The Legacy Of Serbia's 'Spomenik' Master

This October 2019 shot is one of the last images taken of Serbian sculptor Miodrag Zivkovic, who died in Belgrade on July 31 aged 93.
 
Zivkovic was born in the southern Serbian town of Leskovac in 1928. By age 20 he had won a national Yugoslav sculpture contest and then began teaching. Zivkovic also applied for various public art commissions, winning several that resulted in some of the most iconic "spomeniks" (the Serbo-Croatian word for memorial) in Yugoslavia.
 

The Kadinjaca Memorial Complex, which was completed in 1979, stands on a hilltop above a town in western Serbia where partisans and a “workers’ battalion” fought Nazi troops in November 1941. The battle ended in the deaths of nearly all of the 400 workers who fought to give civilians time to flee the Nazi advance.

A detail of the Kadinjaca memorial. The “bullet hole” can be seen from kilometers away in the valleys below.  
 

Interrupted Flight in the Sumarice Memorial Park in central Serbia
 
The white concrete monument was completed in 1963 and marks the massacre of some 2,300 civilians by Nazi forces in 1941 as reprisal for a Yugoslav Partisan attack on German forces. Among those killed were scores of students and several teachers, represented by the children’s faces that can be seen texturing the monument's surface.

The most famous of Zivkovic’s monuments is this memorial to the 1943 battle of Sutjeska in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The angular concrete landmark was unveiled by authoritarian Yugoslav ruler Josep Broz Tito in 1971.

A rear view of the Sutjeska monument
 
Zivkovic told the BBC that he was given “unlimited freedom to do what I wanted” with the monument. At the unveiling, the artist stood next to the stiffly dressed Tito wearing “a sweater...and purple pants; I dared to do it because I’m an artist.”
 

Monument to Brotherhood and Unity in Pristina, Kosovo
 
The three columns are supposed to represent the three main ethnicities who lived in Pristina during the Yugoslav period: Serbs, Albanians, and Montenegrins.

The monument to courage in Ostra, central Serbia, commemorating men from a nearby city who died fighting Nazi troops in World War II.
 

The aluminum-panelled Ostra monument
 
According to Donald Niebyl, who manages a website dedicated to the former Yugoslavia’s memorials, a now-faded inscription near the monument once read: “In fighting 500 hostile soldiers, 14 dead and 11 surviving Partisans affirmed Serbia's history which never once made peace with slavery. This you should know, my descendants...during the liberation war of 1941-1945, the Cacak Partisan Detachment was dying but was reborn, and it testifies that freedom may lose some battles but it will never lose the war.”