This is your second installment of amazing Yugoslavian war monuments. CLICK HERE for part 1 and part 2. Here’s a recap:
After the terrors of World War II monuments sprung up across former Yugoslavia to commemorate victories and losses, heroes and massacres. With Western media becoming ever more anti-Russian, it’s easy to forget the Soviets were on our team in WWII and had significantly more casualties than we did.
These WWII monuments were often in remote rural areas meaning that since the dissolution of Yugoslavia into six countries, they have mostly been abandoned and left to rot. (Although I am reliably informed that some are now being brought back to life).
The Soviet style, as you might remember from those Soviet era bus stops, might be described as surrealist art deco. They are so very different from anything you would find in Western Europe. I love them, and I think you will too.
Below are a selection of these WWII monuments from throughout ex-Yugoslavian lands. Firstly some from Montenegro:
Designed by Bogdan Bogdanović, and opened in 1977.
Designed by Bogdan Bogdanović. Dedicated to 32 anti-fascists and patriots shot by the occupiers on Trebjesa hill.
The monuments at Slobodište mark the area where some 1,650 partisans were executed whilst Germany held the region; the slaughtered were mostly Yugoslavian soldiers and Roma.
The largest execution in Kruševac happened on June 29, 1943, when 324 people were executed as a measure of retaliation. This execution was at first to be carried out on June 28, but since on that day was a great Serbian feast Vidovdan, Milan Nedić’s government were able to move the execution a day later.
Prior to the execution, SS general August Meissner arrived in Kruševac and signed the poster, noting that he himself ordered this mass execution. After that, 162 members of the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland (Chetniks) and 162 members of the People’s Liberation Movement of Yugoslavia were executed.
The monument bears the inscription:
Under this sky, human, straighten up. Bread and freedom are the same thing to us.
Dedicated to the “Kosmaj Partisan detachment” of World War II.
Designed by Bogdan Bogdanović, 1973 and also known as the “miners monument”. It represents the local miners (Albanians and Serbs) who died fighting during WWII. It also signifies the two groups coming together peacefully in post-Soviet times.
Wikipedia also says this about the monument’s meaning to the locals today:
Now the monument has lost its meaning and it can be seen as an object of indifference on both sides of the city.
Designed by Ivan Sabolić; built in 1963. Dedicated to the more than 10,000 victims of fascism killed at Bubanj plateau near Niš between 1941 and 1944. The forests of Bubanj received trucks filled with Jews, Gypsies and Serbs. All fell to execution squads.
Each of the three fists are different sizes, depicting men’s, women’s and children’s hands defying the enemy in death. Before the withdrawal of the Germans as the Red Army advanced into Yugoslavia in 1944, captured Italians were ordered to dig up the trenches and burn the corpses of the victims in order to destroy all traces of the atrocities committed there.
Sobering stuff.
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