,,Forever brothers”
Mother Ružica Pejanović with her two sons of different faith, Luka and Risto (Alija Poturak) in the village Komani near Prijepolje, Raška, Serbia, 1919.
Risto, as a young man, moved to live with the wealthier Muslim Poturak family. There he adopted Islam, took the name Alija, and the surname Poturak. It’s not fully know whether his mother gave her son to a childless family out of compassion, or whether it was to seek help in difficult circumstances and to give him a better life. However, what is known is that the love between the brothers and their mother was never broken. She lived with her son Luka, an Orthodox Christian, and her son Alija, a Muslim, without making any distinction between them.
Back in 1919, Andrija Bogdanović, a friend of the family, took a photograph of Ružica with her sons Luka and Alija, one an Orthodox wearing a šajkača cap, and the other a Muslim wearing a turban. This image, with the mother dressed in traditional Serbian attire, has been preserved as a family relic for more than a century. His nephew Vladimir Bogdanović, wishing for the message of that photograph to be visible to future generations, decided to donate to his native region a sculpture made based on that photograph by a sculptor Goran Čpajak.
A century after the photograph was taken, in front of the sculpture of their ancestors, a meeting between the Pejović and Poturak families also took place.
