engleski

Conflict, Commemorations, and Changing Meanings: The Meštrović Pavilion as a Contested Site of Memory

The collapse of communism, the resurgence of multiparty politics (including extreme nationalism), and subsequently the brutal war accompanying Yugoslavia’s disintegration all reawakened the ghosts of past conflicts in Croatia, specifically those tied to World War Two. Rather than “coming to terms with the past, ” the political elites in post-communist Croatia and the other Yugoslav successor states manipulated, distorted, and actively tapped into traumatic collective memories and contested histories for assuming power, which tragically contributed to a new cycle of war and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. This chapter examines the polemics over the revision of the historical narrative during Croatia’s transition from a single-party communist state to a multiparty democracy through the lens of the demonstrations organized to protest the removal of the Victims of Fascism Square from the capital’s physical landscape and collective consciousness. The significance of the actual square and the building (the pavilion designed by Ivan Meštrović) at the center of the controversy, the cooption of a former communist holiday (Victory over Fascism Day) to organize the protests against the Tuđman government, and the public debates over the (re)construction of Croatia’s culture of memory all shed light on the broader issue of the challenges facing the countries of the former Yugoslavia in dealing with the past.

Croatia, sites of memory, commemorations, Tuđman

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