Serbian soldiers in WW2, age 26. Due to hard life he looks much older than he really was

16 comments
  1. Appologies, I mistyped the title. This is World War **One**. The soldiers on the photo are located on the Salonika front in Greece, which was a front opened against Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria who at the time were occupying North Macedonia.

    The average Serbian soldier was of peasant background, he was extremely proud of his origin and he frequently mentioned it. He was the son of a peasant and didn’t try to look like anything else.

    In the house where he lived, his return was waited by his parents, hsi wife and two or three children. He lived in a house with three generations and he built most of the stuff he needed for living.

    He had a basic or more often no education.

    The Serb soldier was superstitious and a traditionalist.

    Especially superstition was a strong driver for him, deeply rooted in his everyday life. He doesn’t take valuable items off the bodies of dead enemy soldiers. He wears a medal given to him by his mother or a piece of wood out of which he made a small cross. He believes in dreams and tries to make sense of them. He celebrates religious holidays even when retrieving and even in the trenches.

    He avoids women during war, believing they bring bad luck and that those who die on the frontline are those who “have money and made with women before battle”.

    He was probably the only European on the Salonika front who – despite all the pain he experienced during surgery – he refused anesthesia, believing it would shorten his lifetime by a couple years.

    The Serb soldier is religious and believes and divine justine; he believes that punishment will come to those doing crimes in occupied Serbia, as well as the Jewish traders in Thessaloniki who make profit on war’s misfortune.

    He lived through three mobilizations, he’s fighting endlessly since 1912.

  2. Tezhaci, means “heavies” rough translation, its a word used for villagers as their life was “heavy” or hard. Even if there was no war, these people worked over 12h per day.

  3. Dude, joining the army form these guys must have been relief from hard life, unless you get killed of coirse, then your troubles and burdens are obviosly over.

    This poses obviosu question, how many ofg these kind of dudes were joining just to get away or for plunder of war.

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