MEMORY AND MONUMENTAL REPRESENTATION OF THE GREAT WAR: BALKAN PROJECTIONS
The current article presents the main aspects of the memory about the First World War in the Balkans - through the perspective of its visualization in monuments and memorials, and with regards to the tendencies that these commemorative practices follow over the years. On the basis of examples from different Balkan countries, the article traces the main types of war monuments and outlines their place in the general European tendencies of memorial representation. The article outlines the major characteristics of monumental memory about the Great War in the peninsula, among which the monuments’ social function, the close connection of war memorials to the policies of national identity, and the role that monuments have in maintaining the visual memory of this First world confict. Already in the frst post-war decade, the monuments and the commemorations around them started being oriented in such a direction - to note the national community’s symbolic input in the war and to outline the national contours of memory in accordance with the pertinent political and state visions. Both the monuments that were created after the war and the meanings invested in them, changed gradually under the impact of various factors: the increasing distance to the war years, generational changes, the imposition of different political visions about the war memory, the eruption of new military conficts during the 20th century, and, not least, anniversaries and sober commemorations. Whilst in the frst post-war years, monuments and commemorations played a leading role in outlining the communities of the bereaved, who brought their mourning into the collective pantheon of shared suffering, during the following decades, they appeared rather in the position of a spatial and symbolic context for continuing political and id