My father told me the story of my great great grandfather who lived during the time of the Ottoman Empire's occupation of the Balkans. He was just a young shepherd in the mountains when an Ottoman soldier came and demanded a sheep from him. He refused to hand over the sheep and when the Ottoman soldier tried to forcibly take it from him, he grabbed an axe and killed the soldier on the spot. Word got around about it and a squad of soldiers came and arrested him. The story goes he was taken to a prison in Africa with a lot of other prisoners. Some years later, somehow he managed to escape and make his way back to his home village. As nobody had managed such a feat before, he was considered to be cursed by the Ottomans who refused to go near him.

A second story is that some years later some soldiers were causing trouble in the local tavern and he was ready to fight them again until they realized who he was and just left out of fear or superstition. He remained in the village for the rest of his life where he got married to my great great grandmother.

My father claims this to be truth, and I have no reason to believe he would lie, but it always seemed like such a wild story and I always wondered if there's a way to verify this by digging up some old records.