Purple Travel
[February 26 2016]
Crossing Bosnia and the Valley of Heroes
Driving from Dubrovnik to Belgrade by passing through Bosnian mountains and villages, I paid a visit to one of the most significant memorials of former Yugoslavia commemorating the fallen Partisans. The ‘Memorial of victory’ by sculptor Miodrag Zivković opened in the early 1970s as well as the memorial house of the Battle of Sutjeska, the architectural masterpiece of Serbian architect Ranko Radović, remind us of one of the haviest battle of Partisan forces led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito who defeated the German ‘Operation Schwarz’ during Second World War and protagonists who remained excluded from the official remembrance of the war.
Tito’s commissioned monuments are fading but still presenting a Slavic language as a reminder of the complicated legacy of inter-ethnic harmony, prosperity, repression and probably of the cataclysmic failure of the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Text and photo Stefan Jovicic
