Mihailo Ristić

Mihailo Ristić was the son of Gavrilo Ristić, a Belgrade merchant, and Katarina Ćiprić from the family of Đorđe Ćipra, also a prominent Belgrade merchant.

In 1895 Mihailo Ristić married Pravda Jovanović, daughter Vladimir Jovanović, state councilor, minister and senator, and sister Slobodan Jovanović.

Mihailo and Pravda had a son, Andrija "Andra" Ristić, a lawyer who graduated from law school in Paris, Faculty of Law at the University of Belgrade, where he received his doctorate in jurisprudence in 1936.

In Belgrade Mihailo Ristić finished primary school, First Belgrade Gymnasium and the Faculty of Law. He graduated in 1886, and after that he spent a year studying at Paris at the Free School of Political Science.[3]

He spent his entire working life in the diplomatic service. He started his career working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Serbia in 1884.[4] As a secretary in 1892 he traveled to Turkish-controlled Kosovo, including Priština, and testified that the situation was so bad and that he feared that there would be no more Serbs there in ten years.[5] His paper on the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was published in 1893.[6] In a letter from Constantinople, Ristić expressed his doubts about the new administration being able to preserve Serbian heritage in Turkey:

"We are in places where we can to see a little further than others, with completely selfless eyes and we should be afraid of that ... It may be that I am taught to look at my own good for the good of the homeland, and what is happening there now is far from to bring her good. On the contrary, bad days are just coming to her, and a mentally ill person should already be obsessed with foreboding and for the very duration of it."[7]

Although the young king Aleksandar Obrenović carried out a coup d'etat in January 1894, which led to the fall of the Serbian government and changed the policy, Ristić remained in the city on the Bosphorus until the fall of 1895. In 1896 Ristić[8] became Consul at the Serbian Consulate in Skopje, and in 1898, he was appointed secretary of the embassy in Vienna.[9] From 1899 to 1903, he was appointed consul for the Serbian consulate in Bitola. "[10] He became the Serbian consul in Skopje again from 1904 to 1906.[11] He also served in a high diplomatic capacity in Bucharest from 1906 to 1914.,[12] although he was appointed ambassador to Rome in 1907[13] and remained there until 1914 "due to the war".[14]

Photo of the delegations to the peace conference with Ristić and Pašić seated in the middle at the signing

In 1913, Mihailo Ristić in the capacity as Serbian consul in Romania together with Nikola Pašić signed the Bucharest Peace agreement.[15] Mihailo Ristić left for Italy in the last days of December 1914. As Serbia's consul in Rome, he began negotiations with the Italian government in March 1915 on "Albania (Albania) and Serbia's access to the Adriatic Sea."[16] He was sent as Serbian Consul from Rome to Corfu, where a session of the Assembly opened at the end of August 1916.[17]

During 1920, he was a delegate of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the Danube Commission. Diplomat Mihailo Ristić retired in 1924, and died a year later in Belgrade.

Mihailo Ristić's main activity as a consul and diplomat was national propaganda and the awakening of national consciousness in Macedonia and Old Serbia.[18] He worked in the ministry in the propaganda department. In the consulates, he worked on issues of church and school autonomy. He helped carry out the Serbian Chetnik action in Macedonia. He was a consul, a member of the newly formed Chetnik "committee",[19] with several other prominent Serbs in Skopje. As the Serbian consul in Skopje in 1904, he coordinated with trusted people that they had to secure and secure the crossing of Jovan Babunski's company across the border and Vardar for Velesky Azot.[20] Mihailo Ristić was otherwise against the idea of Chetnik detachments coming from Serbia and arming themselves in Serbia.[21] He believed that they had to be recruited among Serbs from the Ottoman Empire, who knew their homeland.[22] He believed that it was best that foreign policy must be conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and not by patriotic associations.[23]

Under the pseudonym "P. Balkanski" he wrote "Through the cemetery, a travelogue of Old Serbia" (1894) and "Serbian people in the Skopje diocese, a discussion of church-school circumstances" (1899).[24]

• Биљана Вучетић (1 September 2012). Наша ствар у Османском царству: Our Issue in the Ottoman Empire. Istorijski institut. pp. 34–. ISBN 978-86-7743-095-5.
• Документи о спољној политици Краљевине Србије 1903-1914. Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti. 1998.