English title: Soldiers, Death, and Tombstone Markers: Private Memory of the Great War in Western Serbia The paper “Soldiers, Death, and Tombstone Markers: Private Memory of the Great War in Western Serbia” analyzes private forms of remembrance of the First World War in western Serbia, with particular attention to rural tombstones and roadside memorials as materialized forms of family, local, and national memory. Contrary to studies that focus mainly on public monuments, state commemorations, and official representative culture, the paper shows that private memorial practices in rural communities had long continuity and a strong influence on the consciousness of several generations. Tombstones and roadside memorials are interpreted as a verbal and visual system of signs linking family, local community, Orthodox Christianity, patriarchal ethics, the Serbian national idea, and the cult of sacrifice. Epitaphs were not merely brief records about the dead, but public messages addressed to the living: invitations to read, listen, remember, and morally evaluate the death of a soldier. In this sense, the cemetery, roadside memorial, and epitaph become mediators of memory and places where the relationship between the dead, the family, and the wider community was renewed. The paper shows that western Serbia had a long tradition of memorializing soldiers’ deaths, older than the wars of 1912–1918. The mass suffering of the Great War did not create an entirely new memory culture, but intensified and reshaped already existing patterns. In epitaphs, freedom, courage, homeland, faith, Serbian national belonging, and family honor appear as values that surpass individual life and give meaning to sacrifice. The study is especially important because it questions interpretations according to which Serbian peasants entered the wars without a developed national and state consciousness, while the cult of heroic death was supposedly constructed only afterward by state action. Epitaphs and funerary monuments from western Serbia reveal a more complex picture: the state and elites shaped official memory culture, but village communities independently created their own forms of patriotic, religious, and family remembrance. In this way, private memorial culture in western Serbia becomes an important source for understanding the relationship between war, death, nation, family, and religion in modern Serbian history. The paper shows that private memory was not a passive shadow of official representative culture, but an autonomous and powerful value system that complemented and supported state representations of the Great War, while sometimes interpreting them differently.