On Memorial Day, we take time out of our day to remember fallen soldiers, taken unduly by history’s wars. Most of us do this by barbecuing meats, although many of us make special trips to the nation’s various war memorials to extend our mourning into the universe, and to give thanks for the soldiers’ sacrifice. This is a tradition that extends, in the U.S., all the way back to The Civil War, when Memorial Day was called Decoration Day, used to decorate the graves of Union soldiers.
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War memorials are common and plentiful in this world, and most of them are noble, public, dignified edifices. When they aren’t statues of soldiers or notable military men, they are, like the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, pointedly unassuming, serving as gentle sad reminders of the many, many people who have died.
Kadinjaca
However, lost somewhere in the back hills of the former Yugoslavia, are a collection of enormous stone war memorials that seem to have been neglected by time. In 1967, the Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito commissioned a series of stone sculptures intended to honor the sites of notable Yugoslavian losses during World War II.
The most notable of these sculptures, seen at the top of this article, is called Spomenik revolucije naroda Moslavine, or simply Monument to the Revolution. It was designed by famed designer Dušan Džamonja. It rests, unassuming, in a field somewhere outside of Podgarić, Berek, Croatia. It looks, to the untrained eye, like something that touched down from space, giving the sculpture an eerie, Stonehenge-ish feeling. What the memorial means, or what the builder intended by its design, is open for interpretation.
ArchDaily
Džamonja had, over the years, planted many such memorials all over the former Yugoslavia, all to commemorate various battles from WWII. Every one of them is located in a very out-of-the-way spot, usually in a field outside a small Croatian village. The sculptures are often unloved by the locals, who see them as ugly and unnecessary. Locals resent that they represent the Tito administration, which – according to our limited understanding of Yugoslavian history – was not exactly a glorious time for much of the Yugoslavian people. The sculptures attract almost no tourists, thanks to their remoteness, and go unnoticed most of the time.
Indeed, the sculptures may have been forgotten entirely were it not for a Belgian photographer named Jan Kempenaers who compiled a book of the sculptures back in 2006, reintroducing them to the world. Looking at the pictures, you can see that these oddball alien structures have been abandoned entirely, slowly wearing down under the rough elements of the Balkans. Kempenaers, through a bout of journalistic tenacity, elected to follow a map he had found to where many, many such sculptures were located. He discovered that many of the sculptures had been dynamited fallowing the fall of Tito. The early 1990s saw a major coup in Yugoslavia, and those who could find the sculptures destroyed them in rage toward the old regime.
ArchDaily
Since the sculptures are lost, however, many of them escaped destruction, and now they sit, very, very far away, gathering moss, ignored by the world in general. No one keeps them up, no one seems to care. Some of them are, according to Kempenaers, scrawled with graffiti, and covered in litter. Although they may represent an old regime, the spomeniks are beautiful and strange enough to be credited as dignified reminders of ancient Yugoslavian culture. Kempenaers is doing what he can to keep these memorials remembered.
Top Image: Plamen at Serbian Wikipedia
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
