The Mausoleum on Vido awaits bronze soldiers 3.5 metres tall: Should they wear the šajkača or a helmet?! Or is there a third solution...
The Serbs and Serbia owe a debt to the heroes of the First World War and to those who perished after the Albanian Golgotha. We owe them two bronze statues of Serbian soldiers in front of their final resting place, statues that speak more than a million words and give full meaning to this mausoleum. In this anniversary, the 110th year since the salvific disembarkation of the state leadership, the army and the people on Corfu, this is the ideal opportunity to create them and place them in front of the memorial ossuary on Vido.
And to decide which uniform they will wear – the one with the šajkača, in which the Serbian soldier won at Cer and Kolubara and crossed Albania, or the one with the Adrian helmet, which the French gave him on the Salonica Front. Or it may be that one soldier should be in one uniform and the other in the other uniform, though the competent institutions will of course decide that.
Kurir and the Journalists’ Association of Serbia (UNS), as far back as the hundredth anniversary of the Albanian Golgotha and the disembarkation on Corfu, launched, in cooperation with the competent Ministry of Labour, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs, a campaign to raise funds for the creation and installation of the bronze soldiers. Part of the funds has been collected and is still awaiting the institutions. It is time to complete everything.
Nikolai Krasnov’s mausoleum on the “island of death”, which contains the bones of almost 3,000 victims and stands above the Blue Tomb, where around 5,000 Serbs were laid to rest, all of whom died after the Albanian Golgotha, was Krasnov’s last completed work. To this day unfinished, the pedestals have been awaiting bronze soldiers 3.5 metres high ever since 1939.
As is shown by the original design from the Archives of Yugoslavia, Krasnov designed “figures of soldier-guards, of superhuman proportions”, as stated in the book Corfu and Vido – Monuments of Serbian History by the authors Olivera Kandić and Miladin Lukić, within the “context of the supra-historical feat of the Serbian army and people”. Krasnov designed the height and the posture at ease, but did not specify the uniform. Therefore, as stated in the same book, a competition was announced in 1939 for the “creation of conceptual plaster models”. The jury selected the work under the code name “Ćićan”, by the academic sculptor Grga Antunac, and the architectural department of the Ministry of Construction also gave a favourable opinion. But in 1940, owing to unfavourable historical and financial circumstances, the making of the statues was postponed.
That work cannot be found anywhere, not even in the author’s family archive. A new solution therefore needs to be determined. Several years ago, the Military Museum in Belgrade sent the signatory of this text photographs with a description of the uniform used by the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia in the First World War.
“In the first years of the Great War, the army wore a uniform that acquired its characteristic appearance in 1908 and was grey-olive in colour.
“It was the uniform in which the Serbian army successfully fought the wars of liberation from 1912 to 1918; thanks to its victorious symbolism, after the wars it also represented the main defining feature of the uniform of the Army of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/Yugoslavia,” they stated at the Military Museum, adding:
“Towards the end of the war, from 1916 on the Salonica Front, the soldiers were supplied mostly with the French ‘blue horizon’ uniform and the French M1915 helmet, of the Adrian type, on which the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Serbia was applied.
The army was also supplied with the French khaki uniform and British uniforms, but the ‘blue horizon’ uniform, through numerous artistic and other works of a memorial nature, became the symbol of the Serbian soldier on the Salonica Front.”
What are we waiting for?