THE SUFFERING OF WOMEN IN THE SOUTH OF SERBIA DURING THE BULGARIAN OCCUPATION IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Abstract

The paper deals with the analysis of violence to which women were exposed in the south of Serbia during the Bulgarian occupation, in the First World War. Since at the beginning of the war, the Serbian women was presented in official Bulgarian documents as the “most dangerous element” in preserving and building national identity, they were  victims of the occupier’s hypertrophied violence. In addition to various forms of psychological and physical violence to which they were exposed, members of the female sex in the southern parts of Serbia suffered mass rapes, which, due to patriarchal morality, were not talked about much. Using archival data, international documents and direct testimonies of victims recorded by eyewitnesses of that time, the author summarizes the forms of violence that women were exposed in the south of Serbia, during the First World War.