History
Jovan Dragasevic, a history and geography professor at the Artillery School, is responsible for the creation of the General Staff’s special history department. This is how he explained his 1866 suggestion to establish the History department in the Military Ministry:
"Every nation that has glorious deeds is a glorious nation. However, beside all the glorious deeds, if those deeds remain unknown, the nation shall also remain unknown. Therefore it is necessary to collect and preserve all those glorious deeds in history, because history is the guardian of a nation’s life, and so future generations shall know, respect, accept and support it..."
The first regulation that established the military history research institution was the “General Staff Organization.”,The regulation was written ten years after Jovan Dragasevic’s suggestion on January 24 (according to the old calendar), i.e. February 5th (new calendar) 1876, on Duke Milan Obrenovic’s demand and at the suggestion of the Military Minister, and according to the Law on Military Organization. The third department of the General Staff was given the task of “collecting data about the history of war, writing them up, arranging them and preserving them”, as well as to “manage the library and entire General Staff archive”. This History department within the General Staff was the predecessor of the current Military Archive and since 1994 (according to the Chief of General Staff order), February 5 is the Day of the Military Archive
Jovan Dragasevic
Jovan Dragasevic was born on February 16, 1836, in Pozarevac and died in Nis on July 14, 1915. He was a Serbian Colonel and Honorary General. In 1860, he graduated from the Artillery School and, at the beginning of 1861, he became a professor in the same school (which later became the Military Academy). He was a part-time professor of comparative geography and ethnography at the Advanced School. During the bombing of Belgrade in 1862, he was in charge over the Pupils’ Legion. He is one of the first Serbian officers who was also a scientist, especially in the field of military geography. He was editor of the military journal Vojin (1864 – 1870) and founder and the first editor of the journal Warrior (1879 – 1888). During the Serbian-Turkish war (1876 – 1877), he served at the Supreme Headquarters and then as a chief of the main General Staff. After the war, as an expert on territorial issues, he was a part of the Serbian delegation to the Congress of Berlin, and during the Serbian-Bulgarian war in 1885, he was the assistant to the Supreme Chief Commander. He wrote patriotic lyrics and nationally romantic stories. He was a regular member of the Serbian Science Society.
Time and wars destroyed many of the valuable documents collected and processed by the History department while it lasted. Everything that happened during the Balkan wars and the First World War, as well as the peace treaty concluded after the war and other conventions, represent the best evidence of the cruel robbery Serbia and Montenegro suffered during the 1912 – 1918 wars and of the destruction of valuable historical documents of the Serbian people. In order to fill in the empty spaces in the existing archival material and to reconstruct unknown war situations, the Department organizes and collects memoirs, too. Organization and processing lasted until 1935. Then inventories with all the existing operational materials were made. The King’s regency regulation of March 6, 1940, transformed the History department into the Military History Institute. According to that regulation, the Institute was part of the General Staff and directly subordinate to it. History and War Experiment (Testing) Departments were established by the order of the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Army and the Partisans’ Supreme Commander on March 1, 1945, within the Yugoslav Army (YA) General Staff. Within the General Staff, there was also an Archival Department. In January 1946, the War Experiments Department was transformed into a separate unit, while the History Department was renamed the History Institute of the YA, and after April 1947, the Military Scientific and Publishing Institute. From Spring 1949 to Fall 2006, it was the Military History Institute, with the Military Archive as its part.
The Military Archive preserves 4 million valuable documents. It collects, preserves, organizes and scientifically processes archival materials and conducts all tasks set by the Law on Archives and other regulations that define archival activities in the Serbian Army. In its depots, there are 7,200 meters of archival materials.
Bombing during 1999 did not spare the military Archive. The unique and rich heritage was transported and protected on time and thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the staff, and the fact that these documents just barely fit into 35 twelve-meter-long trucks testifies to the scope and difficulty of the job done. However, some of the documents could not be saved and the microfilm and conservation laboratory suffered severe damage.