Zadruga

Zadruga (Serbian) is a rural community composed of a large family of from 15 to 70 related adult Slavs and their children. The members ate, lived and worked in communal family style. The house father and house mother assigned the tasks and apportioned rights according to each individual relationship to the founder. The house father occupied the hamlet's best and largest house with the common kitchen, dining and living rooms. The other houses were primarily crude sleeping quarters. The main occupations were farming, grazing and tending orchards and vineyards. No property could be sold except by common consent. In ancient times, Zadrugas were fairly common in the rural and mountain areas of what was later Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and a few of them continued down to more recent years.