Investigating the History of the History Teachers

National Libraries — An Invaluable Resource

In order to do this, I have made several visits to the National Libraries of Serbia and Kosovo. They possess a wealth of information about the two museums going back many years.

The National Library of Serbia is located in Belgrade, next to the Temple of Saint Sava, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world. You can hear the bells chiming from the library’s central reading room. The library contains almost all the books that have ever been published in Serbia, and before that in Yugoslavia. So it held a copy of almost every book that I needed.

To research the National Museum of Belgrade I first looked at old guidebooks. These were a treasure trove of information on the development of the exhibition. They books detailed how all the artefacts were arranged. They even contained floor plans, so I could understand exactly how the exhibitions looked compared to today.

The National Library of Kosovo is famous as one of the strangest (some would say ugliest, though I disagree) buildings in Pristina. Built in 1969, the architect aimed to synthesize Byzantine and Islamic architectural styles. Some people have speculated that the large skylights are a reference to the plis, a distinctive traditional Albanian hat.

It was more difficult to find information about the Kosovo Museum. It has a far shorter history than the National Museum of Serbia, having been founded in 1949. For most of its history, therefore, it functioned simply as a small, provincial Yugoslav museum. Though it did hold exhibitions for the public, it was primarily a research institution.

I could not find any guidebooks from the Kosovo Museum, nor have any books been written about its history. However, the museum did produce journals. Though these are mostly made up of academic articles, some of them do contain reports on the museum’s activities and reports and pictures of the public exhibitions that were held. There are copies of the journal in both the National Libraries of Kosovo and Serbia. The journals gave me a good overview of the public exhibitions that were held in the Kosovo Museum.

My Findings

The most striking finding about the National Museum of Serbia is the lack of change in the permanent exhibition. The artefacts have been arranged in the same categories in the same order since 1956, and even earlier the categories were very similar. This is despite the huge changes in museology that have occurred since 1950s. This simple fact is enough to suggest that the museum could benefit from a new approach to its displays.

After World War II, Serbia was part of the new Communist Yugoslavia. More efforts were made to incorporate some displays and temporary exhibitions from the other areas of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, relics from the First and Second Serbian rebellions against Ottoman rule were removed from the National Museum’s collections in order to establish a separate Museum of the First and Second Serbian Uprisings. The Communist authorities did this in order to ensure that these rebellions were firmly placed into a Marxist interpretation of history, rather than a Serbian nationalist one. This explains the anomaly that Serbia’s National Museum contains almost no historical items from the time of the founding of the modern Serbian state.

A large number of the Kosovo Museum’s artefacts from the classical, post-classical and medieval periods were displayed in an exhibition in Belgrade in 1999 and never returned. This has weighed heavily on the museum’s identity since then. This situation has led to the main exhibition being called a ‘base exhibition’ rather than a ‘permanent exhibition’. The idea is that the exhibition will be improved and expanded in the future, it is not finished. The museum’s Facebook page still states that the “Museum of Kosova haves a rich collection of prehistoric objects uncovered in Kosovo — most of them were spirited off to Belgrade, and hundreds of archaeological finds and ethnographic items yet have to be returned.” Given that this happened in 1999, it seems clear that this situation was a result of the conflict in Kosovo.

Conclusion

Looking at the history of different museums taught me how important it is to examine and critically think about whom is communicating history. Just as individual historians have their biases, so do institutions like museums. It can be instructive to look into the background of a museum to understand its collections, and the historical interpretation that it puts forward. This is especially important with museums because they are often state institutions that have been used to convey a specific message, as can be seen from, for example, Communist Yugoslavia’s influence on the Kosovo Museum and the National Museum of Serbia.

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