Does the pursuit of revenge and retribution ever truly satisfy us?

As I cool off on the pebbly beach of Montenegro and look at the mountain massifs rising above the sea, I think about the lives of people before our time, when everything we have today was created.

I think about the lives of the Montenegrin people, who created a country on the mountain peaks, inaccessible rocky soil, far from the plains where my ancestors grew up.
And then this topic, for this week's #weekend-engagement, which came to me like it was ordered:
Have you ever sought retribution against another person?

Less for the reason that, while I'm lying on a deck chair and enjoying the sounds of the sea waves, I have time to think and write, but for the reason that the concept of "revenge and retribution" in Montenegro has been a topic of conflict, discussion and suffering for centuries.

In Montenegro, harsh mountains and inaccessible remote areas were for centuries the terrain on which people organized themselves into brotherhoods (tribes) whose life functioned according to their own, unwritten rules, and one of the cruelest and most fascinating was blood revenge.

In times when there were no courts and no state, the loss of a male head in a tribe was not only a tragedy for one family, but a security and economic blow for the entire community (tribe).
Honor was the only currency.
If someone killed a member of your brotherhood, your "holy duty" was to repay the debt.
Blood for blood.
But what was the creepiest part of the act?
The debt did not have to be collected from the murderer himself. Any man from his fraternity could have died - often the best, most respected one, because it was considered that "blood pays better".
One insult, injury to property, honor or death would set in motion a spiral that lasted for decades, obliterating entire families.

​The only way out of that hell was "peace of blood" - a painstaking and long process of negotiations where the mediators (reputable and good people from the people) would hardly manage to negotiate a peace, which was finally sealed by the payment of large sums in gold to the injured party and the conclusion of unbreakable blood covenants.
Abolition of this custom was the most difficult but necessary measure in order to form the Montenegrin state.
The passing of the law on punishment for blood revenge, from the end of the 18th century, was the beginning of the abolition of the anarchy of tribal communities.
The laws passed by the Montenegrin dignitaries strictly punish those who commit murder to satisfy blood revenge. From the middle of the 19th century, rigorous laws, but also the formation of the Principality of Montenegro, as a single state, contributed to the fact that the law of blood feud was almost completely eradicated.

However, awareness of this custom and individual isolated cases (driven by a personal sense of injustice or dysfunctional institutions) would appear from time to time during the 20th century.
In modern criminal law, such motives are treated under the qualification of "reckless revenge murder" and carry the strictest prison sentences.

Today, blood feud is a distant past, but this topic made me think about modern man and the laws that ruled among the people who lived on these Montenegrin mountains in the past.
Even though we have laws and institutions today, that basic, primordial urge to collect debt still lurks in people and just waits for the moment when it will surface and show the worst that man carries in himself - the desire and need for revenge.

Today, we all no longer pull guns on other people, but we often sabotage careers, destroy reputations and wait for "our five minutes" to get back at someone in merciless corporate or private wars.

The only question is - does revenge ever set us free, or does it just lock us into a circle from which there is no way out?

And I, have I ever sought revenge or expected revenge for something done to anyone?
I certainly did, but I never thought of taking justice into my own hands and judging someone for what they had done. I trust in the work of the institutions and I ask God to protect me from situations in which I could be hurt or damaged, so that the desire for revenge awakens in me.
More than once, for something that was stolen from me, I thought: "Let it be his last", but I am 100% sure that I could never judge someone by myself.
I believe that under normal circumstances, I would seek compensation for the injustice or damage done in the same way as it was done to me, and I would certainly stick to civilized and modern ways of satisfaction.

Although Jesus in the New Testament preached the principles of forgiveness (if someone slaps you, and you turn the other cheek to him), to me somehow one of the oldest legal principles of human civilization "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is far fairer, and as a law, if I could choose, I would accept the reintroduction of the "Dušan Code".
So you see what you will do and to whom, because it will come back to you in the same way.