Several most famous religious building in center of Sarajevo have been illuminated yesterday night by a special lighting, marking one hundred years since the end of the First World War.
Namely, Gazi Husrev-bey’s Library and the Ashkenazi Synagogue in Sarajevo are the objects that were symbolically illuminated with the special yellow and blue lighting. In this way, Sarajevo joined other European cities that marked a hundred years since the end of the greatest conflict in the history of humanity – the First World War.
Similar marking of anniversary was done in 2014 on the occasion of a hundred years since the Sarajevo assassination, and this anniversary was followed by a series of art performances entitled “Century Peace after the Centuries of Wars”, involving journalists, artists, historians, and researchers.
World War I began in 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and lasted until 1918. During the conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers claimed victory, more than 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were dead.
World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties caused indirectly by the war numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.
The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.
World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to support men who went to war, and to replace those who never came back. The first global war also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.
World War I has also been referred to as “the first modern war.” Many of the technologies we now associate with military conflict—machine guns, tanks, aerial combat and radio communications—were introduced on a massive scale during World War I.
The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925, restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare, and remains in effect today.
