Milka Grgurova

Milka Grgurova was born into a wealthy family of merchants in Sombor. When she was twelve, her parents sent her to an educational institute for girls, where she spent three years. Her father’s bankruptcy forced her to return home. Milka’s father considered that selling their estate in Sombor along with his entire business and his daughter’s hand in marriage to the rich merchant Matić from Sremski Karlovci was the only possible solution to his financial crisis. At sixteen, Milka got married and moved to Sremski Karlovci. Her stay in Sremski Karlovci was rather brief: after the birth of her daughter Evica, the child and Milka returned to her parents’ home in Sombor. On one occasion, an amateur theatre on tour performed in Sombor. Milka was offered a role in one of their plays, which she accepted. Having received her parents’ half-hearted permission and blessing, she left home to become an actress. She was only 23 years old when she became a member of the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad.

Milka left Novi Sad after giving guest performances with her company in Belgrade during the season of 1867/8. This move was facilitated by the fact that the National Theatre had been founded in Belgrade and was under the management of Jovan Đorđević. The larger part of the company moved to Belgrade, where they would give their biggest stage performances for the next 40 years. Milka Grgurova was called the “Serbian Sarah Bernard”. As an “unparalleled tragedy actress”, she managed to play more than 500 roles from the international and national repertoire. She remarried in 1882 to Colonel Konstantin Aleksić. During the period of their harmonious and happy marriage she began to write: encouraged by her husband, Grgurova wrote more than 50 short stories scattered across Serbian periodicals of that time. She published a collection of short stories in 1897. She was 63 when she retired in 1902, having spent 38 years on the stage of our two oldest and most prominent theatres in Serbia. She died of old age when she was 84, in a small room behind the theatre near Manjež park, alone, poor and almost forgotten.