Ksenija was a first female doctor in Serbia: She defended her doctorate in front of Milutin Milankovic (PHOTO)

If she was alive now, the first female doctor of Belgrade University Ksenija Atanasijevic, she would have turned 123 yesterday.

Recommended

Martina is Balkan sex bomb and a scientist: She works as engineer and a photo mode, she invented smart shoes, and her final destination is NASA (PHOTO)

Ksenija was born on 5th February 1894 in Belgrade.

With interruptions due to war events, she brilliantly, with straight A's graduated philosophy on Belgrade university in 1920 and so she became the first graduated philosopher in Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slavs. When she was 28 years old, Ksenija Atanasijevic defended her doctorate in a fantastic way, "Bruno's study about the smallest" in front of the full hall of curious students and five member jury, with our esteemed genius Milutin Milankovic. And so, Belgrade and Serbia got their first female doctor.

She first thought in Nis high school, and she became first female docent in 1923, university teacher in Kingdom of SCS. Ksenija spent 12 years teaching classic, medieval and modern philosophy and ethics on the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. She was more than favorite among students and colleagues. Young, original, filled with knowledge and good intentions towards other students, she became a role model to young girls from that age.

Foto: Wikimedia/Matija

She held numerous lectures and seminars outside class, about Socrates, Schopenhauer, Seneca... She was actively engaged in scientific work between her classes and lectures in the country and abroad. 

She published around 400 scientific works from philosophy, philology, ethics and aesthetics. Her works were translated to all important world languages, and Ksenija herself, as a great polyglot, translated especially from German and Greek language. She translated numerous works of Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Adler, Socrates...

Ulice starog Beograda u međuratnom periodu su bile jednako žive kao i danas. Foto: Wikimedia Commons/Jelica

During World War II she was arrested and tortured by Gestapo, because she wrote publicly against racial and nationalistic hatred. She refused to sign infamous "Appeal of Belgrade intellectuals", made by Gestapo and they forced intellectuals from Belgrade to sign it. After the war communist authorities arrested her and after she left prison all of her books were forbidden. American university called her to go and to hold lectures there, but she refused. Brave and with dignity, she continues to work anonymously and to prepare the third part of her life's work "Philosophical fragments".

(Telegraf.co.uk / Rastemo.rs)