quite clear and fair. The first and most important was the arrival of a new grandchild in this world, and then there was the start of school, the transition to older classes, the beginning of the high school years, and so on. When someone got stuck at school, it was clear to everyone at the table that he was this year's winner, which put me in the place of the absolute record holder on the eternal list.
And the money was special - a silver dinar of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1915 with the profile of King Peter. When you take it out of the garlic, it had a bit of dough on it, but thanks to the precious metal from which it was forged, all impurities were easily removed from it. The surrounding dough remained intact, which was not the case one Christmas in the mid-XNUMXs, when a coin of the SR Yugoslavia was found in another cake, made of copper alloys, which painted the garlic in the green color of the bronze busts on Kalemegdan. Grandma used to "buy" the steam from the garlic with current money, but she always emphasized that the value of the gain itself is in the happiness that will follow you all year.
Silver coins have a long tradition in Serbian states throughout history. Until the mass use of paper money, they represented the backbone of the monetary system. Before the First World War, the National Bank had a reserve of about eight million dinars in silver money, but it fell to only 2,2 million at the end of the year because the population in those difficult times had more confidence in silver than in paper banknotes, among which it stood out the new 50 dinar banknote, which the subjects of the Kingdom of Serbia mockingly called "the freckle" because it appeared at a similar time as the greatest plague in the modern history of these regions. At the end of 1914, the Law on Coinage of Silver Coins was passed, and on January 1, 1915, the National Bank authorized the deputy in Paris to approve the minting of half dinar, dinar, and two dinar coins at the Paris mint. In the period from March to August 1915, 15,5 million pieces of money arrived via Thessaloniki, of which 6,5 million were one dinar each.
One dinar was not a small amount during the war. A copy of the daily press was sold for five pairs, a kilogram of sugar for 1,6 dinars, and a bottle of Japanese water, which helped prevent hair loss, as advertised by the court hairdressers, the Dimići brothers, cost two dinars. Silver coins gained special value during the retreat of the Serbian army through Albania in the winter of 1915/16. The local population did not want to receive the paper money of a country they thought was disappearing, but they did not mind the coins with the right profile of King Peter. In such conditions, it was crucial for the purchase of food and firewood, because in addition to precious metals, those mountaineers only received rifles and ammunition, which often had fatal consequences for the Serbian army. Officers were issued silver coins from the state treasury, and those who performed their duty honorably managed to alleviate the suffering of their army by skilfully trading with the local population.
Unfortunately, in the archive material, we also come across different cases, specifically the reports of the French military authorities who inform the Serbian side that they are arresting Serbian officers who are gambling in the city of Corfu with silver and gold coins. In occupied Serbia, the paper dinar lost its value drastically due to the discriminatory decrees of the Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian occupying powers, but there was no merchant or buyer who would resist silver, no matter what was engraved on it. It was often a lifesaver for single mothers who had to take care of numerous children, without a word about whether the father was even alive or where he was at the moment. During the war, several more series of silver dinar were minted, which remained convertible despite the fact that the country's home territory was occupied, and the final withdrawal came in June 1931, when it was replaced by the Yugoslav dinar.
Many families saved coins that helped them survive, perhaps, even the most difficult moments in family history, and with some of those silver coins, they continued to share happiness many decades later, at least through carefully arranged family traditions.
