Vuk Nedeljkovic
The University of Belgrade
Supervising professor: Ass. prof. Dr. Nenad Makuljevic

The Monuments to the Serbian-Turkish Wars (1876–1878 ) in the Kingdom of Serbia

The monuments dedicated to the events of Serbian-Ottoman Wars (1876–1877 and 1877–1878) will be analyzed in this paper. Russian volunteers were involved in the both wars on Serbian side. The second war was a part of Russian-Ottoman War (1877–1878) and it was ended with Serbian victory and cession of Nish and surrounding lands to the Principality of Serbia by Turkey. Some of these public monuments were raised by Russians, and they also became a new medium for constructing memory and ideology in Serbian state. The paper will discuss formal types of these monuments, context of their raising and function in the Serbian state until World War I.
We can trace several types of monuments: memorial churches (Gornji Adrovac near Aleksinac and Churline near Nish), memorial graves (of captain Milutin Karanovic in Pirot and of a Russian colonel Nikolay Nikolayevich Rajevsky in Gornji Adrovac) and cemeteries (Javor near Ivanjica), monuments in the cities and in the country (obelisks in Aleksinac, Javor and Chukljevich; pyramidal monuments in Bela Palanka, Kurshumlia and Pirot; and scuplture of Unknown Hero in Vranje).
Special public memorial ceremonies were also established as a part of memorial culture. The moral achievements during the Serbian-Turkish Wars (1876–1878) were used as a basis for constructing Obrenovich dynastical and national-state ideology, therefore after these wars Principality of Serbia became a Kingdom in 1882, and Prince Milan Obrenovich was proclaimed the first Serbian king of the modern era.