Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Among the South Slavic peoples, the association of all consanguineals into a coöperative organization, the members of which generally live in a complex of houses built within an inclosure and around the house of the stare-shina or chief of the community.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A social unit of rural community among the South Slavs, associated with family links and set customs.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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And, although the family community, the "zadruga," was giving way to a more modern way of life -- much to the misgiving of those persons who believed that strength lay rather in the union of thirty or forty people, under the authority of the head of the house, than in a more dispersed society which would encourage individual initiative -- yet Serbia was still a semi-Turkish and a quite despotic country, with all the civil service largely filled by Serbs from Hungary and many of the higher offices in the possession of the relatives of the Princess, for Alexander's wife,
The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 Henry Baerlein 1917
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The zadruga kept rituals and customs that dated back to medieval times, such as covering all the mirrors in the house when someone died or working collectively on the annual harvest.
The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005
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The families in question, however, were unlikely to be the small nuclear clusters common in western societies today; rather, Mira suggested, they were probably much more similar to the extended zadruga that she herself had grown up in.
The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005
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Pripovetke I. – Beograd: Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1924
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He advises that there should be a compromise, that the ownership of land in Yugoslavia should not be strictly individualist nor strictly communist, but that while preserving the spirit of the _zadruga_ (ownership by the community) there should also be the mobility of individual ownership.
The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 Henry Baerlein 1917
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This is quite unlike the Russian "mir" or collective village, and not more like the South Slav "zadruga" which makes each family a community, the land belonging to all, as, according to M. Eugene Simon, it does in China.
Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) William Henry Hurlbert 1861
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_zadruga_, or house-community, a patriarchal institution apparently dating from prehistoric times.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" Various
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There she got to know the eighty or so members of her father’s zadruga, or extended family.
The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005
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"joint family," or the "undivided household," which we still see all over China, in India, in the South Slavonian zadruga, and occasionally find in Africa, in America, in Denmark, in North
Mutual Aid; a factor of evolution Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin 1881
qms commented on the word zadruga
The North slav will miss his sastruga,
The slav of the East his beluga.
For the sad southern slav
The homesickness salve
Is talk of his cherished zadruga.
April 30, 2016