In 1913, as the Ottoman Empire was losing its remaining territories in the Balkans, Serbia emerged from the Balkan Wars as a considerably enlarged state. Behind the language of liberation and national expansion, however, lay a harsher reality: military occupation, captivity, forced displacement, and the imposition of Serbian authority over populations that had not previously belonged to the Serbian kingdom. Among the people caught up in this transformation were Armenian soldiers of the Ottoman army.
The photograph above, taken in Belgrade in 1913, shows a group of Armenian prisoners at the Kalemegdan fortress. Serbian soldiers stand among them, while the prisoners sit or squat on the grass. Their presence in the Serbian capital is a striking reminder that the Balkan Wars were not simply conflicts between abstract states. They brought people from across the Ottoman world into the hands of the armies of the newly expanding Balkan kingdoms.
For the Armenians photographed here, the journey to Belgrade began far from Serbia. Many had been Ottoman soldiers recruited from towns and villages in Anatolia. During the First Balkan War, they fought on the Ottoman side against the Balkan armies. When captured, some were transported north to Serbia and held as prisoners of war. Contemporary Armenian publications recorded the names of Armenian prisoners being detained in Belgrade.
Their captivity coincided with a much larger process: the transformation of Ottoman territory into a Serbian national state.
Serbia’s expansion in 1913
The Serbian army had conquered Kosovo, parts of Macedonia and the Sandžak during the First Balkan War. What had previously been Ottoman provinces were now to be incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbia.
Serbian political rhetoric presented this as liberation. The territories were described as lands historically connected with Serbia and their conquest as the recovery of territories from Ottoman rule.
But for many of the people living there, the arrival of the Serbian army meant the replacement of one sovereign power with another.
The population of these territories was ethnically and religiously diverse. Albanians, Muslims, Turks, Slavs and others lived alongside Serbian communities. Serbian authorities now faced the task of transforming military conquest into permanent political control. This process could be violent.
Reports produced during and immediately after the Balkan Wars documented killings, expulsions, destruction of villages, confiscation of property and other abuses committed against civilian populations, particularly in Albanian-inhabited areas. The Carnegie Endowment’s investigation into the Balkan Wars later described extensive violence committed by the armies of the competing Balkan states.
The Serbian conquest was therefore not simply a change of borders. It was an attempt to establish a new political and demographic order.
A colonial logic without a colonial empire
Calling Serbia’s Balkan expansion “colonialism” requires some care. Serbia was not a colonial empire in the overseas sense of Britain or France. It did not possess distant colonies separated from the metropolitan state by oceans.
Yet the term colonial can illuminate aspects of what occurred in the newly conquered territories. A state based in Belgrade extended its army, administration, laws and political identity into territories populated largely by people who had not previously been Serbian subjects. Military conquest came first; administrative integration and demographic transformation followed.
The distinction between liberation and colonization therefore depended heavily on whose perspective one adopted. For Serbian nationalists, the expansion could be understood as liberation from Ottoman rule. For communities that found themselves subjected to Serbian military occupation, the same process could appear as the arrival of a new foreign authority. That tension is essential to understanding the Balkans in 1913.
The Armenians at Kalemegdan
The Armenian prisoners in this photograph occupied a different position from the populations of Serbia’s newly conquered territories. They were not, as far as the available evidence demonstrates, brought to Serbia as a colonial workforce. They were Ottoman soldiers captured during the war. Nor is there sufficient evidence to describe them literally as slaves. The appropriate historical term is prisoners of war. But their captivity was nevertheless part of the same machinery of military expansion.
The Serbian army captured Ottoman soldiers, transported them into Serbia and confined them in places such as Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress. At the same time, Serbian troops were establishing control over territories hundreds of kilometres to the south.
An Armenian from Anatolia could therefore find himself imprisoned in Belgrade while Serbia was simultaneously transforming former Ottoman lands into Serbian territory.
The photograph captures that extraordinary intersection of empire and nationalism. The men are Armenian. Their uniforms are Ottoman. Their captors are Serbian. Their prison is a medieval fortress in the heart of the new Serbian capital. In a single frame, several layers of the collapsing Ottoman order and the emerging Balkan national states come together.
The prisoners behind the language of liberation
The history of 1913 is often told through maps: Ottoman territory disappears, Serbia expands, and the Balkan states become larger. But maps conceal the human consequences of conquest.
Every territorial transfer produced prisoners, refugees, displaced civilians and communities suddenly living under a different state. The Armenians in Belgrade were among the thousands of individuals swept up in this process.
Their photograph is therefore more than a military curiosity. It is a document of the transition from Ottoman imperial rule to competing national projects.
It also demonstrates why the history of the Balkan Wars cannot be reduced to a simple story of national liberation. The liberation of one population could coincide with the subjugation of another. The creation of a national state could require the coercive transformation of a multiethnic territory.
In 1913, Serbia was expanding.
For Serbian nationalists, this expansion represented the realization of a national project. For many inhabitants of the conquered territories, it meant occupation, repression and uncertainty. And for Ottoman soldiers—including Armenians from Anatolia—it could mean capture, transportation and imprisonment in a foreign capital.
The Armenian prisoners of Kalemegdan thus offer an unusually intimate image of the age. They were not slaves in the strict legal sense. They were prisoners of a war that was simultaneously redrawing the map of the Balkans.
And behind the triumphant language of liberation stood the harder reality of conquest: armies crossed borders, populations were displaced, prisoners were transported, and one empire’s collapse became another state’s opportunity for territorial expansion.
