As a child Vladimir listened to the stories told by his father and grandfather about this larger-than-life man, called Vladislav, his great grandfather, who fought in the WWI as a soldier at the Salonica font*. With great attention he learned about the adventures and events that his great grandfather lived through as a part of the Danube Division, a division that crossed the Salonica front in their liberation efforts against occupations forces. Images of soldiers retreating on foot in the harsh winter conditions from Austria-Hungary to Serbia, Albania all the way to Greece, stayed carved in Vladimir’s mind until today. As an adult he started to contemplate more about these events, engaging with his father in conversation about historical events and the stories his great grandfather told. Still influenced by these images and stories, Vladimir wanted to learn more on how these events unfolded and he started to dig deeper.

The work will follow the story of the photographer's great-grandfather who was a soldier in the Danube Division, a division that crossed the Salonica front, in the end resulting in the liberation of Kingdom of Serbia. It will explore not only the historical landscape of the battlefields, but also the memories of a family and the power of oral history in creating a legacy. The series will document landscape relics of the battlegrounds, clandestine gravesites and memorials in Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Greece all the way to Tunisia. The project uses family’s oral history as a catalyst in tracing his great grandfather’s journey and will be assisted with archival materials and research.

The project becomes a multi-layered one, it unravels the personal and biographical, while exploring the historical background of these events from more than a hundred years ago. Landscapes often forgotten and disfigured by the passage of time, submerged in the oblivion of nature’s and human intervention but still standing defiantly, bear witness not only to the geography but also to the personal stories. The historical timeline will reveal the places where the Division fought and lost lives, while the personal stories influenced by those events will be conveyed through portraits of the photographer's family and other descendants of the soldiers in the Danube Division.

Relationship between the landscape, war and the human intervention is ever changing one. The war is a destruction force, it erases everything, the land and human lives. These battlefields and clandestine graves continue to live in the memory of those who survived and in the stories they tell. What was once destroyed, can be rebuilt again. What once was a bloody battlefield, today may seem as pictorial and peaceful landscape. Memory has the same ability, to erase, to honor and to transform. This work will try to examine the symbolic union of a memory, identity and human resilience.