Eldar Gadžijev’s father Magomed was born in the province of Dagestan in Russia’s Caucasus mountains. During World War II, the elder Gadžijev was captured by the Germans and deported to Trieste. There he escaped and joined the Slovenian Partisan resistance. He founded a field hospital in the Brkini region and became a highly-respected military doctor. He met a Slovenian woman and in 1945, Eldar Magomedovič Gadijev was born.

After the war, the elder Gadžijev returned to Russia, and Eldar was brought up by his mother. As a young man, he was a capable track-and-field athlete and eventually grew up to become an extraordinary surgeon.

Gadžijev helped to pioneer liver surgery in Slovenia. He conducted many liver transplants at a time when the procedure was still rare, and over the years, he became a respected expert on the organ and its anatomical structure. He was a part of the team that introduced electrochemotherapy for liver metastases. Despite receiving offers from prestigious medical institutions in various countries, he chose to remain in his native Slovenia.

Throughout his career, he was eager to pass on his knowledge and skills to new generations of Slovenian doctors, many of whom went on to build stellar careers themselves. He wrote numerous articles in medical journals and co-authored an atlas of liver anatomy, which was published by the German-based Springer Verlag and is still used by surgeons around the world.

While based in Ljubljana for most of his career, Gadžijev also spent several years in Maribor. There, he helped to set up the School of Medicine at the University of Maribor and to transform the local hospital into a fully-fledged medical center.

For those in need, however, one of his biggest legacies was as an advocate for patient care, a field that is still frequently overlooked in Slovenia. In both articles and in his professional work, Gadžijev emphasized the importance of empathy and ethics in the medical profession.

Now retired, he spends his free time painting, drying herbs, writing articles about the state of modern healthcare, and traveling to the Russia’s Altai Mountains, whose people inspire him. His son Andrej Gadžijev is also a doctor, continuing the Gadžijev family tradition of first-borns going into medicine -- and helping those who need help the most.

Jaka Bartolj