The Ruins of Memory. Dissonance and Conflict at the Partisan Cemetery in Mostar

This article examines the Partisan Memorial Cemetery of Mostar, designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and inaugurated in 1965, as a paradigmatic example of dissonant funerary heritage in a post-conflict context. Moving beyond interpretations focused exclusively on its architectural and symbolic qualities, the study emphasises the cemetery’s primary function as a burial place and the ethical significance attached to graves, names, individual biographies, and human remains. The analysis reconstructs the historical and cultural conditions surrounding the monument’s creation within socialist Yugoslavia, where memorial architecture contributed to the construction of a shared antifascist narrative based on Brotherhood and Unity. It then explores the cemetery’s spatial organisation, its integration with the landscape, and the symbolic dialogue established between the “city of the dead” and the living city of Mostar. Particular attention is devoted to the transformations that followed the conflicts of the 1990s, including abandonment, recurrent vandalism, institutional protection, and the systematic destruction of approximately seven hundred commemorative plaques in 2022. The article argues that this act constituted not merely an attack on a significant work of twentieth-century architecture, but a deliberate assault on the funerary core of the monument and on the identities of the individuals commemorated there. The case demonstrates the limitations of conservation strategies based solely on legal designation, material restoration, or aesthetic appreciation. It therefore calls for approaches capable of addressing material vulnerability together with contested memory, political responsibility, social recognition, dignity, mourning, and respect for the dead.