Vasa Čubrilović

Vasa Čubrilović (1897–1990) was a historian, university professor and academic.

He graduated History at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, where he received his doctorate in 1929 on the topic of the Bosnian Uprising of 1875-1878. In the same year, Professor Vladimir Ćorović took him in as his assistant at the Seminar for General History of the New Century. After the liberation of Belgrade on October 20, 1944, he returned to the Faculty of Philosophy at the Department of National History. He focused mainly on Serbian and Yugoslav history of the 19th and 20th century.

He was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, as well as an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

When he retired at the Department of National History of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1967, his scientific and pedagogical activities were transferred to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She worked on various scientific projects. The most important one was the establishment of the Institute for Balkan Studies in 1969 as a special scientific unit in the Serbian Academy of Sciences. He was the first director of the Institute and stayed in that role for ten years. He imagined that the Institute would develop as a strictly scientific institution with the task of devoting itself to Balkan studies - history, material and spiritual culture of the Balkan peoples from ancient times to modern events in the development of relations between the Balkan peoples or their relations with the rest of Europe and the world. The fact that he bequeathed his library to the Institute, testifies to how much Professor Čubrilović was attached to the Institute for Balkan Studies.

Publications in the legate: 1273