Better Grave: Cemeteries in the Former Yugoslavia

A visit to cemeteries in the former Yugoslavia.

With Carol Lilly.

Listen: “Better Grave: Cemeteries in the Former Yugoslavia” (Episode #95)

Bonus Extras: “Better Grave” (Episode #95)

Extended, ad-free version of “Better Grave” (Episode #95).

Transcript: “Better Grave: Cemeteries in the Former Yugoslavia” (Episode #95)

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PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok. Yugoblok is a global community and social network for all who celebrate Yugoslavia’s legacy, cultivate its memory, and imagine its future possibilities. It’s all Yugoslavia, all the time. Join at Yugoblok.com.

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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your undertaker Peter Korchnak.

Wherever I travel, including the former Yugoslavia, I make a point of visiting three places: the market, the train station (if one exists, of course), and the cemetery. They’re places of interaction and exchange: of goods, of locations, and of spiritual planes. I find them to be the best venues to get an idea about a place and a feel for its genius loci. 

It is to the third of these must-see places that we’ll go on today’s show. 

Cemeteries is where we put away our dead. They’re where we, the living, visit and gather, remember and commemorate—but also where we express and reinforce our identities and sometimes wage battles.

So far on the show we’ve remembered Yugoslavia above the ground. It’s time to go down below. Because the dead really aren’t dead. Kind of like Yugoslavia, I guess: as long as someone remembers it, it remains alive.

But before we carve the headstones, a shoutout to the latest and very much alive Yugoblok HERO-es: Aleksandar, Alexander, Allen, Billie, Carol, Dyani, Eamon, Gregg, Irina, Irma, James, Matt, and Sofija. Perhaps some day we’ll erect a monument to these and other early members of Yugoblok. Thanks, guy, and welcome to Yugoblok.

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CAROL LILLY: US cemeteries are not nearly as interesting as European cemeteries. They don’t have pictures on them, hardly ever, for one thing. And they’re not usually family graves. So they don’t have that sense of history and community very often. In Europe, I went to cemeteries because they were far more interesting, and especially in Yugoslavia, and the pictures on them were so fascinating. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Carol Lilly is a history professor at the University of Nebraska-Kearney. She is the author of Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia: The Politicization of Cemeteries and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans, out this year from Bloomsbury Academic, the main source for this episode. 

She is also one of the HERO members I mentioned earlier. 

Lilly’s journey to Yugoslav cemeteries began in Russia, her original research interest. In 1984 she visited Yugoslavia the summer after the Olympics, and ended up switching her focus to what she deemed to be, quote, “a kinder, gentler communist country.” 

She learned the language and wrote her dissertation at Yale University with the late Ivo Banac on the Yugoslav communist ideology and culture after World War II.

CAROL LILLY: And I ended up in Croatia, with a family on Dan mrtvih, Day of the Dead. And that ritual was so beautiful. And I was so smitten with it. 

So after that, I got a lot more interested in cemeteries in the former Yugoslavia, or in Yugoslavia, and would go far more often, and just got more and more interested in them. Then after the fall of Yugoslavia, I noticed that the graves became even more interesting.

PETER KORCHNAK: Other than ethnographic works and histories of earlier periods, there was nothing out there on cemeteries in the former Yugoslavia. And so Lilly started digging.

CAROL LILLY: For somebody who has no religious background, this might not have been a great idea, in retrospect, because the amount of knowledge that I did not have really blows my mind even today. And I’m sure it will come back to haunt me on many occasions. But I learned a lot and it was probably the most interesting and fun project I’ve ever done.

PETER KORCHNAK: As soon as World War Two was over, the victorious Yugoslav communists launched the process of commemorating their fallen comrades. 

CAROL LILLY: From the communist perspective, what mattered to them, first and foremost, was their war dead, the Partisans, those who had died for the cause. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The regime mobilized the veterans organizations to gather the remains of soldiers and civilians killed during the war, design and build graves, cemeteries, ossuaries, and monuments for them, rebury them there, and organize commemorations on important anniversaries that would engage living veterans, workers, youth, and others to preserve the Partisans memory, cultivate Yugoslav patriotism, and help foster brotherhood and unity.

CAROL LILLY: But you know, they also didn’t have any money. 

I mean, it takes a lot of time and effort, and money and energy to get all of these bodies moved from where they were initially buried in the middle of a battle together to a particular location. 

They had a lot of other things they had to do. And they left a lot of it up to locals. You know, you need to mourn your dead, you guys get this done. And people did. But it was a lot of it quite ad hoc and effective in terms of helping people mourn, not always particularly sophisticated. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Because of this lack of funding, building ossuaries, mass graves, and mausoleums was a frequent solution to achieve quick and inexpensive commemoration.

There’s a common misconception that People’s Liberation War monuments and Partisan cemeteries were built by Yugoslavia’s government. Many big ones were, yes, but even a major local one like the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar was financed entirely by the city and citizens of Mostar and built with the aid of youth volunteers. 

“Almost no cemeteries or memorials to soldiers or civilians killed in the war were funded at the federal level,” Lilly writes. “Funding for all other cemeteries and memorials to fallen soldiers and civilian victims of fascism, large or small, came from the Republics or the local Communes where they were located, [veterans] associations, and voluntary [citizens] contributions in cash, kind, and labor.” End quote.

The vast majority of the 12 to 15,000 People’s Liberation War monuments and Partisan cemeteries across the former Yugoslavia were financed, built, and maintained on the local level. 

While the decentralized approach fit the general tendency and trend within the country, it resulted in a spectrum of monuments and cemeteries in terms of size, lavishness if you will, design quality, and associated events. The key issue was that the areas with the greatest need for these cemeteries and monuments, that is where the greatest battles had taken place and most people had died, were located in poor areas of the country, predominantly in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

After the initial post-war push, by the mid-1960s the veterans organization would delegate, or off-load, depending how you look at it, maintenance of graves and cemeteries to local schools and youth, labor, and other mass organizations. (When the country disintegrated, many of these organizations disintegrated with it, so there was no one left to do the work.) 

It was also in this period that the regime and veterans organization turned at these sites from grief and commemoration to education and tourism. In other words, past orientation gave way to future outlook, embodied in the motto, they died so we can live (and presumably, build socialism). Ask anyone who grew up in Yugoslavia and they’ll tell you of school or workplace trips to major monuments, including on important anniversaries or for big commemorations. Museums, restaurants, hotels, and sporting venues were built in the vicinity of these, to provide infrastructure for this memorial tourism. This was one of the ways the regime sought to foster patriotism and collective identity among the citizenry.

CAROL LILLY: They felt very strongly about creating cemeteries for the war dead and using the war dead to create this collective identity. 

They had to be careful because they didn’t want to be accused of trying to create Yugoslavism, right, as we know, that had been discredited in the interwar period so they didn’t want to do that. But they did more to have some kind of collective identity that was based on bratstvo i jedinstvo, brotherhood and unity, and based on their sacrifices in the war, and based on socialism, whatever that might mean. And you know, that changes over time. But nonetheless, it has the idea of a common homeland, and a collective identity, brotherhood and unity, and socialism. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The Partisan cemeteries and monuments achieved two things. They helped the surviving Yugoslav citizens to mourn their loved ones killed by foreign occupiers and domestic enemies. And they helped institutionalize the memory of the People’s Liberation War as a pillar of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. In often literally concrete terms, the Party used cemeteries for the war dead as a way to cement “a new collective identity that would secure peace, social stability, and its own position in power.” 

CAROL LILLY: Later, especially as they moved away from the Soviet model and more into these more abstract forms of monumentation, Yugoslavia becomes famous for this monumental art and these these giant monuments.

PETER KORCHNAK: The modernist, abstract forms these monuments and cemeteries took, particularly from the turn of the 1960s, served multiple purposes: they expressed the rejection of Socialist Realism and other Soviet ways; they showcased the progressiveness, that is, more of a Western orientation of Yugoslavia’s non-aligned art and construction; and they avoided identification with any particular religious or national identities and made themselves relevant to all. “Partisan cemeteries had a significant advantage in that they were never ethnoreligiously segregated,” writes Lilly.

One important element of these cemeteries was that many people, could be hundreds, even thousands at some, like Sutjeska, were buried in them. And they were commemorated in a way that served to promote the idea of brotherhood and unity.

CAROL LILLY: They were buried all together. Inasmuch as they finally got the money and the time and the energy to do it, they were buried side by side without regard for their ethnicity or whatever religious background they may have had, or might still have held to because they weren’t all communists, obviously. And they were buried together, right. So there was some sense of having a common identity. 

They were, in fact, all people who had sacrificed for a cause, and that cause was and united Yugoslavia and brotherhood and unity. Maybe they didn’t die for socialism. I think at that time, they didn’t necessarily know that that was what they were dying for. Maybe some did, maybe some didn’t. But they did die for a united country and brotherhood and unity, and against fascism. 

Sometimes they were mass graves, sometimes— they didn’t even have the bodies. And they were just names on an ossuary or on a plaque. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The other aspect of these cemeteries was that civilians were often buried alongside the Partisans. Whereas the latter would most commonly be identified as “fallen fighters”, the former would be labeled “victims of fascist terror.”

CAROL LILLY: A lot of civilians were killed in under these circumstances. And sometimes they were killed in the course of the battle, sometimes they were killed by the occupiers, sometimes they were killed by their neighbors. These were bad times, of course, as everyone knows, and Yugoslavia actually did a better job of recognizing the sacrifices of the civilians than many other countries during the Second World War. 

This was evident in the documents that I read from the veterans organizations that they also wanted to memorialize the victims of fascism, the civilian victims of fascism. Although they didn’t think that they were necessarily equal to the soldiers. But if it was only victims and if it was really just part of the civil war, they didn’t want to be too specific about how they died or who did the killing and what their names were – then those things could also easily be covered up. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In Zagreb I always make a point of visiting the Mirogoj Cemetery. To me, it’s the most beautiful and impressive cemetery in all of former Yugoslavia.

There’s the spectacular grave of independent Croatia’s first president Franjo Tudjman. There are many political and cultural dignitaries, to name a few: singer Arsen Dedić, basketball players Krešimir Čosić and Dražen Petrović, founder of the Iliryan movement Ljudevit Gaj, writers Miroslav Krleža and Vladimir Nazor, politicians Stjepan Radić and Milka Planinc, many many more. Nobles and elites and unknowns, and you could spend a day just hiking around on a walk through Croatia’s and Yugoslavia’s history. 

On my last visit I toured the monuments. As I photographed at the Tomb of the People’s Heroes and the nearby Partisan cemetery, I spotted a woman in a business suit marching toward me, followed slowly and at a distance by two big dudes in bomber jackets. She waved no at me, then asked what I was doing. I opted to speak English and play a dumb tourist with as thick an American accent as I could believably muster. It turns out photography without a permit is not allowed at the cemetery. 

Mirogoj is also host to a German military cemetery, where over 2,000 World War II dead Germans from all over Croatia are interred. It was established in 1996 by a German apolitical organization caring for fallen German soldiers. 

One crucial element of Yugoslav, or any cemetery, that Lilly highlights in her work is exclusion: it’s not just about who is buried but also who isn’t. Quote, “the cemeteries created by the regime for soldiers and other victims of war (…) were cemeteries for the winners, not for either occupiers or those domestic soldiers who had fought against the Communist regime and lost.” 

CAROL LILLY: And anybody who died on the other side of the war that you don’t talk about at all, and you don’t memorialize them. Those people just got disappeared. They had been the enemy. 

PETER KORCHNAK: At Mirogoj, under the previous mayor a controversy erupted around the plan to create a cemetery for Croatian soldiers who died in World War II. Ustaše, cried the opponents; Partisans were Croats too, said the proponents. The idea seems to have died with the mayor. 

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PETER KORCHNAK: Whereas the burial or re-burial, remembrance, and commemoration of those who died in the People’s Liberation War during the Second World War was at the top of Yugoslavia’s priorities, Lilly writes that “the party paid very little attention to the role of civilian burial culture or to cemeteries as potential communities of the dead.” There were almost no discussions or laws about cemeteries. 

CAROL LILLY: With the partisans, they were all buried together and there was no differentiation between ethnicity, religion, background. 

But when you get to the civilian graves, I had gone in with the expectation somehow, that the communists would be trying to create new communities of the dead to go along with the new communities of the living that they would be trying to create also. Not Yugoslavism, per se, but communities that could live together that would be pluralistic and secular. And they didn’t really try to do that much. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Before we tackle this grave issue, a few words on burial practices in the four main religions. Very briefly.

Catholic cemeteries are traditionally built close but on the edge of towns and connected to a church; municipal cemeteries are common in larger towns and cities, though again there is at least a chapel there.

The deceased is taken from home, mortuary, or church in a procession to the cemetery for burial. There is a requiem mass and the body buried along the east-west axis with feet to the east, to better face the Lord at Resurrection. Because of space constraints, particularly in urban areas, spouses and even entire families are often buried in the same grave, with coffins stacked.

Graves reflect status and social divisions, from placement of graves to gravestones: the richer or more important you were, the better your resting place location and the more impressive your headstone (the really rich and famous have statues or even crypts or mausoleums built for them or their families). Graves are often leased for a period, after which remains may be removed and placed into ossuaries, giving way to new renters of the gravesite to be buried there.

Cremation, legal in the Church since the Vatican lifted the ban on the practice in 1965, is also common nowadays. Space and cost are a major consideration here. Many cemeteries have dedicated spaces for urns, the columbarium.

Burial practices in Orthodox Christianity are similar to Roman Catholicism. The one major difference is the cult of the dead and ancestors, as great value is placed on family. Burials entail more elaborate, dramatic rituals to mark the transition from this world to the next, including visitations at home and gravesites, lamentations, and the inclusion of gifts and food throughout. Cremation is not allowed, though there is a practice of placing bones in ossuaries after some time.

Muslims see death as another stage of life. There is no cult of death and very little by way of visiting or praying at graves. Cemeteries are commonly incorporated into built areas, though often attached to a mosque or shrine. As one Sarajevo local told me, “the cemeteries are a daily reminder that today I am here but tomorrow I can be dead.” 

Similar to Jews, Muslims bury bodies in individual graves quickly after death, with the funereal procession playing an important role in the ritual. The deceased is placed on their right side, facing Mecca. 

Jews don’t bury their dead near temples. Cemeteries are on the edge of town, always separate from other faiths though sometimes a separate section of one cemetery. Jewish cemeteries are even more sacred than the synagogues. Whole bodies must be buried and never disturbed, so graves cannot be rotated as among the Catholics or bones removed as among the Orthodox. There are also no mass graves, every body must be have its own site. Burial rituals are aplenty, but all bodies and gravesites are equal. Cremation is not allowed.

Finally, communists encouraged cremation as an egalitarian, hygienic, and inexpensive practice. Not very hard, though. To date, there is not a single crematorium in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even as the popularity of cremation has been growing, the construction of the crematorium at the Vlakovo cemetery in Sarajevo, which started in 2019, is on hold and Bosnians continue cremate their dead in neighboring Croatia and Serbia.

In any case, the Yugoslav regime banned commemorations of religious holidays, including Christmas. It took over the birth, marriage, and death records. But for the most part the communists left burials within the private sphere. There was a government organization responsible for mediating between religious communities and the Communist regime called the Commission for Religious Questions. But in general the regime allowed citizens considerable freedom in religious burial rites and commemoration of the dead, viewing them as personal matters and relating to ethnoreligious identity. The only government-related piece was the use of municipal funeral services and burial in municipal cemeteries.

Pretty much the only concerted and successful effort the communists undertook in this sphere was the secularization of cemeteries.

CAROL LILLY: They did try to a considerable degree to secularize cemeteries because nearly all of the cemeteries up to this point had been religious cemeteries, that is what would call confessional cemeteries Catholic cemeteries, Orthodox cemeteries, Muslim cemeteries, Jewish cemeteries, right. Particularly in Croatia, they tried and were pretty successful by the mid 60s, in taking over management of the cemeteries so that they were no longer owned by, managed by the Catholic Church. 

It was a different situation in Serbia, because most of them were already under sort of communal management. So it was pretty easy to just take them over, right, they weren’t mostly owned by the Orthodox Church. They took over, they secularized them fairly quickly. 

They hardly even tried to do that in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they just didn’t. They left them in the hands of religious organizations, religious entities, up until the 80s. 

And then the other thing they didn’t really try to do was, even where they took over management, they didn’t really try to integrate them. They left them, in most cases, with either separate cemeteries or separate sections within cemeteries for all of the ethno-religious communities. So that you still had Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, and then a separate section for atheists, buried separately. I could see how they didn’t want to get into trouble with these groups. But still, I felt surprised by it.

PETER KORCHNAK: Serbia and Croatia secularized their cemeteries by the mid-1960s. The process was particularly fraught in traditionally Catholic and church-owned Croatia. By contrast nearly one third of cemeteries in Bosnia-Hercegovina remained in the hands of the religious communities by the mid-1980s; here the state and the Islamic Religious Community viewed each other more favorably and the region was more diverse and mixed so that any attempts at secularization were much trickier.

Even as the regime sought to secularize cemeteries and modernize funerals for hygienic purposes, writes Lilly, “it did so inconsistently, while at the same time, it largely left the previous system of ethnoreligious segregation in place. Ethnoreligiously segregated burials remained the rule, whether in separate cemeteries or separate sections of cemeteries, municipal or confessional.”  

The regime created new cemeteries as well, but all but two were organized along ethnoreligious lines. The exceptions were Nova Bežanija and Lešče in Belgrade, probably the only integrated cemeteries in the former Yugoslavia where people of different religions were buried side by side, rather than in different sections.

The question here is, why did the Yugoslav communists not try to stamp out religion from the cemetery or take over cemeteries completely?

For one, writes Lilly, “religious communities and organizations were widely recognized as representatives for the nation [and so] rights and privileges granted to religion in the private sphere accrued to the associated nation and vice versa.” So the communists—

CAROL LILLY: —didn’t want to mess with something that might cause trouble. 

PETER KORCHNAK:  In addition, the Yugoslav Communists wanted to differentiate their policies from those of the Soviet Union, and maintain unity across the country to better face the recurring threat of Soviet invasion. 

Or perhaps it was just too complicated a matter.

CAROL LILLY: Partly, I think they just didn’t think it through. They didn’t think oh, you know, this matters, the dead matter. And again, partly to be fair to them, they had a lot of other things to do. They had an economies to deal with, they had political problems to deal with, they had a lot of other issues that perhaps may have seemed more important to them. 

But the dead do matter. People pay a lot of attention to their dead. And you know, cemeteries are very often like neighborhoods, right? People go to their cemeteries, and they walk through them, and they see who’s there, and they see what the graves look like, and they pay a lot of attention to what the graves are. 

And the segregation of cemeteries means still the segregation of families and of neighborhoods and of ethno-religious communities. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Keeping the dead separated resulted in the failure to reinforce secularism, pluralism, or brotherhood and unity, according to Lilly. 

The socialist regime also, quote “made funerals and civilian cemeteries into legitimate spaces for political discourse by politicizing the funerals of its supporters and encouraging the placement of its own emblem, the five-pointed red star, on the graves of its supporters, while prohibiting any other political or national symbols.” 

CAROL LILLY: What they did do, however, that caused trouble was they politicized them. They left them segregated, but then brought politics into the cemeteries at the same time. And that’s where I think they really sort of did two things at the same time, that that were a pretty dangerous combination.

PETER KORCHNAK: “While most citizens were left to carry out burials as they wished without interference, the Communist regime expected all party, or even trade union members, to be buried in a strictly secular manner, and sometimes harassed those relatives who sought to incorporate religious rites,” Lilly writes. “As the communists had a monopoly on both political power and imagery, neither burial rituals nor grave markers could indicate support for any political organization other than that of the Communist party.  Thus, while the regime was willing to tolerate religious rites [and] religious symbols on grave markers, and ethnoreligiously segregated cemeteries, it insisted on complete political conformity even after death.” End quote. 

When I first saw a five-pointed star on a gravestone in the former Yugoslavia, my jaw dropped. You never see that in Czechoslovakia. What’s going on here? How did this happen? What did the communists do at these cemeteries?

CAROL LILLY: The Partisan cemeteries were only for people who actually died during the war. Any partisans or communists who died after the war were buried in civilian cemeteries. But then they had, or could have, really, almost anybody could have a Partisan star or a hammer-and-sickle, or some political insignia on their gravestones. 

But you know, as we know, if people who, who wanted to get ahead in the world, became members of the party. And then they put the star on their gravestones and sometimes even on their children’s grave stones, which was super weird. So people saw them frequently. But you couldn’t have any other political insignia on a gravestone, obviously. So politics comes in to the cemetery, but only for the communists.

PETER KORCHNAK: Deceased war veterans could be buried with religious rites but the veterans association had to be involved in the ceremony. The petokraka, the five-pointed star, was obligatory on gravestones of these veterans. Communist Party members or even supporters, too, were buried in civilian cemeteries in graves featuring the five-pointed star. Some of these headstones included the Soviet hammer and sickle or engraved images of the deceased in uniform. Conversely, ranking communist officials would not have religious funerals. This would sometimes lead to conflicts, as when the descendants would want a religious funeral for their communist loved one.

CAROL LILLY: The star— I could never find any rule that said who could have a star on their grave. There’s a baby that has a star on his grave. If they can have a star on there, I don’t think there’s a rule. I’m pretty sure that kid didn’t pass a test that made him a member of the party. That was just a parent who, you know, wanted to prove that they were good, loyal. 

I never found any laws that talked about it, except the one or two that said, don’t put anything on the gravestone that would incite religious or national hatred. And even that was pretty rare.

PETER KORCHNAK: At every cemetery in the former Yugoslavia I look for the five-pointed star. Not because I love it for any particular reason, but to get a sense of the community and local history. How quote unquote communist was it? How many Partisans or veterans lived in the area? And, which of course I can never know, how many stars have been removed from gravestones since the fall of Yugoslavia? 

One of the best cemeteries in this regard, in fact in terms of everything we’ve talked about so far is in Zemun. Whenever I’m in Belgrade, I make a trip out to the Zemun Cemetery.

Zemun was the last Austro-Hungarian town before the border with Ottoman Empire and Belgrade, of which it’s now a suburb.

The Zemun Cemetery, up on Gardoš Hill, is a cultural monument. It started out as a Catholic cemetery, then an Orthodox section was added, then a Jewish one. A few gravestones remain from the Muslim section and the newest section is dedicated to Partisans and veterans. Graves face every which way. There’s also a columbarium, several monuments and plaques, and quite a few statues on graves, including by major Yugoslav-period sculptors. My favorite is the statue of a Partisan throwing a hand grenade on the Abafy family grave. Quite a few gravestones across the cemetery bear the five-pointed star.

If the Zemun cemetery is a hodgepodge of graves and headstones, some of the most interesting graves anywhere were those of people in mixed marriages, that is people who were not just of different nationality but religion.

CAROL LILLY: You have these weird choices to make? Well, okay, so whose side of the cemetery are we going to be on? And again, you know, probably most of them were atheists and they didn’t really care. But not always. Or the kids of mixed marriages, they have to make these you know, choices. Maybe in some places, this wouldn’t matter, but this is Yugoslavia. They wanted to have these mixed marriages. And yet, here’s what they’re doing. 

[SOUNDBITE/BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Yugoslav Space Program” by Sticky Keys]

Listeners of Remembering Yugoslavia like you, include ex- and post-Yugoslavs, yugodiasporans, yugophiles, and all the yugocurious across the globe. There’s a new place where can all gather and socialize, exchange stories and ideas, organize or support each other. 

Yugoblok is a “global community for all who celebrate Yugoslavia’s legacy, cultivate its memory, and imagine its future possibilities.” It’s a membership-based social network where you and other members with an individualized profile can share thoughts, opinions, links, photos, questions; you can connect, socialize, and chat with each other; you can create groups around shared interests. It’s like that one big blue social network but with a singular focus and without the trolls and AI.

“This is a great idea,” said one new community member.

Yugoblok is also the new home for both the podcast and my writing, it’s a destination guide, an event venue, a publishing platform, and a shop with original yugo-inspired designs.

It’s all Yugoslavia, all the time.

Most of Yugoblok is free, and a paid membership opens access to even more, including extended and bonus podcasts, additional features, archives, discounts, and more. 

Dozens of people have already signed on to be members of this burgeoning community, including Aleksandar, Alexander, Allen, Billie, Carol, Dyani, Eamon, Gregg, Irina, Irma, James, Matt, and Sofija.

Join them and make Yugoblok your own at Yugoblok.com.

[SOUNDBITE]

“Comrade Tito has died,” announced Miodrag Zdravković on Yugoslav television in the evening of May 4th, 1980. 

[SOUNDBITE]

That’s Morton Dean on CBS Evening News.

Tito’s funeral took place four days later.

PETER KORCHNAK: That story is in the extended version of this episode, available exclusively to HERO members of Yugoblok. Visit Yugoblok.com/Join to register and listen.

[SOUNDBITE] 

CAROL LILLY: As soon as Yugoslavia starts to fall apart, politics comes into the cemetery again, but in a pretty ugly way. And all of those political insignia from the nationalist parties start showing up almost right away in the 90s, even earlier in Kosovo.

PETER KORCHNAK: After Tito, in the 1980s, people in Yugoslavia felt freer to express themselves. That included the dead, burials, cemeteries, and gravestones. 

As in other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the end of communism saw a wave of reburials of important figures and the war dead in the former Yugoslavia. 

CAROL LILLY: In Serbia, when they took the remains of King Lazar and carried them all around the entire country, right in 1989, you know, this is another way of taking the remains of a, you know, an ancient body and using it as a way of sort of showing that all of this territory is ours. 

Then there were the reburials in these mass graves from the Second World War where, you know, bones of and bodies of people found in pits were relocated. And then they had these, you know, massive ceremonies and dug them up and buried them properly. And, you know, that’s all great. I mean, if this brings comfort to the families of those people there is not a thing wrong with it—up to the point where it becomes fodder for nationalist politicians, which it did. 

And it was used for Serbian politicians against Croatia and Croatian politicians against the communists and the Serbs, and in all possible cases. This was all both before and during the dissolution of Yugoslavia. 

The politicization, the ethnicization of dead bodies was, you know, going on throughout and following those wars.

PETER KORCHNAK: In the late 1980s and the turn of the 90s, the Serbian Orthodox Church held huge masses at exhumations and reburials of Serbs killed by the wartime Ustaše regime in Serbian dominated parts of Croatia and dumped in pits scattered around the country’s karsts. The events, organized as nationalist rhetoric was reaching fever pitch, were said to have stoked the fires of ethnic resentment as they underscored the Serbs’ victimhood and pointed fingers at the Croat perpetrators. 

Since graves and gravestones at civilian cemeteries were expressions of or stand-ins for identity, they often became targets in the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Desecrations became a weapon. “Violence perpetrated against the dead served only to amplify and intensify violence among the living,” wrote Lilly.

CAROL LILLY: Again, this varies from place to place, right? I mean, it’s not like the first thing that every military wants to do is go out and desecrate cemeteries. But in some places, it seemed like— They certainly didn’t avoid it, and in some places, they figured out that it was it. it was helpful in that it made the enemy feel really, really bad. 

And I think particularly about the Serbs, because they have this really strong cult of death. And they were the ones who talked the most about desecrations of cemeteries even well before the war started. I mean, it was sort of a constant drum, “And they’re desecrating our cemeteries and they’re desecrating our cemeteries and it’s, you know, even worse than killing people.” 

This was what I heard all the time. And it was almost like a challenge sometimes. I don’t mean, to put the blame on them for it, that’s not my intention is, of course, it’s a terrible thing to do. But it was I’m not sure that it would have been so common if it were not so effective. 

The desecrations were nasty and vicious, and entirely effective. 

It was not only Orthodox cemeteries that were destroyed, absolutely not. There was also damage to Muslim cemeteries in Bosnia-Herzegovina  and to Catholic cemeteries. I saw less of that, because there were people there to repair them afterwards, so I didn’t get pictures of them. But statistically, I do think Orthodox cemeteries were far more frequently damaged, and possibly because it was a more effective weapon. 

And again, I blame the Communists partly for this because they were so politicized.

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: The choice of grave markers depends on official rules and regulations, social norms, and economic supply and demand. 

CAROL LILLY: The public sphere’s influence on the choice of a grave marker is pretty extraordinary. 

One of the things that happens in the US that I think makes cemeteries so dull is that cemetery administrators have all these rules about what you can and can’t have. They tried for a while to insist that you couldn’t even really have vertical monuments in American cemeteries because it makes mowing so difficult. They just wanted to have little plaques on the ground. And that you couldn’t have, well, you really cannot have any real bushes or plants, because it just makes it so hard for the administrators and they mess things up. And all of those dead flowers are, you know, inconvenient and ugly. And they at one point, didn’t want to have photographs on graves because they bring the thought of death too close to people. It’s like, really? What is wrong with you people? And so that’s one extreme. 

And the communists are another extreme right? So you know, let’s not have too much religious stuff. And let’s not have too much of this or too much of that, but they didn’t actually specify it, right, it was just sort of understood, a kind of degree of, don’t display your wealth too much, because you don’t really want the communists to know you have it, not for one thing. It’s inappropriate. 

The other extreme is then of course, what happens after the fall of communism, and people are putting everything—not all people, some people—putting a lot of money into their grave markers. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Most importantly, the economic and political relations surrounding death and burials changed from the socialist to capitalist framework. Commercial enterprises took over the monument industry. The limits of what was not just permitted by regulations but also acceptable in terms of social norms relaxed even further. 

At historic cemeteries like Mirogoj, rules and regulations were updated and remained strict. At others, this doesn’t seem to have been the case.

The most fascinating cemetery in this regard is the Municipal Cemetery in Banja Luka. I went there with a view of visiting the Partisan Memorial Cemetery and the monument on the premises.

The graves along the way were just as fascinating, in both the Orthodox and the Muslim sections. Yes, there are quite a few headstones with the five-pointed star, and a few bigger ones with sculptures. A large number of gravestones bear engraved images of the deceased along with their mottos. There’s a man in a suit standing next to a Mercedes. Another in a leather jacket holding a bottle of liquor. Yet another in a white tanktop is sitting and raising a glass to the visitor. There’s a couple smoking on a sofa. There are also these lifesize, full-color, holographic-like images embedded in glass set in an arched stone frame. 

CAROL LILLY: You know, one might say it’s not all in the best of taste. Not that it’s any of my business, I wouldn’t say but it is a little stunning sometimes. And they tell you a lot about how people perceive their own identities without any rules. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The gravestone Lilly ends her book with is a large one near the main gate. Five families with names suggesting Catholic and Orthodox and Muslim heritage, bearing engravings of a Catholic cross, and Orthodox cross, a star in a crescent moon, and a five-pointed Partisan star. 

“This grave marker is very close to what the Communist regime should have been aiming for,” writes Lilly. “The future residents of this grave, while admittedly still specifying their religious affiliation, do so with complete tolerance for one another on one grave marker. It provides hope for a better future, even as they have come from one failed state and live in another that is still struggling.”

[BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Rubiroza” by Detective Spook]

PETER KORCHNAK: When I was a boy, maybe in first grade, I asked my parents if I could have a piece of the garden at our family cabin to play. My parents agreed, presumably thinking I would plant something. The plot, perhaps one square meter next to the compost bin was dispensable anyway. I leveled the plot into perfection and platted some roads for my toy dump truck, which I used to haul dirt around and make little uniform mounds arranged in a grid. Then I broke up a bunch of straight twigs and used pieces of string to fashion them into small crosses which I then stuck in the ground next to the mounds. When my parents saw that, rather than a garden, I made a cemetery, they confiscated my land, razed it with their boots, and stored firewood there.

My last day job before the pandemic was with an end-of-life advocacy organization, promoting pioneering legislation that allows people who are dying from terminal illness to choose when and how they die.

Which is to say, I’ve had a lifelong fascination with death. A cemetery is always on my itinerary, everywhere I go. And I’ve long been fascinated by the cemeteries in the former Yugoslavia. It’s hard to believe it took me this long to tackle the subject on the show; I guess death comes for all of us eventually. 

Carol Lilly will be back on Yugoblok on the eve of the Day of the Dead. On November 1st she will give an online, Zoom talk at Yugoblok about Yugoslav cemeteries. It’s free for members. Visit Yugoblok.com/Events to get your ticket.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/Podcasts. And while you’re there, join Yugoblok as a member and take part in a growing community of yugophiles and others.  

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Additional music courtesy of Detective Spook and Sticky Keys. Thank you! 

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!