In March 1913, captured Albanian fighters were forced to march through the streets of Belgrade under armed Serbian guard while civilians watched. This was not simply a practical movement of prisoners. It was a public display of “victory”. The defeated men were brought into the capital and made into a spectacle. The message was simple: Serbia had conquered them, controlled them and had the power to display them before its own population. The photograph was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 14 March 1913, alongside reports of Serbian killings of Albanians and criticism of the treatment of the Albanian population.
What makes this particularly disturbing is the wider policy behind it. Serbia had entered the First Balkan War claiming to fight for liberation from Ottoman rule. But once Ottoman power collapsed, Serbia did not simply liberate Serbs.
It conquered large areas inhabited mainly by Albanians and other non-Serbs and brought them under Serbian rule. Kosovo, in particular, had a clear Albanian majority when Serbia took control of it. The population had not asked to become part of Serbia, and Albanian resistance was met with military force. Contemporary and later investigations recorded killings, destruction of villages, expulsions and other forms of repression.
This is where the word colonial becomes useful. Serbia did not have overseas colonies like Britain or France, but colonialism was not only an overseas phenomenon. It also meant taking territory inhabited by another population, imposing your own state over it, treating that population as subordinate and then trying to reshape the territory according to the interests of the conquering state.
In fact, Serbian historian Čedomir Antić has explicitly described Serbian rule in northern Albania in 1912–13 as a case of “Balkan colonialism,” pointing out that Serbia occupied territory that was not populated by Serbs because it was strategically and economically important to the Serbian state.
The same pattern continued after the initial conquest. Serbian authorities were given new opportunities to impose administrative, military, economic and property policies on the Albanian population. Recent research on the Gjilan district in 1913–14 describes these policies as involving demographic reconfiguration and pressure on the non-Serb population.
This was therefore not simply a matter of winning a war and drawing a new border. The Serbian state was taking possession of a territory and then deciding what its population should look like and how that population should live.
The prisoner parade fits directly into this picture. The men in the photograph are no longer shown as individuals. They have become a mass of defeated bodies. They have no weapons, no visible political identity and no control over where they are going. Serbian soldiers surround them with rifles and bayonets while ordinary people watch from the sides of the street. The prisoners themselves have become the message.
That is dehumanizing. A prisoner has to be guarded and transported, but there was nothing inevitable about turning the movement of prisoners into a public show in the centre of the capital. The choice to display them mattered. It told the spectators that these people had been reduced from armed opponents to powerless captives. Their defeat was being performed in front of the Serbian public.
And the policy was not limited to Albanians. During the Second Balkan War in 1913, Serbia also publicly displayed Bulgarian prisoners in Belgrade after fighting Bulgaria. This is important because Bulgarians were fellow South Slavs and Serbia and Bulgaria had only recently been allies against the Ottoman Empire. Yet once they became enemies, Bulgarian soldiers could also be turned into a public demonstration of Serbian victory.
That tells us something important about Serbian nationalism at the time. The system was not based simply on a modern idea of biological race. It was based on a hierarchy of peoples and political power. Albanians could be treated as an inferior population whose territory was to be conquered and reorganized.
Bulgarians, despite being fellow Slavs, could become the defeated enemy whose humiliation demonstrated Serbian power. What mattered was who controlled the territory and who had the military power to impose that control.
There is also something deeply colonial about the language used to justify this expansion. Serbia could describe its own territorial expansion as liberation while treating the people who already lived there as a problem to be controlled. The conquered population was not treated as an equal political community with its own national aspirations. It was treated as something Serbia had acquired.
That contradiction is especially striking in 1913. This was not the medieval world. It was an age of newspapers, international diplomacy, international law and growing criticism of imperial conquest. The Hague regulations of 1907 had already established basic obligations toward prisoners of war.
The later Geneva Convention of 1929 would go further and explicitly prohibit exposing prisoners to public curiosity. The exact 1929 rule cannot simply be applied retrospectively to a 1913 photograph, but the contrast is still important: European ideas about the treatment of prisoners were moving in one direction while this spectacle belonged to an older culture of displaying defeated people.
The wider treatment of Albanians was even more serious than the parade itself. The 1914 Carnegie investigation collected testimony describing Serbian and Montenegrin forces burning villages, killing civilians and using violence with the stated effect of changing the ethnic character of Albanian-inhabited areas.
Contemporary European reporting also described killings and the destruction of Albanian communities. Whatever disagreements exist over individual casualty figures, the basic fact of widespread violence against Albanian civilians during the Balkan Wars is not dependent on this one photograph.
The prisoner parade therefore should not be viewed as an isolated curiosity. It belongs to the same political world as the occupation, military rule, repression and demographic policies imposed after the conquest. The photograph simply makes the power relationship visible.
Serbia was building a national state through territorial expansion, and it used the language of liberation to justify that expansion. But liberation for Serbia could mean subjugation for Albanians. The result was an imperial project in the Balkans: territory was seized, populations were brought under foreign rule, resistance was crushed and the conquered were expected to accept the political order imposed upon them.
The fact that some of the victims were Albanians makes the racial and cultural dimension particularly obvious, especially given the period’s European stereotypes about Muslims, Albanians and “barbaric” peoples. But the Bulgarian prisoners show that the underlying principle went beyond ethnicity. Even fellow Slavs could be humiliated when they stood on the wrong side of Serbian power.
The photograph is therefore more than a picture of prisoners. It is a picture of power being demonstrated over human beings. In the middle of a modern European capital, Serbia turned defeated soldiers into a public spectacle. The trams, the grand buildings, the crowds and the soldiers all belong to the modern world. The treatment of the prisoners belongs to something much older: the idea that the conquered can be displayed as proof of the conqueror’s strength.
In 1913, that idea had no place in a genuinely liberal understanding of national freedom. A state cannot seriously claim to be liberating peoples from imperial rule while simultaneously conquering other peoples, denying their political wishes and treating them as subjects to be controlled. The prisoner parade exposes that contradiction in its simplest form:
Serbian power was presented as liberation when Serbia was the beneficiary, and as authority when others were the ones being conquered.
