Remembering Serbia’s Balkan Wars in Pictures and Words

During and immediately after the Balkan Wars, different types of visual narratives emerged in Serbia to depict the war - the illustrated periodical, represented by Balkanski rat [The Balkan War], the photographic exhibitions, postcards, and photographic collage appendices of alleged atrocities committed by the belligerents of the Balkan Wars. The first three forms were created for a domestic audience and dissemination among Serbia’s military and civic elites and the latter form for foreign governments and their publics. From these visual materials emerged an official narrative depicting Serbia as fighting for the liberation of Serbs living in Ottoman territory (even if peoples of Ottoman Macedonia did not identify as Serbs) in the First Balkan War and, in the Second, as resisting the territorial ambitions of Bulgaria.