ABSTRACT
A great proportion of the world’s cultural heritage gradually disappears because of the effects of ‘natural’ causes: acidified paper, leather, film, and so on, deteriorate or disappear because of light, heat, humidity or dust. Unfortunately, disasters also threaten the more rapid deterioration of the material preserved in libraries. According to Derek Law (1999: 6) disasters are always unexpected, but can be divided into predictable and unpredictable ones. The predictable are mostly natural, and, occasionally, man-made, such as fire, flood and earthquake. The unpredictable disasters, much more difficult to deal with, come in the shape of violence: armed conflicts and wars seemed to be an unavoidable element of the twentieth century, and have already marked the beginning of the new millennium. And, however numerous or diverse reasons and causes for the destruction of cultural heritage may be, armed conflicts and wars seem to be the reason for the most massive destruction, ever since the Library of Alexandria, which was destroyed on several occasions: first in 47 BC, during the civil war between Julius Caesar and the followers of Pompey the Great, when Caesar was besieged in Alexandria, and then in three subsequent big fires. But we do not
have to go so far into the past to find examples of war-affected or ruined libraries. It is enough to think of the two World Wars from the past century, or the one waged on the territory of former Yugoslavia in its last decade.
