What is a spomenik? Tour former Yugoslavia’s lost brutalist symbols of unity

It’s tempting to see spomeniks as just another example of Soviet brutalism; concrete, modernist, midcentury, perfect for heavy coffee table books and ‘concrete clickbait.’ Describing these peculiar war memorials of former Yugoslavia in 2013, The Guardian newspaper likened them to 'alien landings, crop circles or Pink Floyd album covers'.

A guide to spomenik design

Yet, beyond their staggering size and otherworldly beauty, spomeniks tell a complex story about trauma, memory, and collective identity in a newly formed nation reckoning with the effects of war. Here is our guide to what these amazing structures are, what they mean, the key proponents, and some representative examples.

What are spomeniks?

When the Axis forces invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, a multi-ethnic antifascist partisan movement emerged to successfully fight back against the occupation. After the Second World War, Josip Tito’s new Socialist Federal Republic wanted to commemorate these fighters, along with the million civilian casualties of the war. A monument series – the spomeniks (a word derived from the Serb-Croat word for ‘memory’) – was chosen as the way forward. Planned to be dotted around Yugoslavia’s six states, their presence was intended to build a shared, universal language of ‘unity and brotherhood’ (bratstvo i jedinstvo) across the country's religious and ethnic differences.

Unlike socialist-realist sculptures of generals and fighters, spomeniks drew on the orientation towards Western modernism following Tito’s split from the USSR in 1948. Spomeniks were to be highly symbolic and abstract, doubling up as outdoor classrooms where schoolchildren could be inoculated with the current government's single national liberation narrative. They were intended to invoke feelings of national and cultural togetherness, capable of endless reinterpretation in a permanent revolution toward progressive socialism.

By 1961, there were over 14,000 such monuments in Yugoslavia. By 1990, some estimate there were almost 40,000. Today, most spomeniks have been destroyed, abandoned, or forgotten – victims of the sectarian divisions that have re-emerged in the region since the 1990s. Unlike Stalin’s Treptower Park and its top-down grandeur, these abstract concrete blocks are particularly interesting because they were largely commissioned, funded and built by local communities. In the end, Tito barely visited them at all.

A key representative: Bogdan Bogdanović

Serbian architect and intellectual Bogdan Bogdanović (1922-2010) designed many spomeniks. His first project, The Stone Flower (1960-66), was a 24m ‘melancholy lotus’ on the banks of the Sava River in Jasenovac, Croatia. Built on the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp, the flower is a memorial to the 100,000 people who died at the hands of fascist Croatian Ustaše forces. Rather than dwell on inter-ethnic conflict and bring 'evil back to life', however, Bogdanović’s lotus symbolises rebirth and renewal. Reflecting on building the monument in an interview in 2008, Bogdanović said that he won the commission because, quite simply, his 'surrealist biography' was not 'Russian'.

Another example is Bogdanović’s 19m Monument to the Partisans and Miners (1959-73) on Partisan Hill in Kosovo, built to commemorate local Serbian and Albanian partisan fighters. Bogdanović was selected by the regional government and veteran group to build this ‘shrine to the revolution’, a trilithon topped with an ore-shaped block, a reference to the site’s mining history.

The two fluted Doric columns represented the once-unified Serbs and Albanians, with the gap between them symbolising a ‘gateway’ to a peaceful future. Tito’s Young Pioneers regularly visited the site in a kind of secular pilgrimage. Vandalised and disused, today the spomenik, better known locally as ‘the barbecue’, overlooks this segregated city, although, according to Kosovo's tourism website, it has ‘lost its symbolic meaning’.

The case of the Partisan Memorial Cemetery

Perhaps most significant of all of his projects is Bogdanović’s Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar, Bosnia (1960-65). Built to commemorate local antifascist Partisan fighters, the necropolis was the architect's most complex project. The staggering tiered spomenik sits in the hills above Mostar and originally featured 87,000 pebbles and 700 flower-stone plaques, engraved with the names of Serb, Jewish, Croat, Bosniak, and Roma fighters.

Void of religious, nationalist, socialist or military symbolism, and resembling a 'cosmological sundial', Bogdanović’s secular memorial was intended to be close to everyone. A fountain, mimicking Mostar’s Neretva River, originally descended into a large pool at the hill’s base, where children used to learn to swim. Carvings were done by Croatian masons while civic volunteer groups were responsible for its construction. Mostar’s citizens referred to the site as a ‘park’, ‘playground’, and ‘place for a picnic’, embedded in everyday life. Like other spomeniks, funding came from local government, trade groups and families.

Bogdanović became an honorary citizen of the town upon completing the project. Yet, when he returned to the site in 1997, he noted in a piece he wrote in the local Mostar news magazine, MM, that the 'former city of the dead and the former city of the living' now looked at each other with 'empty, black and burned eyes'. An iconic symbol of brotherhood and unity, the site was the first to be targeted, set alight and graffitied when war broke out in 1992. The site was recently seen deserted, save for empty beer bottles and smashed fragments of the 700 memorial stones.

New imaginings – spomeniks now

Concrete is often considered the bane of midcentury modernist architecture, but here its indestructible nature is a saving grace. Despite decades of sustained neglect and vandalism, many spomeniks still stand. Recently, a new generation of residents, architects and activists campaigned for their reconstruction. In 2023, Mostar’s memorial cemetery was added to the EU-funded Europa Nostra’s endangered monuments list. On its 60th anniversary in September 2025, the spomenik was brought to life for a night of theatre and performance, organised by a collective of young Mostar artists as part of the city's Street Art Festival.

Over the past decade, more spomeniks across former Yugoslavia have been carefully restored, reclaimed or repurposed (at least one has been turned into a radio tower, while in others the names of Second World War veterans were replaced by those of the victims of the Yugoslav wars). Renewed interest in the sites has been prompted by savvy internet sleuths, ‘Yugonostalgia’, international attention (spomeniks featured in a 2018 MoMA exhibition), and a healthy dose of concrete clickbait.

While a return to the spirit of brotherhood and unity that the spomeniks represented might not have a direct interpretation today, these enduring structures have the potential to take on new meanings in new contexts. Rather than represent ideological abandonment, spomeniks' abstraction is their greatest legacy. Writing about the Mostar cemetery, Bogdanović was asked: 'How will generations after us interpret this building?' His response was clear: 'Many associations are possible [and] various imaginings.'