10.03.2016

Exhibition "Valjevo 1914-1915 City-Hospital"

КЛИКНИТЕ ОВДЕ ЗА ВИРТУЕЛНУ ТУРУ КРОЗ ГАЛЕРИЈУ !

In the Atrium of the Central Military Club today the exhibition "Valjevo 1914-1915 City-Hospital" has been opened. It was organized by Odbrana Media Centre in cooperation with the National Museum of Valjevo. The exhibition, which is one in a series of events marking the centenary of the Great War, evokes the period in which Valjevo and its hospitals became a symbol of suffering, but also sacrifice, humanity and international cooperation.

Speaking about the exhibition, Director of Odbrana Media Centre Colonel Stevica S. Karapandzin pointed out that the house he manages had invested considerable effort to worthily mark the period since the beginning of the First World War through the news, exhibition and publishing industry.

- Apart from the great victories at Cer, Kolubara and Kajmakcalan, huge sacrifice of officers, non-commissioned officers and military personnel, by which this period is known, we are trying to point to some other segments that are no less important and which contributed that Serbia becomes one of the winner countries – Director of the Odbrana Media Centre said, noting that the artists were those who left a significant mark at that time, offering their art as a record for the generations to come.

Recalling the number of wounded and sick who passed through Valjevo during the Great War, Colonel Karapandzin said that the Valjevo Hospital has become synonym for the suffering that the Serbian people survived in those years.
According to the director of the Valjevo National Museum Vladimir Krivosej, PhD, the exhibition brings some new, previously unknown details about the Valjevo Hospital.

- The inflow of a large numbers of wounded and later the typhoid outbreak turned the whole town into a hospital. Two permanent hospitals, civilian and military, were expanded with six reserve ones which were accommodated in the barracks because the army was in front, than in the buildings of the High School and the Court. However, all these facilities were not sufficient to accommodate all the wounded and sick, so that all the major buildings in the city were converted into hospitals – the director of the Museum said, pointing out that so far 29 objects which were used as hospitals were recorded, but it is believed hat their number is greater. He pointed out that the exhibition, which testifies about the hell that the Serbian people went through in those years, visited so far Nis, Kragujevac, Zajecar, Arandjelovac and it is to move from the Central Military Club to Novi Sad.

The exhibition was opened by the Primarius Aleksandar Nedok, PhD, a regular member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the Serbian Medical Society, connoisseur of Serbian military medical corps, author and co-author of several editions of Odbrana Media Center on that topic.

Aleksandar Nedok reminded that the Austro-Hungarians, contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Convention, held 150 Serbian students of medicine and stopped an ordered contingent of medicines and medical equipment to be used for treating the army and the nation in Serbia by only 419 doctors and 203 medical students with modest medical supplies.

- Valjevo has become the Headquarters of the Supreme Command and the centre of all activities, including medical care. Thousands of wounded passed daily through a small town of only 10,000 inhabitants. As if that was not enough, doctors have had to deal with typhus - Nedok said, adding that the first medical help arrived from the Netherlands and Switzerland.

He pointed out that the Serbian people must retain the power of resistance, which they bear in their genes and which, unfortunately, they had to show so many times. Serbian army showed heroic strength and superhuman effort against Austro-Hungarians, including doctors, among whom a non-negligible number gave their lives in that struggle.

The exhibition was prepared to commemorate the great war sufferings during the 1914/15 epidemic typhus and is dedicated to all the victims and all those who helped to defeat the epidemic, regardless of which side they entered the war, because they were all found in Valjevo in the same lines and for the common cause – the fight against the fearsome monster. As a basic narrative thread to prepare the exhibition, diary notes and memoirs of foreigners who at that time resided in Valjevo were used. The exhibition consists of panels with photographs, posters, copies of archival materials and part of the exhibition which reconstructed the environment of the hospital at that time.

All those interested in the "Valjevo 1914-1915 City-Hhospital" whose authors are museum advisor Dragana Lazarevic Ilic and Vladimir Krivosejev, PhD, can see it untill 24 March 2016.