Adrovac
Vronsky's inspiration died here—Colonel Raevsky's 1876 heart burial under lindens led to a Russian-style church now renovating in a 134-person village.
Adrovac exists because Count Vronsky died here—or rather, the man who inspired him. In August 1876, Russian Colonel Nikolai Raevsky—grandson of a Napoleonic war hero, model for the tragic lover in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina—volunteered for the Serbian army and fell defending this village from Ottoman forces. His heart was buried under the linden trees; his body returned to Russia. Twenty years later, his sister Anna Raevsky funded a Russian-style church among those same lindens: the Holy Trinity Church, consecrated in 1903, now a symbol of Serbo-Russian cultural ties.
The village of 134 people (2002 census) sits in the Aleksinac municipality, near where the Serbian-Turkish border ran in the 1870s. This was the front line of a forgotten war: Russian volunteers fighting alongside Serbs, European great powers refusing to intervene, young aristocrats dying for causes their homelands wouldn't officially support. The church renovation began in June 2025, reviving the monument to a conflict that shaped both Russian literature and Balkan politics.
By 2026, Adrovac remains what it has been for a century: a village too small to sustain itself, but too historically significant to forget. The lindens still shade the church where Saints Sava and Sergius of Radonezh flank the Holy Trinity—Serbian and Russian holy men united on a wall where a literary icon's inspiration lies buried beneath.