This article discusses Senicide (killing your own parent) in Serbian society

Summary

The article discusses the historical Serbian custom known as “Lapot,” a form of senicide. According to the practice, when a parent (typically the father) reached the age of 60, a son or close family member would take him to a remote location and kill him, usually with an axe or club. A ritual element involved placing a piece of flatbread (pogača) on the elder’s head, symbolizing that he no longer deserved to eat bread.The custom is said to have existed until the late 19th century. The text references Serbian anthropological works and folklore that describe or analyze this tradition.

A morbid custom among the Serbs: when the parent (the father) turned 60, his son would take him and lead him to a designated place, usually near a cliff or stream, and kill him either with a hatchet or a “tokmak” (club) — as written by Dražen Gudić in 2017.

How strange that no one has ever told us about this anti-human atrocity of the Serbs — not even during the time of the Turks. Among their filthy customs was also this one: on the wedding night, the father would be the first to verify whether the bride of his son-in-law was untouched.

Starting even earlier than the Congress of Berlin, when this people had neither writing nor reading, they managed to displace us from our lands, grow at the expense of Dardanian territory, and reach where they are today. These so-called humans are still not satisfied and are now seeking to divide Kosovo in half.

From Garashanin, Jovan Cvijić, and others, they have written thousands of books, brochures, and pamphlets, printed in European languages and distributed across Europe. Europe, which did not know us well, believed their “books” and lectures in major centers of the continent, where they “documented” worse and worse things about us.

We were portrayed as a “savage people living only in the mountains,” and that we had seized “their” lands. We were “like bears in caves who didn’t even know where the graves of our ancestors were.” The first one who spoke with any weight about this was Father Gjergj Fishta at the Paris Peace Conference.

Turkey and Russia had engaged the smartest people to speak as badly as possible about us, to convince the West that we are a Turkish remnant brought by them — a people without tradition, without history or civilization, who do not deserve a state — simply a people missing only a tail.

In today’s literature, which the Serbs themselves do not hide, there exists their popular expression “zreo za sekirče” (“ripe for the hatchet”), a phrase that remains as a reminder of the times when Serbs reduced their family in the most inhuman and beastly way, called “lapot.”

According to this “mythical” senicide (senicide = killing of the elderly), when a man reached 60, he became superfluous and a burden to the family. It fell to the son or another family member (if he had no sons) to take him to the forest and ritually kill him by striking him on the head with something heavy or with an axe. The “elimination ritual” required that the “old man” hold a pogača (flatbread) on his head.

The pogača on the head symbolized that he no longer deserved to eat bread and therefore did not deserve to live, as he was a great burden. This filthy custom was practiced until the end of the 19th century, after which it was banned by law.

Anthropologist Bojan Jovanović, author of the book “Tajna lapota” (“The Secret of Lapot”), explains that this was a custom with psychological connotations and a social function. Some anthropologists argue that lapot was not actually a practiced custom or ritual, but a myth whose transmission aimed to prohibit patricide in order to prevent chaos and enable civilized resolution of generational conflict and cultural survival.

He tries to show how in one case the mother and grandson hid the grandfather, and then this “backward” custom was banned by law at the end of the 19th century.

Much earlier, before 1918, Tihomir Đorđević accurately described in his book the reason and method of killing the 60-year-old “elder.”

Also in the 1929 book “Narodna predanja o ubijanju starih ljudi” by the great Serbian scholar Vojislav Radovanović, lapot is described as a public ritual act.

A blood-curdling story titled “This is how I killed my father respecting the old Serbian custom” was written a few years ago by Mihailo Medenica. (His description is horrifying, so I did not translate it directly.)

“Lapot is an ancient Serbian ritual of publicly killing the old and infirm — a precursor to slasher films, but with real victims.

When grandma turns 80, there’s no more use for her — she just sits and eats cheese, can’t do anything, has gone senile, irritates the household. Then the family agrees to massacre her and one day tells her: “Grandma, we’re going to town!” In town, the highlanders gather with picks, axes, cleavers, stakes, and clubs.

The family members each bring a knife, small axe, awl, knitting needle — whoever has a rifle brings it. They seat grandma on a chair, kiss her Serbian-style three times, and then beat, kick, stab, hack off limbs with the axe, perform liposuction, skin her — blood spurts everywhere — until they turn grandma into pulp. Then everyone goes home happy and satisfied, especially grandma’s family.”

(Photos are from the film Lapot by Bata Paskaljević.)

Fahri Xharra, 25.05.2020

References (links provided in the original article) include Serbian media reports and academic sources on the topic.

Xharra, Fahri. “Zakoni i tmerrshëm i eliminimit të prindit tek serbët / Kur prindi i mbushte 60 vjet, i biri e merrte me vete dhe….” InforCulture, December 27, 2022.