Exhibition Adventure in the Balkans – Images, Memories, Recollections at the SASA Gallery of Science and Technology

The exhibition titled Adventure in the Balkans – Images, Memories, Recollections, organized by the Archives of Vojvodina and the SASA Gallery of Science and Technology, was opened at the SASA Gallery of Science and Technology, on Thursday, 6 July 2023, at 6 p.m. Archives consultant Ljiljana Dožić, head of the Department for Documentation, Information and the Information System at the Archives of Vojvodina is the author of the exhibition.

While commemorating the anniversary of the end of the First World War, the Archives of  Vojvodina adopted a decision to publish the manuscript Adventure in the Balkans 1915 by Douglas Meriwether Dold and prepare a thematic exhibition of archival and various other materials collected while attempting to shed light on the events preceding the manuscript.

The thematic exhibition titled Adventure in the Balkans – Images, Memories, Recollections follows members of the Columbia University Expedition who, invited by their professor Mihajlo Pupin, set off in 1915 to war-swept Serbia on a humanitarian mission to help the Serbian people.

There were 24 American students who responded to Mihajlo Pupin’s invitation, mostly students of Columbia University, who departed for the Great War, not to fight, but to help, take care and heal.  Many of them decided to remain in the Balkans and continue their humanitarian work, even after the humanitarian Expedition stopped working. Douglas Meriwether Dold, a medicine graduate at Columbia University, was among them. After the retreat of the Serbian Army from Niiš, together with the bishop of Niš Dositej, he participated in the official surrender of the city to the Bulgarian army pleading for the safety of the unprotected population.

Douglas Dold recounted these events in his manuscript Adventure in the Balkans 1915, whose copy has been preserved at the Archives of Vojvodina as part of the Collection of Dr Nikola Koča Jončić ’s documents on Mihajlo Pupin while the original is housed in Butler Library in New York.

The Yugoslav state posthumously awarded Douglas Meriwether Dold with the Order of the Charity Cross for his medical services during the First World War.

The exhibition Adventure in the Balkans – Images, Memories, Recollections encompasses selected papers, newspaper articles and photographs which illustrate events from the initial invitation of Mihajlo Pupin addressed to volunteers at the end of April 1915, over the establishment of the Columbia relief expedition, its journey to Serbia, their humanitarian work, to Douglas Dold’s return to the USA in the second half of December 1915. There is a particular section dedicated to the members of the Expedition, and the exhibition includes posters used in the American campaign for Serbia’s relief in the First World War. The exhibition is primarily based on the materials of American provenance. Apart from documenting the Expedition’s work, it also expounds on how the American public perceived the events in the Serbia of that period.

The book Adventure on the Balkans by Douglas Meriwether Dold is available at Авантура на Балкану.