Burying and Remembering. The Serbian War Casualties and the Yugoslav Kingdom (1914–1941)
Burying and Remembering. The Serbian War Casualties and the Yugoslav Kingdom (1914–1941)

Summary/Abstract: This article reviews some of the key points regarding the treatment of war dead belonging to the Army of the Serbian Kingdom and their subsequent symbolic and political importance during the interwar years, within the Yugoslav Kingdom. Consequently, the dead embodied the potent experience of Serbia’s Great War but they also symbolized the discords within the new South Slav state. This text starts by following the bottom-up practices of buying the dead during the very conflict. As the war ended, dealing with the bodily remains of dead Serbian soldiers and civilians became a remarkable logistical and financial challenge for the new state. This topic offers the possibility to gain access, in tune with the cultural history of warfare, into the world of bereaved families and to inspect the impact of the mass death on the postwar society. Nevertheless, the state continuously underlined the ideological importance of the dead. As the article concludes, issues such as determining the identity of the fallen or respecting the individual sacrifices of the fallen were understood by state officials as being of secondary importance.

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