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Partisan Memorials in Former Yugoslavia

Makedonium monument in Krusevo

I recently stumbled upon a slideshow of modern memorials in former Yugoslavia over at Robert Burghardt’s FZZ Fanzine. The memorials date back to the early 1960s following Yugoslavia’s emancipation from the Soviet Union. In the preface to the slide show Robert mentions, “These monuments belong to the most important witnesses of Yugoslav memorial culture and stem from the most active period of Yugoslav modern art which has been described as socialist modernism or socialist aestheticism. As War-monuments they are unique: They do not express the fighting and death, but life, resistance and the energy by which they were carried. They are directed forward while they mark the starting point for a new society, whose products they are.”