page_title: Greece–Serbia relations
section_title: World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Greece–Serbia relations / History / World War I
caption_attribution_description: Serbian WWI soldiers mausoleum on Vido island
context_page_description: Greece and Serbia enjoy close diplomatic relations, which have traditionally been friendly due to cultural, religious and historical ties between the two nations.
  The majority of Serbs and Greeks practice the Eastern Orthodox faith and the two nations were historically bound by alliance treaties and co-belligerence in wars since the Middle Ages. In modern times, the revolutions against the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan Wars, the World Wars and Yugoslav wars, and the Greek opposition to the NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia, where Greece was the only NATO member to condemn the actions and openly expressed its disapproval, and Greece's subjequent refusal to recognize the Kosovo Unilateral Declaration of Independence, backing the Serbian stance on this issue as one of the five European Union's member states that have done so, also have contributed to these relations.
  Greece is a strong supporter of the EU membership candidacy for Serbia, and in 2003 it has proposed the "Agenda 2014" for boosting the Euro-Atlantic integration of all the Western Balkan states into the Union.
context_section_description: Despite its defensive alliance with Serbia, Greece remained neutral in the early part of the First World War, due to the dissension between Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who was pro-Entente and favoured entering the war, and King Constantine I of Greece, who was pro-German and favoured neutrality. The resulting National Schism was resolved only in 1917, when Constantine was forcibly deposed by the Entente Powers and Greece entered the war under Venizelos.
  Corfu served as a refuge for the Serbian army that retreated there by the Entente forces ships from the homeland occupied by the Austrians and Bulgarians. During their stay, a large portion of Serbian soldiers died from exhaustion, food shortage, and different diseases. Most of their remains were buried at sea near the island of Vido, a small island at the mouth of Corfu port, and a monument of thanks to the Greek Nation has been erected at Vido by the grateful Serbs; consequently, the waters around Vido island are known by the Serbian people as the Blue Graveyard (in Serbian, Плава Гробница), after a poem written by Milutin Bojić after World War I.
caption: Serbian Mausoleum at Vido island near Corfu.
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