Tombstones of Utopia: The Rise and Ruin of Yugoslavia's Spomeniks

Molly Schweickhardt

Lying in an isolated Croatian countryside, a fallen concrete triple obelisk rests forgotten, coated in graffiti and overgrown with brush. Until it was destroyed in 1992, the structure proudly stood as a 56-foot-high monument of sharp intersecting planes, projecting dramatically upward from the hillside. Its brutalism and abstractness stand in direct contrast to the solemn beauty of the natural landscape around it. Despite its apparent unworldliness, architect Vuko Bombardelli, sponsored by the former Yugoslavian government, designed the monument in 1961 to memorialize resistance fighters in World War II who took up arms against the occupying Axis forces within Croatia in 1941. To Bombardelli, this type of monument, hereafter referred to by the South Slavic language group terminology spomeniks, symbolizes “youth’s eternal struggle of defiance and its quest for internal purity.” This spomenik, resting on the exact location where 24 young men were executed for their resistance against the Axis powers, is just one of the numerous memorials constructed during the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia made to memorialize the tragic events of World War II and the National Liberation War. The spomeniks are often seen as representations of the utopian idealism of former Yugoslavia, standing as physical pillars of the socialist vision of ethnic unity despite deep internal division within the country. Yet, after Yugoslavia’s dissolution starting in 1991, new ethno-nationalist states lost interest in preserving spomenik cultural heritage.  The deliberate neglect and destruction of the spomeniks after the balkanization of Yugoslavia reflects the evolution of new national identities, which demonstrates that political aesthetics are not merely reflective of national identity but instrumental in its creation.

While the country of Yugoslavia is best known for its post-World War II alignment with the Soviet bloc, a pre-communistic Yugoslavia existed following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I. Before the nation was named Yugoslavia, The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes formed under the centralized monarchy of King Peter I Karadjordjević. However, this new state was short-lived as the country was occupied and divided by Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria during the Second World War. Under fascist control of the Axis powers and the formation of the Ustaše---the Axis puppet state within Croatia---the country fell into a state of brutality and violence. The Ustaše established concentration camps throughout the country aimed at creating a pure Croat state through the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Jews, and Romas. By 1941, more than 300,000 Serbs and pro-Yugoslav Croats were reported slain by the fascist forces, with 300,000 to 500,000 Serbs reported systematically murdered by the end of the war. The Yugoslavs reacted to the occupier's extreme violence through the formation of anti-fascist revolutionary groups; the royalist Chetniks and the communist Partisan movement under Josip Broz Tito. Following World War II, with Allied support, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was born. Elections were held in 1945, with the Communist Partisan movement winning all the seats in the Constituent Assembly and in 1953 Josip Tito was officially elected president of Yugoslavia. 

 The Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was characterized by its extreme diversity. The country boasted two alphabets, three languages, four religions, five nationalities, six republics, and eight ethnic minorities. Despite the complex ethnic diversity of the country, the new socialist government revolved around the slogan “bratstvo i jedinstvo”—meaning brotherhood and unity—that carried over from the Partisan movement of World War II and was intended to prevent the dominance of any single ethnic group. Tito attempted to satisfy the need for national homogenization through the creation of Yugoslav supranationally. At a speech given at the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences on November 26, 1948, Tito argued that the goal of the Communist Party “lies in the necessity for keeping a sharp lookout to see that national chauvinism does not appear and develop among any of the nationalities... to ensure that all the negative phenomena of nationalism disappear and that people are educated in the spirit of internationalism.” Through adopting a wide Yugoslav identity, Tito aimed at minimizing the threat of local and regional nationalism which threatened to undermine the power of the central government and effectively Tito himself.

Yugoslavia stood at the forefront of socialist constructivism as Tito and the Partisan party actively and openly manufactured a new supranational identity through ambitious projects that utilized art and culture in service of political goals. Socialist constructivism refers to the theory developed by Soviet artists and architects following the 1917 Revolution, in which art and design focused on its utilitarian and social function over individual expression to actively construct a new socialist society. Tito embodied this theory through enacting an ambitious series of histographies, and encyclopedias written about Yugoslavian culture and the National Liberation War (WWII) to rewrite the nation's history under the guise of stability and unification. Similarly, to physically construct the new socialist utopian state, Tito enacted the spomenik project which, according to Nina Stevanović, served as an “ideological program that strived to create an official interpretation of the past in order to gain control over the society in the given present.” The spomeniks were constructed in the exact locations where the battles, massacres, and historic episodes occurred during World War ll. Therefore, people who wanted to visit these monuments were obliged to travel to remote regions, creating a sort of patriotic tourism industry in which Yugoslavs could go on a historic pilgrimage from site to site. 

Nevertheless, it was critical that these spomeniks speak of the present and the near future while avoiding the ethnic and religious tensions that scourged the nation. While other communist countries such as China and the Soviet Union adopted socialist realism---which utilized naturalism and realism to glorify the proletariat in art, sculpture, and propaganda posters alike---Yugoslavia turned toward avant-gardism. Sun Zixi’s In Front of Tiananmen (1964) and the Soviet statue Warrior Liberator (1949) constructed by Yevgeny Vuchetich demonstrate how the Soviet Union and China condemned avant-garde art as bourgeois and elite, seemingly detached from the realities of the proletariat. Therefore, they opted for a realism that was easily digestible for the masses, one that workers could physically see themselves in. Contrasting the ideologies of the other communist nations, Yugoslavia opted for brutalism, futurism, and abstraction, which are all part of the international modernist movement, as their regime's official aesthetic. 

While Tito initially described modern art as an “unacceptable foreign implant” incompatible with “our socialist ethic” that is trying to “derail us from our revolutionary path," he ultimately accepted the usefulness of modern art toward his goal of constructing an egalitarian society. The rise of the modern art and architectural movement was rooted in the unification between industry and art. Industry becomes aligned with a concrete utopia, one that does not center on diversity or cultural distinctions, but rather speed, revolution, and production. Through functionalism, engineering, and industrial processes, modernists argued in favor of embracing the zeitgeist of the 20^th century through utilizing industrialization to solve universal social qualms. Therefore, Yugoslavian state artists used concrete and reinforced steel in a brutalist fashion to emphasize the physical and emotional weight of the past. The brutalism paired with the abstractness of the monuments

depersonalizes them from any singular ethnic group and forms a mentality of collectivism over individual accomplishment. Their futurism accentuates the ultimate contradiction of the monuments. While they seek to memorialize Yugoslavia’s recent tragic past, they narratively enforce the idea of a total rebirth of their society, erasing past barriers through revolution while looking hopefully towards a new socialist society, physically constructed through these monuments. Therefore, brutalism, abstraction, and futurism embodied the goal of Tito: to form an egalitarian state that can move beyond its fractionalization spurred by regional nationalism and ethnic tension, instead building a modern concrete utopia rising to power on the global stage. 

To stay true to this egalitarian vision, none of the spomeniks include accurate bodily anatomy; they rather stand as a collective of massive abstract concrete and metal shapes against the backdrop of the natural environment. While some spomnieks are anthropomorphic, they are always cubical, genderless, and blur the boundaries between human anatomy and abstract geometry. The Battle of Sutjeska Memorial Monument Complex (1971) in the Valley of Heros is an abstract set of concrete wings with various unintelligible faces, meant to commemorate the fighters and fallen soldiers during the Battle of Sutjeska in 1943. The Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina (1967) rises as a massive pair of concrete wings with a futuristic, eye-like void at its center giving the appearance of a spaceship, made to recognize the community's rebellion against the Ustaše during the National Liberation War (WWII). The Monument to the Revolution at Kozara (1972) stands at roughly 108-feet tall, soaring upward in a cylindrical form encircled by concrete ribs that resemble an abstract fortress. This monument was created in remembrance of the Partisan fighters, fallen soldiers and civilian victims who died in the bloody Kozara Offensive in the spring of 1942. With roughly 1,000,000 total civilian and military deaths and roughly 6% of Yugoslavia’s population dying under Axis occupation, these monuments were meant to serve as a partisan reminder of these tragic events while also acting as a unifying moment for the country. 

After Tito’s death in 1980, the country fell victim to tendencies of regional nationalism. Since Josip Tito declared himself president for life in 1974, there was no contingency plan on who would lead the country after his death. Yugoslavia chose to form a collective presidency in which each of the six republics and two autonomous regions voted for one member to represent them in an eight-person presidency, where a majority vote would constitute decision making. The formation of the collective presidency caused power to be stripped from the central government, allowing separatist identities to once again reign supreme. 

The utopian vision of peace and harmony between different ethnicities and religious groups was completely dissolved as each republic and autonomous region had their own political and social priorities. Therefore, the central government collapsed as each region could not agree on how to govern the country at large along with rising tensions between different ethnic and religious groups. Religious fervor spurred the Catholic Croats against the Orthodox Serbs, Christians against the minority Muslim Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats against Albanians and vice-versa. Similarly, mythological renditions of history placed Serbia as the cradle of ethnic superiority within the Balkans. Territorial disputes also began to rip apart the country as leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, the head of state of Greater-Serbia, used ethno-nationalism to strengthen their justification for expansionist policies to ensure Serb dominance over the other republics. Milosevic found an opening within the feckless central government in which Serbia would usurp the Yugoslavian government.

Through gaining control of Kosovo and Vojvodina and installing a pro-Serbian government in Montenegro, Serbia practically ran half of the collective presidency, which caused Croatia and Slovenia to declare their national independence. The most notable Balkan literary work of the 1980s, Danko Popović’s book Knjiga o Milutinu published in 1985, proudly proclaimed that Croats and Slovenes were the enemies of the Serbs as they economically exploited the Serbian people. The book sold out within a week of its release and was reprinted thirteen times, demonstrating that these mentalities were commonplace within Yugoslavia and in extension foreshadowing the fall of the regime.   

The dissolution of Yugoslavia took place between the years of 1991 to 2008, starting with the violent succession of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 and finally ending with Kosovo declaring independence from Serbia in 2008. The increased militarization during balkanization led to the complete destruction of many of the spomeniks, as nationalistic forces and civilians sought to destroy many reminders of former Yugoslavia, especially those pertaining to ethnic unity. The modernist monuments in Vis, Kamensko, Mostar, Opuzen, Gevgelija, Petrova Gora, and countless others were completely destroyed or have fallen into disrepair.  

Ethno-nationalist sentiments such as Greater-Serbia still plague the Balkans today, causing increased ethnic tension within the region. Serbia’s current president, Aleksandar Vučić, grew up under Milosevic’s ethno-nationalistic idea of a Greater-Serbia and formed the far-right Serbian Progressive Party at 23 years of age. During the Yugoslav Wars, he became famous for saying “You kill one Serb, and we will kill 100 Muslims” after the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. This ethno-nationalism has continued to permeate throughout the region due to the extreme violence and ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav Wars. 

While the spomeniks were meant to memorialize some of Yugoslavia’s greatest tragedies, the past 45 years have seen a shift in what they represent to the Balkan people. They now stand as tombstones of the former Yugoslavia, with their collapse standing as an example of the changing perception of ethnic homogeny under the new post-Yugoslavian states. The egalitarian monuments did not fit into the rhetoric of expansionist nationalists who sought to build ethnic identities. Therefore, their neglect and decay not only reflect the rejection of the socialist ideals they once embodied, but also the relics of a disintegrated vision that now stand only as witnesses to the region's fractured political and cultural identity. 

(This article was originally printed in the Fall 2025 edition of our print magazine. To see the entire magazine, click here.)