His father was Jevrem Gligorijević-Šantrić, Sultan Abdul Hamid's silversmith in Bešiktas who eventually left the district after the Young Turk Revolution and returned to his ancestral home in Peć to be closer to his cultural roots, the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, and people.
[2] Jevrem's brother Panteleimon Šantrić, a diplomat in the service of Imperial Russia at the time, was shot in the back of the head in 1911 by an Arnaut while walking in downtown Peć.
[3] From 1903 to the beginning of the First Balkan War in the Ottoman Empire, the position of Serbian and Russian envoys was extremely dangerous.
Jovan Šantrić completed six grades of the Greek and Serbian elementary school in Bešitktas.
[7] After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, he was a delegate to the First Serbian Conference, held the week of the 10 to 15 August 1908 in Skopje, at which the Serb Democratic League was founded in the Ottoman Empire.