The Serbs

The story begins centuries before the modern conflicts, with the wind-battered castles of medieval Serbian rulers and a defeat on the battlefield more than six hundred years ago whose echoes still shape how Serbs see themselves. Tim Judah traces the sense of collective identity that carried Serbs through the long period under Ottoman domination, then moves through the brief moments of national triumph during the First World War and the catastrophe the community endured during the Second.

Judah turns next to postwar Yugoslavia, where Tito built a fragile balance among its nationalities and that balance came apart after his death. He shows how Slobodan Milosevic, who would later become president, drew on a particular reading of the past to rouse Serbs toward nationalist fervor, and how he readied the country for armed conflict. Eyewitness testimony brings the war into focus: villages set alight, the forced displacement of populations, the humiliation of the siege of Sarajevo, and long convoys of Serb refugees who were exploited by their leaders and left behind when the goal of a larger Serbian state collapsed.

This is the first detailed look at everyday life behind Serbian lines during these years. Judah does not defend the Serbian leadership or its actions. Instead, he sets out how a modern European society came to be among the most despised of the period, and he makes its behavior understandable by placing it within the history and aspirations that shaped it.