Three Images of Death – An Essay on the Perception of Death in Serbia, 1914–1916
Three Images of Death – An Essay on the Perception of Death in Serbia, 1914–1916

Summary/Abstract: The First World War, particularly the period of 1914-1916 is engraved in the collective memory of Serbian society as “Time of Death”. The aim of the article is to analyze the individual perceptions of death, the images and representations of death in the war, and how contemporaries related to death, dying and funeral customs in the above-mentioned period. The discussion is based on the works created by the painter Miodrag Petrović during the war, more precisely his sketch for the composition The Funeral, made in 1916. An important topic of this article is whether and how the specificity of the Serbian case, such as previous experience of war, punitive expeditions, hunger, epidemics, and exile influenced the perception and symbolic interpretation of death and dying in Serbian society, among both soldiers and civilians.

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