Historical Collection

The Historical Collection is the most diverse and sizeable of all the collections of the SASA Archives with its 15,180 accession numbers. It contains materials from the Middle Ages to the present day, including medieval charters, either in their original form or as copies, documents, correspondence, protocols, manuscripts, copies of documents from foreign archives, memoirs, sheet music, photographic albums, etc., either as individual items or as parts of larger wholes, such as bodies of correspondence and bequests, some of which contain as many as 15,000 items. They are legacies of rulers (the Obrenović and Karađorđević dynasties and the family of Despot Đorđe Branković) and our prominent scholars, politicians and men of letters, such as J. Ristić, V. Karadžić, I. Andrić, A. Belić, M. Milanković, J. Cvijić, J. Mišković, S.S, Mokranjac, N. Pašić, A. Despić, B. Ćopić, V. Čubrilović, V. Novak, D. Medaković, D. Bogdanović, D. Kanazir, Ž. Pavlović, I. Ruvarac, I. Garašanin, J. Prodanović, J. Tomić, J. Šlezinger, K. Stanković, M. Ristić, M. Rakić, M. Ibrovac, P. Milosavljević, S. Cvijanović, S. Dimitrijević, S:M. Sarajlija, S. Kulenović, S. Stanojević, S. Knićanin, F. Kanitz, and many others.

The documents are written in Serbian (there are also those written in Church Slavonic), Latin, Russian, French, English, German, Italian, Hungarian, Turkish, Greek and other languages.

The Collection has a card catalogue arranged by name and subject, a card catalogue of Vuk Karadžić’s legacy, nine inventory books, and inventories and lists of all the legacies. Some of the bodies of correspondence, records, memories, memoirs, diaries, biographies, shorter works and other items in the Collection have been published.