Article by Col Mehmeti & Riad Limani. Translated by Petrit Latifi

In the 1920s, the Serbian radical and terrorist Punisha Raçić claimed he was a descendant of the “holy king” of Deçan and for these lies, he was given no less then 3,500 hectares of land and forests around the Deçan monastery. Albanian territories were also taken by Serbs in the 1920s.

Serbian Chetnik and terrorist, Punisha Račić (1886-1944), who in the early 1920s appropriated 3,500 hectares of land and forests in Dečani, including church property

Even today, the publications of the Deçan Monastery do not mention the affair of the Serbian terrorist turned Radical Party MP, Punisha Raçić. In the early 1920s, he was making a name for himself as a scoundrel, claiming through false genealogies that he was a descendant of the “holy king” of Deçan, and at other times as a descendant of the imaginary Stevo Vasojević who was killed in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This gave him the right to claim no less than 3,500 hectares of land and forests around the Deçan Monastery. With his closeness to Nikola Pašić, Raçić had laid claim to the Deçan forests, appropriating them through dubious contracts and even setting up sawmills there.

In the summer of 1924, according to the newspaper “Novosti”, a delegation had asked Pashiqi to arrest Raçiqi for cutting down forests in Deçan. According to the press of the time, Pashiqi had threatened that if there were protests against Raçiqi, the army would be sent in. In the Court of Peja, the dispute was won by the Serbian nationalist deputy, who continued with his business activities in cutting down timber from the forests in Deçan around the monastery.

Expropriation of the properties of 50 Albanian families of Isniq

To make the picture even wider, in the period between the two world wars, the Deçan monastery continuously expanded its properties. Thus, on August 27, 1927, the High Agrarian Directorate in Skopje gave the monastery the properties of 50 Albanian families of Isniq, which were expropriated without the right of appeal. By the capitulation of Yugoslavia in 1941, the monastery had become a shareholder of over 600 hectares of land (see Marlengen Verli, Albania and Kosovo: the history of an aspiration, 2007, p. 288).

Reference

https://www.koha.net/shtojca-kulture/manastiri-i-decanit-dhe-nje-histori-ngaterresash-me-token