Yugoslavia and Today’s Serbia
During World War I, Serbia is ruled by Peter I of the Petrović dynasty, who builds the Topola Church as the family mausoleum and is buried there. The Serbs are in direct conflict with Austria over the issue of Bosnia. In the early 20th century, the Austrians annexed the former Ottoman province of Bosnia, where large Serbian minority lived. Tensions lead to the assassination of the visiting Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo, which triggered the beginning of World War I. Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia on Austria, with Germany joining Austria and England and France joining Russia.
During this war, the Serbs repelled three Austrian attacks on their territory, astonishing the world with the struggle of the few against the many. Austria was an empire of fifty million people, while Serbia was a small, new country of three million people. Finally, when the Germans joined the fray, the country capitulated, but the spirit of the people did not break. The Serbian army retreated through the snowy mountains in a heroic march to Macedonia and Albania, and from there, together with Allied forces, especially the French, they advanced north and drove the Austrians out of their country.
During this war, Serbia suffered terrible casualties; almost a third of its population was annihilated. According to official estimates, 60% of men of military age (18 to 60) died in the war, a sacrifice that the Serbian people cherish to this day.
The Dream and Its Breakdown – Yugoslavia
After World War I, the northern Balkan Slavic peoples of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia were liberated from foreign Austro-Hungarian rule. The conditions were ripe for the unification of all the southern Slavs, and this was done under Serbian leadership from the center in Belgrade. King Alexander proclaimed the establishment of the Yugoslav Kingdom in 1918, but relations between the Croats and Serbs wer strained, and Serbian hegemony was not welcomed.
Thus, Yugoslavia entered World War II as a weakened state and was indeed occupied within a short time by the Germans, who divided it into several states. A Muslim entity was established in Bosnia, a fascist party ruled Croatia, and a puppet government was set up in Belgrade. However, the Serbs, as a people who have suffered and known war, fought back fiercely. They moved into the forests and established two underground armies—one of the royalists (Chetniks) and the other of the communists led by Tito.
At the end of the war, Tito and his followers had the upper hand. They had an army of half a million men and managed to liberate their country without outside help and take control of it, thus beginning the golden age of the second Yugoslav state.
Communism in Yugoslavia was a soft and independent form of communism. People were allowed to own property and travel abroad; tourists could visit the country and enjoy its wonderful beaches and sites. Tito positioned himself as the leader of the Third World, an independent entity not subject to the influence of any of the blocs. Yugoslavia had the fourth-largest gross domestic product in Europe, ahead of Austria. The country produced cars and airplanes, had the third-largest army in the world—about a million people—as well as a large territory and a population of 23 million.
Tito divided the country into six independent states with their own parliaments: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia, and one autonomous province—Kosovo. He granted autonomy to minorities (the Albanians) and ruled wisely. After his death in the 1980s, disintegration began. The universal-communist ideology was replaced by Serbian nationalism, led by Milošević. His dream was to establish a Greater Serbia, incorporating Macedonia, Montenegro, and parts of Croatia and Bosnia into it, instead of the Yugoslav state, and, of course, this included the annexation of Kosovo with its Albanian population.
The breakup of Yugoslavia gave him the opportunity to implement his vision, and this led to a series of wars lasting more than a decade, at the end of which Serbia was defeated on all fronts because of international intervention—not before crimes against humanity were committed, including genocide. Atrocities were committed by all sides, but especially in an organized manner by some Serbian nationalist extreme groups.
Those who committed atrocities were an extreme minority—criminals under the guise of nationalism, people outside the norm—but the background that legitimized these acts has much deeper roots. Although it is difficult to understand and accept, delving into the mentality of the Serbian struggle for independence, as expressed by the great poets, reveals a blind spot in Serbian history, as will be shown in the chapter on Mirko Petrović-Njegoš.
Serbia Today
Serbia is home to about seven million people, two and a half million of whom live in the Belgrade area, which is the beating heart of the entire nation and the second largest city along the Danube (after Vienna). Today, it is a parliamentary democracy that oscillates between the West—the European Union—and the East—Putin’s Russia. The Serbs have not, and probably never will, come to terms with the fact that they lost Kosovo, and at the same time, they are rebuilding their country with their inexhaustible energy and are becoming a modern and reformed state, proud of itself and looking to the future.
In the past, visitors to Yugoslavia concentrated on the beautiful coastal regions of Montenegro and Croatia, but it turns out that Serbia itself has a lot to offer, from the Iron Gate Canyon in the east to the Valley of the Kings and the mountains in the west. Serbia is a forested, green, and beautiful country, combining fertile plains and mountainous regions in the east and west, and most importantly, it is home to warm and welcoming people.
