He was the son of Milutin Tesla, an Orthodox presbyter, and Georgina Djuka Mandić, whose father was also an Orthodox clergyman. She had a talent for making homemade craft tools and mechanical devices and a knack for memorizing Serbian epic poems. Djuka never received a formal education. Nikola always claimed that he owed his eidetic memory (the ability to recall an image from memory with great precision for a short period after seeing it only once) and creative abilities to genetics at his mother's influence.
