PARTISAN CEMETERY

Established in 1965, this memorial cemetery (Partizansko Spomen Groblje) is one of the largest in the former Yugoslavia. Lacking maintenance today, it is located on a hill in the Trimuša forest park to the west of the city. The site houses 810 graves of partisans from the Mostar region who died in the Second World War. The complex was designed by Bogdan Bogdanović (1922-2010), whose work includes the Stone Flower in the former Croatian concentration camp of Jasenovac-Donja Gradina. Here, the Serbian architect blended two major artistic movements: land art, using relief and natural materials, and brutalism, with numerous raw concrete elements. The cemetery was conceived as a large garden crossed by a 250 m-long path. Bogdanović took the Neretva River as his source of inspiration: the path is conceived as a river that meanders over a cobbled floor from the Neretva, leading to an immense "cascade" of stone and concrete blocks embedded in greenery. Here lie the bodies of 560 partisans (not all the remains have been found), eight of whom, considered "national heroes", are buried in a circular mausoleum at the top of the "cascade". Bogdanović chose not to include "any symbols of death iconography or socialist realism". In 2022, the cemetery was severely vandalized. It is now classified as "endangered heritage" by Unesco.