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The City of the Dead Confronts the City of the Living: Mostar’s Partisan Memorial Cemetery as ‘lieu de mémoire’

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Cover photo: Partisan Memorial Cemetery, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: leiris202/Flickr. No changes made. View the license here.

By Nikolai Ranko Duffield

Introduction

Located in a valley between the Hum and Velež mountains, a city of stone sits idly, intersected by the mighty blue Neretva, which flows quietly through the centre. Frequently listed as a top tourist destination in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Western travel outlets, the stari most (or “old bridge”) perches over the river—connecting two sides of the city of Mostar. The city gets its name from its bridges and their keepers. The city derives its name from the Serbo-Croatian mostari, which means “bridge keepers.” Its history shouts out to residents and visitors alike: striking Ottoman-era mosques, stari čaršija (or “old town centre”), bridges mingle with Franciscan churches, Moorish revival architecture, and Yugoslav modernist administrative and apartment blocks. Periodically, blown-out buildings, marked with shrapnel, bullet holes, and various forms of graffiti remain alongside overflowing dumpsters filled with rotting trash and snarling rats haunt a former battlefield of the recent past—a survivor of urbicide. 

Journeying west from the stari most, one may not notice an entrance surrounded by overgrowth, marked by crumbling stone walls. Not listed on “must-see” attractions on tourist sites, even deemed a potential safety hazard for visiting tourists[1], the remnants of Mostar’s Partisan Cemetery (Partizansko groblje u Mostaru, also known as Partiza) or Partisan Necropolis (Partizanka nekropola) remains resolutely—both forgotten and remembered. Described by its architect, Bogdan Bogdanović, as “a miniature Mostar, a replica of the city on the Neretva banks, its ideal diagram,”[2] the once renowned cemetery-park that has hosted both official state ceremonies to remember the anti-fascist struggle during the Second World War. It is the site where families, young couples, and children who played and enjoyed their days under the hot Herzegovinian sun. These days, however, the site is left mostly alone in its ruins, revived every few months as a contentious battleground, then forgotten again. Mostar’s Partisan Cemetery—caught between remembering and forgetting—will be the centre of my analysis. Using French historian Pierre Nora’s conception, I argue that this site constitutes a lieu de mémoire. Once a place of commemoration to the anti-fascist resisters from the city, a monument to the multiethnic Yugoslav ideal of bratstvo i jedinstvo (“brotherhood and unity”), after the violent civil war of the 1990s, its legacy remains fractured—either representing totalitarian art from an era of dictatorship, an idealistic anti-nationalist disgrace, or a site of remembrance to a nation and history which is no more. However, memory does not simply trickle from the top-down—personal memory and mobilization from the bottom-up also play a role in active remembrance and negotiating history. The multiplicities this site leave it as a place of conflict and forgetting, notably after the rupture of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and will be teased out in order to offer an understanding of the complexities of such sites and their place as lieux de mémoire. First, I construct the context in which the Partisan Necropolis in Mostar came, from the Second World War to the present-day. Second, I provide a brief overview on the literature on history and memory and the framework of Nora’s lieux de mémoire. Third, I offer my analysis of the site as a lieu de mémoire in Bosnia and Herzegovina and even throughout the former Yugoslavia. Memory does not simply trickle from the top-down—personal memory and mobilization from the bottom-up also plays a role in remembrance and understand history. The contentious mobilization around the remembrance of this site forms its status as a place of both conflict and forgetting.

The City of the Dead, the City of the Living: Mostar and its Partisan Cemetery

Mostar was liberated from Nazi and Ustaša—Croatian fascists representing the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945)—occupation on 14 February 1945 by the Yugoslav Partisans. As Gal Kirn notes, the People’s Liberation Struggle from 1941 to 1945 was “not merely resistance but a revolutionary event” that produced a definitive rupture with “old Yugoslavia” (Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918-1941) and drastically transformed social and national relations.[3] Between 1947 and 1965, mass production of anti-fascist monuments and memorial sites was undertaken; roughly 22,000 such monuments and memorial sites were built across the country.[4] This played an identity-forming role in the new multiethnic socialist republic. The Association of Veterans of the People’s Liberation War (Savez udruženja boraca Nardonooslobodilačkog rata Jugoslavije, otherwise known as SUBNOR), with the aid of the Yugoslav federal authorities, launched this project to memorialize and glorify the People’s Liberation War.[5] These monuments and sites were refined to three fundamental narratives of liberation: (i) victory over fascism connected to the revolution; (ii) the victims—both civilian and military—of fascism; and (iii) specific local historical contexts in which these events took place.[6] Already breaking from the Stalinist socialist realism style in the early 1950s, Yugoslav socialist modernism established a new independent revolutionary artistic venture of Yugoslav artists. Many different artists worked on the various modernist monuments and memorial sites; however, Vojin Bakić, Bogdan Bogdanović, and Miodrag Živković represent the most notable artists who worked on multiple of these sites. 

Mostar was considered a red city—a strong seat for resistance to fascism—and thus was deemed to require a memorial to the fallen partisans from the city. Džemal Bijedić, later president of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, commissioned Serbian architect Bogdan Bogdanović to construct the memorial complex on Bijeli Brijeg (the most notable promontory of Biskupova Glavica hill), on the tip of the southern outskirts of the city.[7] Construction on the site began in 1960 and was finished by 1965. I believe that Bogdanović’s description of the project he undertook requires being quoted at length:

“That ideogram of the city, that hieroglyph, that stone mark was not as modest in size. It reached the contours of a modest, primeval Balkan-Hellenic acropolis. Between the entrance — the lower gate — and the fountain at the top one had to ascend an elevation of about twenty meters, and hike some three hundred meters of winding paths and hairpin turns. The road upwards was discernable by the water streaming down the stone organs towards the visitors.”[8]

The memorial site commemorated the lives lost—whether Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Serbs or Jews—without ethnic or religious demarcations. The memorial complex was built out of stone that mirrored the stone city that constructed Mostar—a city of the dead built from the stone of the city of the living. Bogdanović continues, stating: 

“The monument slowly got built, laboriously and carefully, by voluntary contributions, even also in natura (in which case the “natura” was stone), even stone of Mostarian houses, that were for the most part destroyed by time and urban planning; and families gladly donated their stone buildings. Even the quiet moving of the material, the material from the Old Town included, had a symbolic value. The stones, often with centuries old traces of smoke and calcified moss, with ‘housekeepers’ [a plant species], transported pieces of memories and the spirit of piety from one time to another, and mixed it with mighty quantities freshly masoned stone, as white as cheese.”[9]

When Yugoslavia collapsed, and the newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina broke out into a civil war, a rupture occurred in the national ideals of antifascism and komšiluk (“neighbourliness” regardless of ethnic and/or religious differences) as “post-Yugoslav nation-building processes demanded a new interpretation of history” along the lines of (neo)liberalism and ethnonationalism.[10] As Bogdanović noted, “[i]n our country all memories [were] created equally… but now we have no common country; we have a war for the supremacy of memory, a fierce and dirty war… memories are distorted or completely fictitious.”[11] He concludes that this is an “unnatural memory”[12] that undermined “real memories”[13] of others and one’s own “to the point of physical eradication”[14] which cities throughout the multiethnic nation fanned via “a furry of indignation at the reserves of memory the city represents.”[15] The destruction of cities—or urbicide—was a prominent proponent of the Yugoslav wars, as once vibrant, multiethnic cities and towns like Dubrovnik, Mostar, Osijek, Sarajevo, and Vukovar were relentlessly shelled. Along with the city, monuments and memorial complexes were not safe from this shift in “unnatural memory” and reinterpreting Yugoslav history.[16] As Kirn notes, from the early-1990s, there were two prevalent methods in dealing with monuments.[17] First, the monuments were converted and attached with new meaning for the burgeoning nation-states in the midst of war.[18] Second, there was the outright destruction of them—usually by grassroots movements that received, at least, tacit support from their respective ethnonational political class.[19] As the battle lines were drawn between Bosnia’s main three ethnic groups, the Partisan Cemetery did not escape the fate of other monuments throughout the former Yugoslavia. Heavy shelling and vandalism quickly left the once-pristine complex badly damaged and in a state of severe decay. As the eyes of the world watched as another symbol of unity and history, the 420-year-old stari most, was shelled by the Bosnian Croat-led forces until it collapsed into the Neretva on 9 November 1993, the Partisan Cemetery sat in ruins on a hill overlooking the disintegrating city. By the end of the war, roughly 70 percent of the city was destroyed.[20] The city of the dead watched as the city of the living turned itself into one as well. 

Memory and History: Lieux de Mémoire

To understand this rupture and the continued presence/absence of the Partisan Cemetery in contemporary Mostar and Bosnia and Herzegovina, it remains necessary to outline the literature on history and memory, as well as provide the framework of Nora’s lieux de mémoire for the analysis. Memory studies in Western thought have oscillated between the realm of psychological investigation of internal memory processes pioneered by Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson, Maurice Halbwachs, and Frederic Bartlett’s development of the social character of memory.[21] While Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire wrote about the accelerated fragmentation of memory as a condition of modernity, the Renaissance saw “classical” arts of memory from the Ancient Greeks and Romans.[22] History and memory have faced a dilemma in the contemporary period. As Nora puts it, the “conquest and eradication of memory by history has had the effect of a revelation, as if ancient bonds of identity had been broken and something had ended that we had experienced as self-evident—the equation of memory and history.”[23] As collective memory has become exteriorized in public institutions designed to store them, it has been complemented by the increasing interiorization of individual memory.[24] Patrick H. Hutton explains that, “[i]n an age in which the collective identities of traditional society, especially those of family, church, and nation, were disintegrating, the individual felt the need to search his own memory for some surer sense of personal identity.”[25] In the contemporary period of accelerated history, it “confronts us with the brutal realization of the difference between real memory and history.”[26] On the one hand, history finds “integrated, dictatorial memory”[27]—“unself-conscious, commandeering, a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition,”[28] while on the other hand, “our memory”[29] is “simply sifted and sorted historical traces.”[30] Nora continues that the “study of the lieux de mémoire lies at the intersection of two developments:” (i) “the reflexive turning of history upon itself”[31] in historiography; and (ii) the end of a tradition of memory” in history.[32]

Partisan Memorial Cemetery, Mostar. Photo: Fanny Schertzer/Wikimedia Commons. No changes made. View the license here

Pierre Nora’s writing about France, its national history, and its historiography from the 18th century until the contemporary postmodern period. This has caused a great debate in the relationship between history and memory in historiography—with many critiques.[33] As Maria Todorova questions, “[d]o we cling in a pedantic—although one can maintain, also purist—manner to the meaning that Nora has conferred on the phrase, which leaves us with the option of applying the definition structurally to non-French contexts and seeking out convergences and divergences?”[34] She retains that, in the Bulgarian context, “a site that was meant to have a great historical significance, to be a veritable Communist lieux de mémoire, and that, relegated to a lieu d’oubli, continues to have all the makings of a place of memory.”[35] I agree with this framing to help us understand the Partisan Cemetery as a lieux de mémoire partially relegated to a lieu d’oubli while still retaining a historical symbolic significant that remains contended to this day. 

Nora describes lieux de mémoire as sites where “memory crystallizes.”[36] Here, there is a sense that memory has been “torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity exists.”[37] Lieux de mémoire “occur at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of memory disappears, surviving only as a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history”[38] and this sends us to “history’s most elementary tools,”[39] such as archives, libraries, museums, commemorations, and celebrations.[40] They are the creation of play between memory and history. On the one hand, there must be a “will to remember,”[41] and, on the other hand, it requires “the intervention of history, time, and change.”[42] Its purpose remains to block forgetting. As Hutton explains, Nora “conceives of these places as sites that once did but no longer provide direct access to living traditions… they evoke only intimations of what these traditions may have been like.”[43] It is then a “mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound ultimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in mix of the collective and the individual, the sacred and profane, and the immutable and the mobile.”[44]  On the symbolic element of lieux there are two levels. First, dominant lieux de mémoire, which is “spectacular, triumphant, imposing and, generally, imposed from above from a national authority or other,”[45] and usually characterized for the use of official ceremony.[46] Second, there is dominated lieux de mémoire which Nora describes “as places of refuge, which is the living heart of memory” and is remembered from the grassroots instead of imposed from above.[47] Lieux is, ultimately, a double— “a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations.”[48]

Partisan Memorial Cemetery: from lieu de mémoire to lieu d’oubli and back again

In 1997, looking back on his works for a country and history that no longer existed following the war, Bogdanović wrote,

“Many of the memorial buildings, to which I have devoted my best mental and physical strengths, do not exist anymore or are, at least for now, condemned to an invisible deterioration and disappearance. I would feel miserable if I would — even for a moment — allow myself to regret, for instance, the most opulent work of my architectural youth: the Partisan monument in Mostar, today when the real old Mostar has disappeared, along with the even older Mostarian families, whose children rest in this honourable war cemetery. When I once explained my idea for the monument, I told a grateful audience the story of how one day, and forever after, ‘two cities’ will look each other in the eyes: the city of the dead antifascist heroes, mostly young men and women, and the city of the living, for which they gave their lives…”[49]

He concludes by saying that “[a]ll that is left of [his] original promise is that the former city of the dead and the former city of the living still look at each other, only now with empty, black and burned eyes.”[50] Mostar had survived the urbicide it had endured in 1992 and again from 1993 to 1994. However, the history of united partisan struggle was lost to the new reality of neoliberal governance overseen by Western observers and nationalist divisions. The Neretva now divided the two remaining largest ethnic groups—Croats on the left bank; Bosnian Muslims on the right. 

After the war, a commission was established to renovate the complex in 2003.[51] Between 2004 and 2005, reconstruction was underway, with the help of funds from the Dutch and Norwegian governments.[52] The complex was partially reopened to the public in 2005 after some areas of the memorial underwent rehabilitation, and the site was declared a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[53] Despite these developments, the site has oscillated between attempts at renovation and preservation, and destruction and vandalism. The site is remembered by both nationalist, fascistic elements and anti-fascist pro-Yugoslav ones alike. It remains mostly in ruins now after continued repeated desecrations—“the monument has been left to (most likely) adolescents who vandalise the site, covering it in swastikas and Croatian WWII fascist Ustaša insignia, confronting their ideological ‘enemies’ [anti-fascists, anti-nationalists, communists, Yugonostalgics] with their graffiti.”[54] Reports from 2017 have stated that the site is  “covered in glass and plastic bottles and all sort of garbage, while vegetation is overgrowing the monument, parts of which have been destroyed. Some of the tombstones have been torn up and broken into pieces, while the fountains are no longer functioning.”[55] Although largely forgotten, the cemetery still received visitors from local and national anti-fascist organizations that continue to commemorate days that were celebrated as official holidays during the socialist period, including Bosnia and Herzegovina Statehood Day and Mostar Liberation Day on 14 February. 

On 25 November 2019, the Partisan Cemetery was vandalized, again. The cemetery complex has been vandalized multiple times a year since the war. On this occasion, the vandals struck on the eve of Bosnia and Herzegovina Statehood Day, which marks the declaration of Bosnian statehood in 1943 by the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Zemaljsko antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Bosne i Hercegovine, ZAVNOBiH), which existed under the umbrella organization of the Yugoslav partisans during the People’s Liberation War. In January 2020, there appeared to be further damage done to the cemetery accompanied by various pro-fascist and discriminatory graffiti on the crumbling walls. On more than a few occasions, a direct violent confrontation was reported at the site. In November 2017, the Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters of the People’s Liberation War (Udruženja antifašističkih boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog rata, UABNOR) of Mostar, was attacked while they were attempting to lay flowers at the Partisan Cemetery to commemorate Statehood Day.[56] After these events, a group of students from the University of Mostar and their student guests from Croatia and Serbia were also attacked by fascist youths—leading to minor injuries among the students.[57] Moreover, in November 2019, 2,000 members of anti-fascist associations from across Bosnia and the former Yugoslav region were attacked with glass bottles, oysters, and torches that were thrown at them from across the street.[58] The aggressors were quickly dispersed after police intervention and there were no noted injuries.[59] As recently as January 2022, the cemetery was again defaced with fascist symbols (swastika and emblem of the Ustaša regime), accompanied by graffiti that stated “Tito is dead” (“Tito je mrtav”) alongside a derogatory term for Bosnian Muslims.[60]

With the end of the war and collapse of Yugoslavia, the memorial site shifted from a dominant lieu de mémoire to a dominated lieu as official government commemoration quickly dissipated and—besides 2003-2006—the Bosnian government left the complex to the whims of the local population. No longer in the official realm, the commemoration became a dominated lieu de mémoire as organizations such as UNABOR continue to commemorate anti-fascist holidays at the complex—even if they must face violence when doing so. These events are held to remember the region’s strong anti-fascist legacy and the memory of a united Yugoslavia. As Monika Palmberger argues, “Mostarians are not only exposed to changing political contexts but are also confronted with their personal past experiences; therefore, their reconstructions of the past remain more flexible and situations than those of people professionally involved in writing official national histories.”[61]

These mobilizations of remembrance countering nationalist (or, sometimes, pro-fascist) mobilizations also manifest in online groups that specifically remain dedicated to preserving the memory of the complex—and the ideological commitments it stood for. A Facebook group named “Partizansko-spomen-groblje- Help us preserve famous WW2 memorial in Mostar” claims, as of December 2020, roughly 2,400 members’ states that its goal is to “preserve a positive history and great memory on [the] fallen heroes that gave their life against [the] evil Nazi times of II World War [Second World War]. This memory needs us to survive, join this group and spread the word.”[62] The posts in the group are mostly articles in Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian which are dedicated to keeping the group members aware of the news stories surrounding the monument, various commemorations on the victory over fascism, and the history of the various anti-fascist organizations that worked under the Yugoslav partisans during the war. Although there is an ‘official’ forgetting on the governmental level, many grassroots organizations retain the site’s memory and history. 

Conclusion

Local teacher and writer Vesna Marić sums up her feelings towards the Partisan Cemetery, writing: 

“The Partisan Monument is a great metaphor for the old and the new system for the forbidden places that everyone is trying to forget but are still there, with all the wasted opportunities. Today, people go there who are either addicted to crack or drunks or those who want to break stuff. To me, the Partisan Monument means a lot of special things which have changed meanings in the last 40 years of my life. It’s a place where we would hang out as kids and it’s a real metaphor for the memories of my childhood, and likewise represents this traumatic cut between the old regime and the new regime, of which one of them is no longer allowed. It’s a metaphor for that sort of schizophrenic relation between the past and the present in which nothing is integrated.”[63]

I believe this quotation provides an important summation to the Cemetery as a place caught between remembering and forgetting. In other words, it is a lieu de mémoire kept alive by local grassroots organizations that engage with the ideological connotations of the complex—whether they agree with it or not—and moved into the realm of a lieu d’oubli by local and national governments that are unsure what to do with it. In a personal essay, Maria Todorova notes that Yugoslavia remains alive in people’s memories like “the living dead”.[64] While Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito may be long dead, along with the country he helped unite, they both continue to live in the memories of those who lived to experience Yugoslavia.  Throughout this essay, I have argued that Mostar’s Partisan Cemetery constitutes, what Nora describes as, a lieu de mémoire—located at the intersection of history and memory. Further, this paper illustrated the specifically fluid nature of this site as one of mémoire and oubli (forgetting) after the collapse of Yugoslavia: how it oscillates between the two at different levels of memory between the local and the national, grassroots and institutional. The Partisan cemetery has been largely forgotten by governmental institutions and official organizations; however, it remains a site of remembrance and revile among various pro-Yugoslav, left-wing grassroots organizations, and nationalist, pro-fascist groups. Connecting the destruction of cities to that of graveyards, Bogdanović states that “the fear of ‘other people’s memories,’ of evil, occult, incomprehensible content—comes into play. They never think… that by destroying the memories of those near to them they are breaking the chain of their own anthropological memory.”[65] The city of the living remains stuck with the city of the dead—a place both remembered and forgotten in a divided region that is attempting to heal and reconcile its history and memory for the sake of its future. 

Footnotes:

  1. “Mostar,” Spomenik Database, accessed November 28, 2020, https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/mostar.
  2. Arna Mačkić and Bogdan Bogdanović, “The Partisan Necropolis,” last modified October 6, 2015, https://failedarchitecture.com/the-partisan-necropolis-mostars-empty-stare/.
  3. Gal Kirn, “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context,” in Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, ed. Daniel Šuber and Slobodan Karamanić, (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012), 277.
  4. Janes-Laslo Stadler, “Die Partisanennekrople in Mostar,” Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art 172, no. 27 (2017): 2.
  5. Kirn, “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context,” 259.
  6. Kirn, “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context,” 259.
  7. Spomenik Database. “Mostar.”
  8. Mačkić and Bogdanović, “The Partisan Necropolis.”
  9. Mačkić and Bogdanović, “The Partisan Necropolis.”
  10. Kirn, “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context,” 252.
  11. Bogdan Bogdanović, “The City and Death,” in Balkan Blues: Writing Out of Yugoslavia, ed. Joanna Labon, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995): 57.
  12. Bogdanović, “The City and Death,” 58.
  13. Bogdanović, “The City and Death,” 58.
  14. Bogdanović, “The City and Death,” 58.
  15. Bogdanović, “The City and Death,” 58.
  16. Bogdanović, “The City and Death,” 58.
  17.  Kirn, “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context,” 255.
  18.  Kirn, “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context,” 255.
  19.  Kirn, “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context,” 255.
  20.  Mačkić and Bogdanović, “The Partisan Necropolis.” 
  21. Stephen Legg, “Contesting and surviving memory: space, nation, and nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 23, (2005): 481.
  22.  Legg, “Contesting and surviving memory,” 481.
  23. Pierre Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26, (Spring 1989): 8.
  24. Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993): 151.
  25. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 151.
  26. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 8.
  27. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 8.
  28. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 8.
  29. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 8.
  30. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 8.
  31.  Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 11.
  32.  Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 11.
  33. Stephen Legg, “Contesting and surviving memory: space, nation, and nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 23, (2005): 481-504. 
  34. Maria Todorova, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as lieu de mémoire,” The Journal of Modern History 78, no. 2 (June 2006): 382.
  35. Todorova, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov,” 382.
  36. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 7.
  37. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 7. 
  38. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 12.
  39. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 12.
  40. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 12.
  41. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 19.
  42. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 19.
  43. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 148.
  44. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 19.
  45. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 22.
  46. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 22.
  47. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 22.
  48. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 24.
  49. Mačkić and Bogdanović, “The Partisan Necropolis.” 
  50. Mačkić and Bogdanović, “The Partisan Necropolis.”
  51. “Partisan Memorial-Cemetery, the architectural ensemble,” Bosnia and Herzegovina Commission to Preserve National Monuments, accessed December 2, 2020, http://old.kons.gov.ba/main.php?id_struct=50&lang=4&action=view&id=2778.
  52.  “Partisan Memorial-Cemetery.” 
  53.  “Partisan Memorial-Cemetery.” 
  54.  Sven Milekić, “Partisans’ Necropolis in Bosnia’s Mostar Left to Rot,” last modified June 15, 2017,https://balkaninsight.com/2017/06/15/partisans-necropolis-in-bosnia-s-mostar-left-to-rot-06-14-2017/. 
  55.  Milekić, “Partisans’ Necropolis in Bosnia’s Mostar.”
  56.  “Na Partizanskom groblju u Mostaru napadnuti studenti, te gosti iz Srbije i Hrvatske,” Klix online, last modifiedNovember 24, 2017, https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/na-partizanskom-groblju-u-mostaru-napadnuti-studenti-te-gosti-iz-srbije-i-hrvatske/171124141. 
  57.  Klix online, “Na Partizanskom.”
  58.  “Huligani u Mostaru bakljama i bocama gađali članove antifašističkih udruženja,” Klix online, last modified February 15, 2020, https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/huligani-u-mostaru-bakljama-i-bocama-gadjali-clanove-antifasistickih-udruzenja/200215050. 
  59.  Klix online, “Huligani u Mostaru.” 
  60.  “Novi vandalski pohod u Mostaru: Fašističko znakovlje i “Tito je mrtav”!” Dnevni avaz, last modified January 7, 2022, https://avaz.ba/vijesti/bih/708557/novi-vandalski-pohod-u-mostaru-fasisticko-znakovlje-i-tito-je-mrtav. 
  61.  Monika Palmberger, “Why alternative memory and place-making practices in divided cities matter,” Space and Polity 23, no. 2 (2019): 243. 
  62.  “Partizansko spomen-groblje-Help to preserve famous WW2 Memorial in Mostar,” Facebook, n.d., https://www.facebook.com/groups/147730451916207/. 
  63.  Marko Barišić, Aida Murtić and Alisa Burzić, Mostarska Hurqualya: (Ne)Zaboravljeni grad, (Bihać: Grafičar, 2017): 56.
  64.  Maria Todorova, “My Yugoslavia,” in After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land, ed. Radmila Gorup (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013): 35-36. 
  65.  Bogdanović, “The City and Death,” 59. 

References:

Barišić, Marko, Aida Murtić, and Alisa Burzić. Mostarska Hurqualya: (Ne)Zaboravljeni grad. Bihać: Grafičar, 2017.

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