A BAR TO MARRIAGE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19698, 26 July 1927, Page 10

A BAR TO MARRIAGE.

"SPIRITUAL AFFINITY" CASE

DISTRESSING SERBIAN CRIME

A distressing crime, which throws considerable light on Serbian social ideas, has occurred at Belgrade. A young workman of 20. named Georgevitch, was seen walking in the evening, happily enough, with a 16-year-old girl to whom his father had been a god-parent; and a few minutes later rushed to the nearest police station to say he had killed her. She was found lying in the road with a knife sticking out from her breast. It transpired, from the youth's story, that the young couple had for some time been desperately in love. Their respective parents, seeing them constantly together, did not at first suspect that it was more than a friendship of "koums," or godrelations; but when they at last realised the truth they were filled with indignation and horror, as all those who are bound by this spiritual tie are in Serbia regarded in the same light as blood-relations. In the eyes of orthodox Serbians, marriage between the young man 1 and the girl would have been equivalent to incest. It was the despair which took possession of young Georgevitch when he realised that not only the Church, but all his own relations and the girl's and the opinion of society were against him, that drove him to take the desperate step for which he will now probably pay with a term of several years' imprisonment.