MONUMENT TO MINERS

This monument (Spomenik rudarima junacima, Monumenti i minatorëve të rënë) overlooks Mitrovica from Miners' Hill, 560 m above sea level. Placed under the Zvečan fortress, it is one of the most important memorials in the former socialist Yugoslavia. Rising to a height of 19 m, this concrete structure consists of two pyramidal columns supporting a huge "cradle". Surrounded by a memorial park, it was erected in 1973 to celebrate the acts of resistance of the miners of Trepča during the Second World War. The monument has suffered numerous damages since 1999. Initially, the sculpture was covered with copper, but this has almost disappeared. The economic lung of Kosovo, the mines of Trepča (12 km to the northeast), rich in lead and zinc, were an important issue during all conflicts for the past five centuries. They remain today the country's main working-class bastion.

The sabotage of 1941. On July 30, 1941, four months after the beginning of the German occupation, the miners of Trepča blew up part of the facilities. This action had a devastating effect on the Nazi war industry, since Trepča was to supply 40% of the lead needed to make batteries for the German submarines then skimming the Atlantic. Some of the Serbian and Albanian miners from Trepča then formed a partisan unit that fought throughout the war, participating in the liberation of Mitrovica on 23 November 1944. The work thus pays tribute both to the sabotage of 1941 and to all the miner-partisans who died during the occupation. Its creator, Bogdan Bogdanović (1922-2010), is the most famous architect of socialist Yugoslavia. He is credited with some twenty memorials throughout the former Federation, including the Stone Flower (1966), in memory of the victims of the Jasenovac extermination camp in Croatia. Bogdanović conceived the Mitrovica monument as a double symbol. The "cradle" placed at the top of the building actually represents a sedan, a wagon that circulated in the galleries of the Trepča mines. The whole monument evokes a "door" between the north and south of the city, a place of reconciliation between Serbs and Albanians. A Serb himself, Bogdanović fought all his life for humanist values and against nationalism. A leading figure in the opposition to Slobodan Milošević, he went into exile in Paris in 1993, and then in Vienna, Austria, where he died in 2010.