At the tail end of our OCS’s time together in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the group I was travelling with for our six-day long ‘midterm’ break returned to Mostar for a six hour stop-over on our way from the country’s capital Sarajevo to our break-destination of Budva, Montenegro.
Having just stayed a few nights in Mostar three days prior, I was excited to have the opportunity to continue to explore and experience the touristy paradise that is Mostar’s old-town. However, in between leaving Mostar and returning, I had learned about a relatively unknown cemetery in the city, dedicated to the communist partisans who’d died fighting to liberate Yugoslavia from fascism during the Second World War. In Sarajevo, I heard tantalizing snippets about the Partisan Memorial from Mihaela. I also learned about one of our speaker’s, Bojan Stojčić, art pieces entitled History to the Stone, Future to the Wind, in which he contrasted the constant shifting of life through air with the often solid, unchanging spaces of old monuments and buildings (among other interpretations).
My curiosity was piqued, and instead of opting for another circuit around old town stores and cafés, I went on a trek to visit this strange, neglected, Yugoslav-era monument. The history of it goes as follows:
Commissioned in 1960 as a cemetery for around 800 Mostar partisans who had died fighting fascism, the monument was opened in a ceremony attended by Tito in 1965. The architectural style was meant to evoke ideas of a bright, new future under Communist Yugoslavia. The soldiers buried there were divided proportionally by the ethnic composition of the city of Mostar at the time, with Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats buried alongside each other, united in death. In the 1990’s during the war in Bosnia, the memorial was damaged by shelling and dynamite. It was restored by the original architect in 2005 and listed as a national site of Bosnia. However, the site soon after fell into disuse and ;lacked proper maintenance.
When we arrived after traversing the more lived-in areas of Mostar, the neglect was obvious. The entrance to the memorial was unmarked and hard to find, there were massive potholes on the road leading up to the main entrance, and the vegetation was over grown and unmaintained. This tracked with what I had understood about the legacy of communist Yugoslavia: it’s ignored, seen as a controversial, idealistic time that can’t be returned to.
What I didn’t expect was the vandalism and destruction we saw. Soon after arriving, it was impossible not to notice the huge Swastikas and Croatian fascist Ustazi Us spray-painted all over the memorial. Furthermore, most of the tomb stones were smashed and destroyed, their pieces lying about in disordered piles. All in all, it was clear that certain groups of nationalists found problems with the continued existence of the cemetery, to say the least. What surprised me most, however, was how recent this vandalism was: January and June of 2022.
For me, this experience connected with many ideas I’ve been gestating throughout my time learning about life in Serbia and Bosnia post-breakup of Yugoslavia. Firstly, even though the bulk of the fighting may have taken place in the 90s, a lifetime removed from my own life, the conflict and tensions are still present, this narrative doesn’t only exist within museums, but daily life and active memory. That hate and the potential for nationalist violence is still manifest in communities as recently as 2022.
Secondly, however, there is a contingent of people who fight against and resist that hate. There were people who continued to leave flowers at the monument. Some people had pieced back together the smashed headstones of some of the partisans. And still others, with their own spray paint, painted X’s over the fascist symbols. Even though there was and still exists violent destruction of legacy, there are people who want to rebuild and remember.
And thirdly, that despite all the ugly trauma and violence, both in the cemetery and throughout the country, there is a beauty and stillness that permeates everything. An ability to define a space beyond the shared hurt and look towards both parts of the past and glimpses of the future as beautiful.