A military museum is an institution that collects, studies and presents various items for military use, such as weapons and uniforms.
The museum is located on Kalemegdan in the building of the Belgrade Fortress, which was built in 1924 for the purposes of the Military Geographical Institution.
After the independence of Serbia at the Congress of Berlin, the Museum was founded by the Decree of Prince Milan Obrenović on August 22, 1878. The first exhibition was opened on the occasion of the centenary of the First Serbian Uprising in 1904. In the official gazette No. 17 of May 25, 1904, an invitation was published to citizens to submit items of weapons, suits, and flags of their ancestors who participated in the liberation of Serbia.
In the museum, there were objects belonging to the Grand Dukes Stepa Stepanović, Božidar Terzić, Pavla Jurišić, Mihaila Vasić Miloš Živanović and others.
Among the donors were Prince Pavle Karađorđević, who presented 6 porters of Serbian rulers, his father Arsen’s saber, which Arsen received from the Russian Emperor Nikolai II Romanov, as well as the hunting dagger of Ludwig of Baden. The museum also houses the car in which King Aleksandar Karađorđević and French Foreign Minister Louis Barto were killed, as well as the weapon . Today, the museum houses the admiral uniform of King Alexander, as well as several of his decorations.
The museum also has an archive of 100,000 photographs and negatives that show pictures from the Serbian-Turkish wars, both Balkan wars, the First and Second World War. There are also weapons from the 90s, used in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, as well as during the NATO aggression in 1999.
The military museum is surrounded by heavy weapons (guns from the Middle Ages until the end of the 20th century, tanks from the Second World War, such as the Russian T-34, a torpedo launcher, a patrol boat, mountain artillery weapons.
Also in the treasury of the Military Museum is a post stamp with a portrait of Milan Obrenović as the museum founder.