The entrance to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery sits relatively discreetly along the lower western flank of Bijeli Brijeg, where a broad cobbled avenue guides visitors into a shaded area. This cemetery was near to the accommodation where Jonathan and I were staying in Mostar, and it had caught our attention as an intriguing site with a traumatic recent past
The site was commissioned in 1959 and formally dedicated in 1965, with the monument being created to honour the hundreds of citizens from Mostar who died as anti-fascist Partisans during the Second World War. It was all designed by the Belgrade architect Bogdan Bogdanović and he wanted something more organic than just another graveyard with stones lined up in rows. His intentions were noble and it doesn’t take long to see what he was trying to achieve.
Today, the whole arrangement feels a little less peaceful when arriving as the car park was pot-holed, the site has nearly no signage and it almost feels like it doesn’t want visitors. Given the lack of signage, I was fortunate to have Jonathan there who has a much better retention of historical facts to help me piece this whole complex political jigsaw together.
Passing beyond the outer gate reveals the ramps that lead visitors further into the main part of the graveyard. I didn’t understand this section which doesn’t go anywhere, but I wondered whether it was formerly some sort of water feature. I had read that there were frequent issues with graffiti and that included Nazi symbols, although I only saw one example of this. This suggests that there is some routine maintenance going on here to stop things from getting worse, but that this doesn’t extend to restoring what has already been damaged.
Walking up to the main memorial, tens of thousands of rounded river cobbles and salvaged limestone blocks were brought up from the river-bed and old ruined houses across Mostar to build these structures. Bogdanović rejected the more traditional orthodox socialist-realist monuments of the time, so there are no statues of soldiers charging with rifles or massive hammers and sickles. Although the accessibility options aren’t great here, the walk up to the site did add some grandeur and anticipation if nothing else.
The path then transitions into a narrow, dramatic stone corridor flanked by towering walls, small niches and arched openings that feel like the backstreets of a fortified medieval town. Bogdanović openly described this complex as an architectural representation of historic Mostar, designed to mirror its narrow lanes and unexpected turns. It was meant to create an element of discovery, although I found this whole section a little sinister even in the bright sun.
There are beautiful views over Mostar and in the 1970s and 1980s, this space was used as a public park. Sadly, the site’s location on the western side of Mostar placed it on the frontline during the tragic 1992–1995 war, when the city was split by brutal fighting between Croat and Bosniak forces. In the decades that followed, the monument became an ideological flashpoint in a divided city, frequently suffering from severe municipal neglect, political deadlock and repeated bouts of vandalism. There were many people who wanted this graveyard to be restored, but there were many other competing demands on resources and a rather limited system of local government available.
Emerging into the main amphitheatre reveals the sheer scale of the memorial and it is an impressive sight to look at, with its former glory not too hard to picture.
Looking across the amphitheatre from its lower boundary gives more of a clear perspective on the site’s sweeping layout, but evidence of modern political hostility is now visible. In June 2022, the memorial suffered a sad act of planned desecration when vandals entered the site overnight and smashed around seven hundred headstones with sledgehammers, reducing decades of memory to rubble.
Although the site was declared a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2006, securing more reliable funding, maintenance and proper perimeter security has proved to be an endless struggle. I must note that 2022 felt very recent when we were reading about this site, a reminder of how challenging the problems in this city still are, however much things are getting better.
It’s hard not to be saddened by the current state of the cemetery, with broken fragments of stone strewn everywhere and pieces of litter scattered in between. Crouching down to read these fragments didn’t feel quite as they were intended to be read.
This stone marker commemorates Borivoje D. Zubac, a Mostar native born in 1917 who died in 1942 at the Mamula concentration camp at the age of just twenty-five. Mamula, an island fortress situated at the entrance to the Bay of Kotor, was converted by fascist Italian occupation forces into a brutal prison camp where hundreds of partisans and civilians were starved, tortured and executed. There aren’t many identifiable stones left now, so this one felt important simply because it had survived.
A short distance away lies another shattered marker resting in the dry grass and what makes this cemetery historically unique is that it includes the names of fallen fighters from every community across Mostar, with Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats and Jews resting together without distinction of faith or ethnicity. Yet even smashed and half-buried in the soil, these limestone fragments stubbornly preserve the identities of the citizens who laid down their lives, backed up by photos of the markers at https://partizansko.info/en/ before they were smashed up. Certainly in adding context to the history of this site, this website really is very useful and I’m pleased that it has a record of the stones.
Fresh spring water originally welled up from the centre of this stone structure before flowing down through the terraces and winding channels to the entrance below. Though the water has long ceased to run and the stone shows decades of weathering, this does offer something of a glimpse of what was once here. I’m also not sure that it would require a huge amount of resources to be restored, but the challenge is perhaps more in ensuring that it’s not vandalised again.
Looking towards the valley from the top of the cemetery, it all tells the story of peace and hatred which has unfolded in this region over recent decades. It remains haunting and extraordinary, so I was glad to see it, but hopefully in the future it can be restored once again. Our next stop was the Bruce Lee statue, something of a contrast to this, but it had the aim of trying to unify the different communities in Mostar.