The Serbian government returns to Belgrade

A British chronology of the war records under 9 December 1918 that the Serbian government re-established itself in Belgrade. The available accounts do not connect any particular act with that day. The government’s return was not a single event but took several weeks, and Serbia was then still using the Julian calendar, under which 9 December was 26 November. What is known is that in December the government and the ministries were already working in the capital, which they had left in July 1914 when they moved to Niš.

From the beginning of 1916 the seat of the government had been Corfu. After the breaking of the Salonica front and the recapture of Belgrade on 1 November, the ministers returned home by various routes. The American agent to the Serbian government, H. Percival Dodge, reported from Corfu on 12 November that the ministers were scattered between Paris, Corfu, Skopje and Belgrade. Regent Alexander reached the capital before them and took up residence in the house of the merchant Krsmanović on Terazije. The deputies of the Serbian parliament mostly returned by way of Dubrovnik.

The government returned in the middle of a crisis. The cabinet of Prime Minister Nikola Pašić resigned after the Geneva conference, and on 16 November (3 November in the Julian calendar) Pašić formed a new coalition government that included the opposition. The prime minister himself, however, remained abroad. In Belgrade the government was represented by Stojan Protić, one of the leaders of the ruling Radical Party, and several other ministers. It was they who on 28 November received the delegation of the National Council from Zagreb and prepared the ceremony at which the regent proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The government, which had returned to Belgrade as the government of Serbia, was in December already in fact exercising authority on behalf of the whole new state.

The city they returned to had been ruined by three years of Austro-Hungarian occupation. The royal palace was uninhabitable, and the parliament sat in a makeshift hall in the Hotel Paris, where it met in the second half of December for its last session. There was a shortage of food, medicines and transport, and people were being decimated by typhus and Spanish flu. The posts minister, Edo Lukinić, said a few months later that Serbia did not have even enough horses, carts and drivers to restore the most modest postal service, and that medicines from Zemun, on the other side of the Sava, could not reach Belgrade for a month. Even so, the capital of Serbia became the capital of the new kingdom, and on 20 December the regent appointed its first common government there.