DINZ德网 | 南斯拉夫的超凡纪念碑 · 伫立荒野的抗争与张力

The mighty, abstract concrete “spomeniks” are unique not just in their vaunting ambition to render in concrete, stone, metal and other materials the horror, the courage and the endurance of people’s resistance against Nazism but that Yugoslavia under Tito, a relatively short-lived unified country, shared a common concept of how to express the inexpressible.

In 2015 American Donald Niebyl happened on Belgian photographer Jan Kempanaers’ images of incredible memorial sculptures the likes of which he never could have imagined. He was instantly captivated and did all he could to learn more about them. These forms were communicating a huge amount of symbolic language and history from a region that to him seemed hopelessly out of reach. They are the spomeniks.

“The few articles in popular media I could find at the time had precious little information about them outside of describing them in unhelpful sensationalist terms ‘alien’ or ‘UFO’ or ‘otherworldly’”

Determined to learn about the history of these works, who created them, why were they created and why were they situated in such remote locations. Donald then travelled to the former Yugoslavia between jobs to see the monuments for himself. Tracking the locations down consisted largely of scouring Google Map satellite images until he spotted them. During his first trip in 2016, Donald found about 50 spomeniks, which he meticulously documented while friends he made along the way helped with the history, translating inscriptions and deciphering symbolism.

So started the “Spomenik Database” and, quickly, interest grew across the internet.Is Spomenik a direct translation of the word monument or is it something more, and which language is it in? “

The root of the word spomen- means memory in the same sense that the root of the word memorial is memory. However, the -ik ending of the word denotes a certain active nature that I think is special. For example, in the same South Slavic language group, the word rad means work in English, but when you add the -ik ending onto it, you get radnik which means worker”.

The word “spomenik” translates from the South Slavic languages of Slovenian, Macedonian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin into the English word “monument” or “memorial”. To me, it is a very interesting word.

Therefore, the word “spomenik” implies a non-passive dynamic element of the object, where it exists as a living functioning repository in the preservation of memory.

"…. and is there a particular reason that so many of them are so huge?"

"As far as your question about the immense scale on which many of these monuments exist, there are many components to this phenomenon. One unique component of WWII monument construction in Yugoslavia was monuments being constructed in the exact locations where events occurred, such as battles, massacres and historic episodes.

Not only did this better connect monuments to the events which they were meant to commemorate, but it also obliged those who wanted to visit the monuments to trek out of their way to the remote region where these monuments were situated. As a result,“what was created in Yugoslavia was a sort of “patriotic tourism” industry where the new middle class with their brand new Yugo car could, for the first time, go on holidays travelling around their country and, all the while, go on a sort of historical pilgrimage along the way from site to site."

The size of the monuments and their placement upon geographical features not only worked to symbolically underscore the immensity of the events being memorialized, but they also acted as pronounced punctuations upon the landscape that would draw and attract people instinctively towards them. Furthermore, I would also say that the potential intended symbolism of their size went an additional step.

Another point to remark on in the discussion of the word spomenik is its recent entrance into English and numerous other world languages as a word referring specifically to Yugoslav-era monuments. This phenomenon no doubt began with the above mentioned Belgian photographer Jan Kempanaers who published a collection of his images of these works in a 2015 photobook titled simply Spomeniks, with the photos often pointed to as being the instigator of global interest in these monuments. Various perspectives exist on the use of the word spomeniks in this regard with many embracing it as a unique word to refer to a distinct body of cultural heritage while others contend that its use in this way is inappropriate and only serves to further exoticize the often misunderstood monuments.

The discussion arises further around the pluralization of the word spomenik, which, when employing the languages’ grammar rules, is properly written as “spomenici”. However, as many outside of the former-Yugoslav region are unfamiliar with South Slavic grammar rules, the word is often pluralized by just adding an ‘s’ ending as spomeniks. This is seen not only just in English but also in numerous other languages as well. A multitude of perspectives around the phenomenon are also divided with many finding it a clever and innovative merging of languages, while others remark that such word constructions are silly or even problematic. To this day, conversations continue in many realms (from academia to tourism, to social media, to politics and further) about the framework within which Yugoslav-era antifascist monuments should be shared, remembered and valorized.