Landscapes of Difficult Heritage [1st ed.] 9783030571245, 9783030571252

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Introduction (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 1-13
Front Matter ....Pages 15-15
Heritage, Violence and Temporalities (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 17-50
Memories, Landscapes and the Production of Narratives (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 51-77
Front Matter ....Pages 79-79
The Temporalities of Belonging (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 81-108
Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 109-131
Places of Reclaiming Continuity (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 133-153
Front Matter ....Pages 155-155
The Burden of the Past (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 157-185
The Temporalities of Gazimestan (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 187-203
Negated Spaces and Strategies of Irrelevance (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 205-225
Front Matter ....Pages 227-227
Prehistoric Violence as Difficult Heritage (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 229-260
A Place of Avoidance and Belonging (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 261-282
Front Matter ....Pages 283-283
Concluding Discussion (Gustav Wollentz)....Pages 285-292
Back Matter ....Pages 293-297

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONFLICT

Landscapes of Difficult Heritage Gustav Wollentz

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict Series Editors Ihab Saloul University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Rob van der Laarse University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Britt Baillie Wits City Institute University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts. Professor Ihab Saloul is founder and research co-director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) at University of Amsterdam and Professor of Memory Studies and Narrative at the Umberto Eco Centre at Bologna University. Saloul’s interests include cultural memory and identity politics, narrative theory and visual analysis, conflict and trauma, Diaspora and migration as well as contemporary cultural thought in the Middle East. Professor Rob van der Laarse is professor of Conflict and War Heritage at and the University of Amsterdam and VU University Amsterdam, and he was the founding director of the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Van der Laarse’s research focuses on (early) modern European elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, heritage and identity politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory of the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence. Dr. Britt Baillie is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand and a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflict Studies at the University of Cambridge. Baillie’s interests include the politics of cultural heritage, urban heritage, religious heritage, living heritage, heritage as commons, and contested heritage. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638

Gustav Wollentz

Landscapes of Difficult Heritage

Gustav Wollentz Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity Östersund, Sweden

ISSN 2634-6419        ISSN 2634-6427 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ISBN 978-3-030-57124-5    ISBN 978-3-030-57125-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Matt Carr, Getty Images. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to those who did not forget What would I be, if it were not for you? With love to Jessica

Acknowledgements

There are so many people who have helped me out in the process of preparing this book that it is difficult to know where to begin. However, ultimately, nothing of this would have been possible if it had not been for the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” (GSHDL) at Kiel University. The research was funded by the  German Research Foundation (DFG) through the GSHDL [Grant name GSC 208/2]. The GSHDL  provided me with an excellent working environment full of friendly colleagues involved with their own fascinating projects. I want to start off by thanking Johannes Müller, Antonia Davidovic-Walther and Cornelius Holtorf. Johannes Müller supported and trusted me in this project throughout the whole process. Antonia Davidovic-Walther provided invaluable help for me when preparing the fieldwork. I am also very thankful for the engaging discussions and for her sharp comments on various drafts. Cornelius Holtorf served as a constant rock of support through loads of stimulating conversation and always being there to read and comment on drafts. Thank you, Cornelius, it meant the world to me. Among my colleagues and friends at the GSHDL, particular thank you goes to Artur Ribeiro for proofreading and for stimulating discussions. I also have to thank my friend and colleague Gianpiero Di Maida, with whom I organized a small but successful workshop in September 2015. Thank you is also directed towards Milinda Hoo and Veronika Egetenmeyr and Christian Horn. In addition to that, among my colleagues and friends at the GSHDL I want to thank Natalia Égüez, Asli Oflaz, Marianne Talma, Clara Drummer, Marta Dal Corso, Marco Zanon and Stefanie Schaefer. Thank you for all the happy times and good memories! vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In preparing and carrying out the field work, a special thank you has to be directed to Marko Barišić for all the help provided as a translator during interviews and for his positive spirit and persistent belief in the effort of moving towards a better world. Furthermore, I received fantastic help from Damir Ugljen, Edona Rugova and Dea Luma during the fieldwork, in assisting as translators and advising me while preparing and carrying out the fieldwork. In Mostar, further thank you is directed to Riad Ćišić, Vedrana Tutiš Šimunović, Tatjana Mićević-Đurić, Ivanka Miličević-Capek, Edita Vučić, Nina Č uljak and Tino Tomas. In Kosovo, further thank you is directed to Milot Berisha, Boban Todorović, Enver Rexha and Haxhi Methmetaj. I also have to extend a big thank you to everyone involved in the Sandby borg project, and especially to Helena Victor for her guidance and help in the work I carried out. I was very happy to become part of the incredible Sandby borg team, and I look forward to continued work including more breath-taking discoveries. Therefore, a big thank you goes to the following amazing people: Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, Clara Alfsdotter, Fredrik Gunnarsson, Sophie Vallulv, Nicholas Nilsson, Viktoria Sandberg and Daniel Lindskog. I also want to thank the archaeologists at Linnaeus University, who taught me to love archaeology and heritage studies as a young Bachelor student many years ago. I remember my first class of Archaeology with Joakim Goldhahn as professor. I am very thankful for the friendship we have established over the years, and your influence on the way I approach science and the writing process should not be underestimated. I also have to thank Anders Högberg, for his belief, support and interest in my work. Additionally, I want to thank Bodil Petersson and Carolina Jonssson Malm. Among other research projects in Europe I want to extend particular thank you to the Cultural heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict (CRIC) project, based at Cambridge University. The research carried out within CRIC had a great impact upon me, and I was delighted when the team members of CRIC asked me to contribute to the next volume published as part of the project. I therefore extend a big thank you to Paola Filippucci, Dacia Viejo-Rose and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen. I also would like to thank the International Organization Bridging Ages, based at Kalmar County Museum, with a particular thank you to Ebbe Westergren. Furthermore, I want to thank the following people for helping me out in various ways, either through email correspondence or through

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interesting conversations: Oula Seitsonen, Giulia Carabelli, Aline Cateux, Sarah May, Laura McAtackney, Staffan Löfving, Martin Furholt, Gabriel Moshenska, Maria Persson, Mara Weinelt, Melisa Forić, Christian Meyer, Fabian Graham, Jutta Kneisel, Anna Storm, Nourah Sammar, Robert Hoffmann and Jelena Steigerwald,  Veselko  Barišić. Moreover, Frauke Sontberg provided invaluable help in the process! Additionally, I want to thank my mother and father Ann Johanson and Claes Wollentz, as well as Fredrik Wollentz  for being  the best brother imaginable. I also want to thank Birgitta Wollentz, Fred Johanson, Ann-Sofie Appelgren, Sinjini Dutta,  Niklas Lövgren, Erik Rinaldo, Alex Lenhammar and Rebecka Le Moine. My wife Jessica Bustamante has supported me throughout both the highs and the lows. Thank you for helping me with figures and maps, and thank you for putting up with me with so much patience, care and understanding. I love you. Finally, I have to thank all my anonymous interview partners who gave me their time, insights and knowledge. Without your help this book would never have been possible.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Part I The Theoretical Foundation  15 2 Heritage, Violence and Temporalities 17 3 Memories, Landscapes and the Production of Narratives 51 Part II Mostar  79 4 The Temporalities of Belonging 81 5 Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar109 6 Places of Reclaiming Continuity133 Part III Gazimestan 155 7 The Burden of the Past157 8 The Temporalities of Gazimestan187 xi

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Contents

9 Negated Spaces and Strategies of Irrelevance205 Part IV Sandby borg 227 10 Prehistoric Violence as Difficult Heritage229 11 A Place of Avoidance and Belonging261 Part V Concluding Discussion 283 12 Concluding Discussion285 Index293

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 6.1

The New Orthodox Church. Spring 2015. (Photo: GW) 57 The Old Orthodox Church. Spring 2015. (Photo: GW) 58 Map is made by Jessica Bustamante. Photos used are taken by GW. Map service by Google. 82 Stari Most. (Photo: GW) 87 The Franciscan bell tower with the Cross on Hum Hill in the background. (Photo: GW) 88 Minarets in the old town of Mostar. (Photo: GW) 89 The Bruce Lee statue. (Photo: GW) 95 The monument to the miners of Rudnik. (Photo: Marko Barišic ́)103 Detonated memorial for the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo: GW) 113 Monument to the Fallen Croat Defenders in the Homeland War. (Photo: GW) 115 Ruin in Mostar with graffiti celebrating the football fan club “Red Army 1981” for the team FK Velež Mostar, consisting mostly of Bosniaks. Football is highly politicized in Mostar. (Photo: GW) 122 Ruin made into a fascist free zone. This is an AustroHungarian house initially built as the private home of the mayor of Mostar, Mujaga Komadina. Spring of 2019. (Photo: Jessica Bustamante) 126 The Partisan Memorial Cemetery. Photo taken in the spring of 2019, 1 year after its 2018 restoration. (Photo: Jessica Bustamante)143

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8 Fig. 7.9 Fig. 7.10 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3

The monument from a distance. Photo taken in the spring of 2019, 1 year after its 2018 restoration. (Photo: GW) A man walking in the Partisan Memorial Cemetery. (Photo: GW) A fascist “Ustaše” sign at the entrance to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery. Spring 2015. (Photo: GW) The entrance to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery was used for waste disposal in the spring of 2019. (Photo: GW) Map is made by Jessica Bustamante. Photos used are taken by GW. Map service by Google. The Gazimestan monument. (Photo: GW) Sultan Murad’s Türbe and museum. (Photo: GW) The Shrine of Bajraktar. (Photo: GW) Installation to Lazar in Babin Most/Babimoc. (Photo: GW) The curse of Kosovo on the Gazimestan monument. (Photo: GW) Gathering at the Gazimestan monument on Vidovdan 2016. (Photo: GW) The guarded entrance to the Gazimestan Monument. (Photo: GW) Litter inside the Gazimestan monument. (Photo: GW) Road leading to the Gazimestan filled with garbage. (Photo: GW) The Vidovdan celebration of 2016. (Photo: GW) People on top of Gazimestan, Vidovdan 2016. (Photo: GW) The person working with me at Vidovdan 2016 reacted to the nationalistic atmosphere present at the ceremony by painting a Yugoslavian star on his wrist. (Photo: GW) Graffiti on the road to Gazimestan, Vidovdan 2016, displaying “Kosova UÇK”, celebrating the Kosovo Liberation Army. An act of resistance. (Photo: GW) Gathering at Grac ́anica Monastery, Vidovdan 2016. (Photo: GW) Statue of Miloš Obilic ́, now standing in Grac ́anica /Graçanica. (Photo: GW) Map is made by Jessica Bustamante. Photo used is taken by Sebastian Jacobsson. Map service by Google. Sandby borg. Photo: Sebastian Jacobsson. Courtesy of Kalmar County Museum. Skeleton from Sandby borg. (Photo: Daniel Lindskog)

144 145 146 148 158 159 166 166 167 169 170 176 177 178 208 209 210 211 212 219 230 232 233

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Fig. 10.4 Outlay of Sandby borg with areas excavated so far marked in red, as of March 2018. (Illustration: Helena Victor/Kalmar County Museum) 234 Fig. 10.5 One of the relief brooches. Photo: Daniel Lindskog. Courtesy of Kalmar County Museum.  235 Fig. 10.6 Body outlined on the floor of the Sandby borg exhibition, January 2018. (Photo: GW) 243 Fig. 11.1 Clara Alfsdotter unearthing a skeleton. (Photo: Daniel Lindskog) 267 Fig. 11.2 A Roman solidus discovered at Sandby borg. (Photo: Daniel Lindskog)274 Fig. 11.3 Waste from glass bead production was found during the excavation of 2016. Photo: Daniel Lindskog. Courtesy of Kalmar County Museum. 275

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1

Kisic Authorized Heritage Discourse Assmann’s distinction between inner, social and cultural memory

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Like you, I forgot. Like you, I longed for a memory beyond consolation, a memory of shadows and stone. For my part I struggled every day with all my might against the horror of no longer understanding the reason to remember. Like you, I forgot. (Monologue in Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959, screenplay written by Marguerite Duras)

There is an inevitability in forgetting that can both be a source of relief and of distress. This is particularly true in the case of memories of trauma and violence, and it is often manifested through the diverse engagements and practices which occur in a landscape. In an evocative manner, the quote from the 1959 movie Hiroshima Mon Amour, written by the author Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) and directed by Alain Resnais (1922–2014), poetically exemplifies the constant negotiation between remembering and forgetting an incident of profound horror, in this case the WWII atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Such a negotiation is neither a linear process, nor is it devoid of pain. The need to forget and the need to remember may not be mutually exclusive. In fact, they build upon and constitute each other. While this does not make it an easy area of study, it does make it an important one. Furthermore, remembering and forgetting is not immaterial. On the contrary, memories are stimulated by visual clues. Within this process, the heritage serves a central role, due to the common role of the heritage within a landscape for negotiating the meaning of the past in the present, serving as an incentive for tracing © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_1

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continuity and/or discontinuity and contributing with a sense of belonging and/or disassociation for individuals, while at the same time directing such incentives towards the future. The diverse ways such a negotiation is played out is far from straightforward, and demands an approach which does neither level out variation nor dissonance (Kisić 2016). The heritage of places associated to a violent or otherwise unsettling and disturbing past can be labelled as “difficult heritage” (Logan and Reeves 2009; Macdonald 2009; Samuels 2015). The basic premise directing this book is that “temporality” lies at the core of the negotiation. However, contrary to a traditional and arguably “Western” view of difficult heritage, the temporality of the distant and not-so-distant past will not be studied as linearly positioned, neatly and chronologically manifested, within the present. The way temporality leaks out into the every-day life of people does not obey to linearity. Despite such a realization being recognized in previous research (i.e. Filippucci 2010), it can be argued that the implications of the argument have not been fully explored (Wollentz 2017). Time is still often approached as a distinct force in itself gradually operating to decrease the difficulty in heritage (Meskell 2002; Stone 2006; Hartmann 2014). However, is it a valid assertion to position the temporalities of heritage as outside of human influence? Perhaps the question can instead be posed in the following way: can the temporalities of heritage be actively produced as well as challenged? If so, how does such a production or challenge manifest itself through human engagements and interactions with a landscape connected to a disturbing and/or otherwise unsettling past? Furthermore, how does it affect the heritage within such a landscape? It has previously been argued that rituals often serve a function in giving the past a sense of presentness again, actively causing that which has disappeared to reappear through institutionalized practices (Connerton 1989: 63). This makes many types of rituals an embodied and performed (Bell 2009) challenge of temporal distance. Remembering practices on places associated to violence often take on ritual character (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). As defined by Steven Lukes (1975: 291), rituals constitute a “rule-governed activity of a symbolic character which draws the attention of its participants to objects of thought and feeling which they hold to be of special significance.” It follows that rituals do not need to be of an explicitly religious character (Lukes 1975: 290), and may involve practices related to remembering/forgetting incidents of violence and trauma. In these cases, it can be argued that rituals are serving to induce a

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sense of temporal proximity and continuity to the event in question. Consequently, if temporal proximity can be produced through specific practices, it can also be challenged. However, such a challenge would involve a different set of practices and engagements to difficult heritage, than those serving to induce a sense of presentness and continuity towards the past. Such a realization demands an approach to difficult heritage and temporality which does not make any a priori assumptions concerning how the passage of time as a distinct force in itself, would affect the role and meaning of heritage. Indeed, it forces us to acknowledge that a large array of different and even simultaneously present temporalities, shape, draw on and contribute to heritage. Accordingly, temporality cannot be studied as inherent within the physical heritage, that is, the possession of “pastness” is not residing within material culture. Instead, it is better understood as a negotiation dependent upon several factors (see Holtorf 2017), of which individuals themselves are not to be regarded as passive recipients. These perspectives on heritage and temporalities carry with them implications for how difficult heritage is to be researched, and it has guided me not only in the theoretical framework applied, but also in the selection of case studies and the methodology practiced.

Research Questions and Aims There were three broad research questions that guided me in the work leading to this book. (1) How can a focus on the temporalities of heritage, including a selection of case studies in which the heritage of violence pertains to different time periods, benefit our understanding of difficult heritage? (2) How can incidents of violence, and the different temporalities which are produced and/or challenged surrounding the violence, affect the relationship to landscapes, and how can they infuse the heritage with new values, meanings and roles? (3) What kind of variation and patterns can be found within and between the case studies, and how can these be made meaningful when developing and/or managing a site of difficult heritage? I hope that this book can serve to widen the perspectives concerning the temporalities of difficult heritage, as well as becoming an incentive for further studies carried out. Furthermore, I hope that it can serve as a resource for people practically engaged in developing and managing difficult heritage, no matter the assumed “temporality” of the heritage in

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question, in order to acknowledge nuances and possible pitfalls. In other words, I will provide some suggestions which may be good to keep in mind in the management and research of difficult heritage, and hopefully it can be of some practical use. I also hope that students in critical heritage studies will find many stimulating ideas and perspectives in this book. Additionally, I hope that researchers engaged with any of my selected case studies, which are Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Gazimestan monument, Kosovo and Sandby borg, Sweden, will find it engaging and useful.

Selecting Case Studies In order to fully explore the temporalities of difficult heritage, it was seen as necessary to select case studies in which the incident of violence originated within different time periods. This selection was made based on two reasons (1) Such a study has so far not been undertaken through an in-­ depth approach, most likely pertaining to an a priori assumption regarding the passage of time and how it relates to difficult heritage. (2) Through such a selection, different forms of “heritage temporalities” could be examined, potentially serving to locate variation between cases as well as possible patterns. In order to keep the material manageable and to be able to study each case in-depth, three case studies were chosen. Due to the expressed aim of examining different forms of temporalities, I selected one example of modern violence, one example of where the incident occurred during medieval times and one example of prehistoric violence. However, comparisons to other examples will continuously be made in order to locate the case studies within a broader frame of discussion and relevance. They are thus not studied in isolation. As a case study where the incident of violence can be traced to recent times, I am studying Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is a city which experienced widespread destruction of its physical heritage during the breakup of Yugoslavia and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995). I recognized a need to select Mostar as a case study, since previous research and approaches on the city have tended to enforce a static and sometimes essentialist approach to the post-war heritage of the city (Makaš 2007: 256–337; Walasek 2015: 205–258). It is therefore my hope to provide a more dynamic perspective to the heritage of Mostar, which also recognizes heritage as a source for change in the city. As a case study where the incident of violence can be traced to medieval times, I selected the contested 1389 medieval battle of Kosovo Field, located in

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Kosovo, through a study of the Gazimestan monument which was built in 1953 in memory of the battle. While there is an abundance of research focusing on the historical battle, as well as on the development of the myth in present-day Serbia, which will be presented later, a bottom-up approach focusing on the relationship to the heritage among the people currently living in the area is lacking, calling for the necessity to undertake such a study. As a case study where the incident of violence can be traced to prehistoric times, I selected the Iron Age ring fort Sandby borg in Sweden, where a brutal massacre occurred during the migration period, around the end of the fifth century AD. The massacre was discovered in 2011 and is currently being unearthed through regular excavations conducted by the Kalmar County Museum. I am a member of the team excavating and researching Sandby borg, and within the team we recognized a need to conduct research on the fort as a form of difficult heritage, partially, but not exclusively, due to the emergence of stories told among the local population that the site has been an avoided place in the landscape since the massacre more than 1500 years ago. These three cases are all different from each other, not only in regards to temporalities, but also in terms of heritage places, which demands a variety in approaches and points of entry. This is an inevitable consequence of selecting cases which are geographically and temporally diverse, and it had to be respected and acknowledged when conducting the fieldwork. However, there is an undeniable benefit motivating the selection, since it opens up the possibility to acknowledge and study variation and the underlying mechanisms behind such variation, in regards to the temporalities of difficult heritage. In Mostar, being the case study with closest temporal proximity to the event of violence in question, focus will be placed upon how heritage contributes with a sense of belonging/disassociation in terms of dealing with a painful past, and how this connects to different temporalities: that is, what I coin the temporalities of belonging in Mostar. At Gazimestan, being constructed as a memorial of a 1389 medieval battle continuously made relevant in connection to the present-day situation, focus will be placed upon the multiplicity of different temporalities of a site of difficult heritage, and how individuals are not passive recipients but play an active role in, what I coin, temporally positioning heritage through various strategies of coping with a site associated to a painful past. In Sandby borg, being a prehistoric case of difficult heritage, focus will be placed upon how temporal proximity and temporal distance can be actively produced as well as challenged, and the possible benefits arising from

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recognizing this negotiation when developing a site of difficult heritage. Furthermore, all the cases will be shared by the overall research questions and aims presented earlier, as well as a shared theoretical foundation guiding the work.

Wounded Landscapes? When the 2017 Nobel Prize winner in literature Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Buried Giant, published in 2015, he set it in a fictional Britain of the past, within a land ravaged by wars and violence. A mist is covering the land and memories are short. People do not remember why they were fighting, and lovers do not remember why they fell in love. Ishiguro was considering setting the book in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina or Rwanda, but changed his mind in need of finding a more allegorical place. The book captures the negotiating between remembering and forgetting in the aftermath of violence, as well as how the landscape itself plays a crucial role within such a process. In fact, the title of the volume, The Buried Giant, is not referring to a real giant, but to something that is buried deep in the soil and which will not be forgotten easily despite the mist of forgetting covering the land. In a poignant sequence, Ishiguro writes “The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers.” This raises significant questions concerning the processes of remembering and forgetting trauma and its implications in a post-war society, as well as how this negotiation connects to the landscape itself. This book focuses specifically on how events of direct violence (Galtung and Höivik 1971), rather than symbolic or structural violence (Bourdieu 1991), effects the role of the landscape and the heritage within it. The research that led up to this book was part of my PhD project at The Graduate School Human Development in Landscapes, Kiel University, called “The Wounded Landscape” that was carried out between 2014 and 2018. A landscape can be “wounded” by violence not only due to how places can be so tied to certain incidents of violence as to be almost impossible to disentangle, violence also carries the potential to physically alter places at a fundamental level. Monuments, buildings as well as the nature itself may be destroyed. Undoubtedly, each and every one of us have come across photos of devastated and desolate post-war landscapes, from Dresden in Germany to Hiroshima in Japan. Furthermore, the bodies of

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the dead may become one with the soil through natural processes of decomposition. The dead can thus become part of a landscape, not only symbolically, but also physically (Filippucci 2020). This ties to Ishiguro’s idea of a “buried giant” waiting to stir. Nevertheless, this does not suggest that a physical manifestation is required in order for violence to be remembered. Such a clear-cut correlation cannot be made and attempts of “erasing” memories through physical destruction of tangible remains are seldom successful and may instead bite back with a vengeance (see Bille et al. 2010). Indeed, the process goes both ways, and ultimately, the landscape may resist any top-down attempts of controlling its meaning and significance in memorialization processes (Sørensen and Viejo-Rose 2015). This negotiation demands an approach which studies the impact from a bottom-up perspective, in which the perspective within the local communities affected is made central. On a local level, violence may serve to challenge the very values that a landscape (including its heritage) is inducing and contributing with; concerned especially with the values of belonging within a specific place, and the sense of security, stability, continuity and future-perspectives that such a sense of belonging builds upon (see Jansen 2007). These values are strongly related to the identities that the landscape and its heritage are producing through meaning-making engagements. These identities may be connected to the “nation” but also to other more local and individually shaped identities (Smith 2006: 69–70). After all, identities are not only multiple, but also overlapping (Eriksen 2004; Green 2005). Violence does not destroy memories and the identities built upon these memories, as much as it conjures them in order to make them manifest, that is, violence seen as a performative act aiming to make solid that which is elusive (Herscher 2010). This will be further elaborated throughout the book. In this section, it is merely necessary to emphasize that the “wounding” of landscapes does not suggest that memories of violence can physically enter into the fabric of places or its heritage and reside there unchanged throughout times, through what can be designated the “storage model” (see Trouillot 1995: 15). On the contrary, place, defined here as how space is made meaningful through embodied habits and engagements within a landscape, has to be studied as entangled in a continuous state of becoming (see also Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996: 24), or, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold phrased it, of “carrying” on, of being continuously born (Ingold 2010). Therefore, the making of places within a landscape, needs to be approached as a process in movement which is never finalized.

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Consequently, a landscape can never be reduced to static or singular meanings (Mitchell 2000). Therefore, a reservation to the use of the word “wounded” in connection with landscapes has to be made. A wound carries with it several connotations. For instance, wounds can heal completely, or they can turn into scars. Wounds can even fester and lead to deadly viruses. Scars can re-open and induce pain long after the incident occurred. The wound metaphor is thus a very strong one (see Storm 2014: 3–8). However, being such a strong metaphor carries implications with it. Most importantly, it carries the baggage of being strongly associated to negative values. It is important to recognize the horror and tragedy that violence often induces, which may be severely damaging and disruptive within the life-course of individuals. Nevertheless, my argument is that heritage associated to violence does not need to, nor should it, necessarily be levelled out to induce peaceful and harmonies engagements with heritage. It will be argued that “dissonance” (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) should be approached as a resource rather than as a disturbance when developing a site of difficult heritage.

A Method of Pluralizing Perspectives In order to grasp the nuances and complexities, an approach which acknowledges variation, dissonance and is therefore fundamentally bottom-­up rather than top-down is demanded (see here Ashworth et al. 2007). This goes in line with a so-called Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD) (Kisić 2016), which will be introduced in Chap. 2. By so doing, the approach goes hand in hand with more recent heritage conventions, in particular the so-called Faro Convention  (Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society), developed by Council of Europe in 2005 and entered into force in 2011 (Council of Europe 2005), through recognizing the “heritage communities” as meaningful creators and participators of heritage, and thereby pluralizing perspectives upon the past. In all my case studies semi-structured qualitative interviews (Raleigh Yow 2005; Bernard 2006) were carried out with suitable interview partners. These usually lasted between one and two hours and they were recorded and thereafter fully transcribed. The aim when selecting interview partners was to achieve a diversity in responses and perspectives among the local population. Of course, different strategies had to be utilized for the specific case studies which will be elaborated upon within the respective chapters for the cases. All in all, 64

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interviews with 76 people were carried out.1 Twenty-six people were interviewed in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, 21 people were interviewed in Swedish, 15 people were interviewed in English and 14 people were interviewed in Albanian. The interviews carried out in Bosnian-Croatian-­Serbian and Albanian were done with the help of translators (Marko Barišić, Damir Ugljen, Edona Rugova or Dea Luma) who were hired within the project and who I worked closely together with. In case of confusions arising in translations, we went through the recorded interviews together a second time. In most cases we selected interview partners based on certain criteria specific within each case study, but in some cases, myself or together with my translator, we spontaneously approached people in bars and cafés, in order to see if they would like to be interviewed. Occasionally, we were approached by people who wanted to be interviewed. The interviews were carried out with the help of a set of questions that were developed prior to conducting the fieldwork, which were loosely followed in order to allow for people to venture into unexpected directions revealing what they themselves found significant surrounding the heritage. Additionally, the “official” perspective of heritage, which often operates within the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006), was deemed of significance, and therefore archaeologists and heritage professionals working with the heritage in the case studies have been interviewed. Thereby, comparisons between the official perspective and the local perspective will be made in order to analyse contrasting views and practices. However, in the case study of Sandby borg I am myself part of the team conducting research and excavating, making official interviews with the team members unnecessary. Instead, I noted attitudes and approaches through active participation in the excavation and regular conversations with the team members.

Outline of the Book In Part I, the theoretical foundation will be presented. In Chap. 2, I will present how I approach and work with the concept of heritage in general, with a particular focus on difficult heritage and its relationship to different 1  One interview was carried out through a set of questions sent through email, due to the interviewee not being available for a face-to-face interview. Furthermore, one interview was carried out through Skype. In all other cases, semi-structured interviews through non-digital face-to-face interaction was carried out.

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temporalities. In Chap. 3, I will present how I will work with memory and its relationship to spatial frameworks, specifically how the landscape helps in producing narratives about the past through incorporating practices. In Part II, I will present the results from the fieldwork carried out in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first chapter on Mostar will provide a background to the situation in the city surrounding its heritage, as well as an elaboration on why the research carried out is necessary. Furthermore, the views of the heritage professionals in the city who were interviewed will be presented. Thereafter, I will present what I coin the temporalities of belonging in the city, and how they connect to the heritage. In the second chapter, the attitudes towards the memorials and memorial practices in Mostar will be presented, framed within a discussion of remembering/forgetting incidents of trauma. In the final chapter on Mostar, I will more broadly discuss the implications of the results when developing the heritage of the city, concerned with the negotiation of finding continuity/discontinuity in a post-war city, and how such a negotiation ties to the heritage. In Part III, the results from the Gazimestan monument, Kosovo, will be presented. In the first chapter on Gazimestan, I will provide a background to the situation surrounding the heritage of the Gazimestan monument, as well as the views of the heritage professionals interviewed. In the second chapter, focus will be placed upon how different temporalities within the narratives constructed are simultaneously present, drawing on and contributing to heritage. More specifically, I will study the process of what I term temporally positioning heritage, which aims to challenge notions of inscribed meanings, values and memories residing within the physicality of heritage. The third and final chapter on Gazimestan will be looking at the practices—and the lack thereof—occurring at the Gazimestan monument today. In Part IV the results from Sandby borg, Sweden, will be presented. In the first chapter on Sandby borg, I will provide a background to the situation, present the attitude within the Sandby borg team, as well as contextualize Sandby borg. In the second chapter on Sandby borg, the results concerning the alleged practice of long-term avoidance as well as the site as a form of difficult heritage or not, will be presented. Furthermore, a discussion will be carried out surrounding how temporal proximity and distance can be actively produced as well as challenged surrounding a prehistoric site of difficult heritage, and the implications of the results when developing the site. Finally, the overall conclusions will be summarized.

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Disclaimer Results from this book have been published in two peer-reviewed papers. Parts of results on Mostar and Gazimestan were published in “Conflicted memorials and the need to look forward. The interplay between remembering and forgetting in Mostar and on the Kosovo Field” in the volume Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict: From History to Heritage, edited by Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Dacia Viejo-Rose and Paola Filippucci, and published by Palgrave Macmillan. Parts of the results from Sandby borg were published in “Prehistoric Violence as Difficult Heritage: Sandby borg – A Place of Avoidance and Belonging”, in the 2017 issue of Current Swedish Archaeology. Most of the fieldwork was carried out in 2015 and 2016 while the book was largely written in 2017 and 2018. It therefore represents conditions from those years, but references have been updated when necessary.

Bibliography Ashworth, G.J., B. Graham, and J.E. Tunbridge. 2007. Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies. London: Pluto Press. Bell, C.M. 2009. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New  York: Oxford University Press. [First Edition Published in 1992]. Bernard, H.R. 2006. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Bille, M., F. Hastrup, and T.F. Sørensen. 2010. Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence. In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. M. Bille, F. Hastrup, and T.F. Sørensen, 3–22. New York: Springer. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Council of Europe. 2005. Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. https://rm.coe.int/1680083746. 31 Mar 2020. Eriksen, T.H. 2004. Rötter och fötter. Identitet i en föränderlig tid. Nora: Nya Doxa. Filippucci, P. 2010. Archaeology and the Anthropology of Memory: Takes on the Recent Past. In Archaeology and Anthropology: Understanding Similarity, Exploring Difference, ed. D.  Garrow and T.  Yarrow, 69–83. Oxford: Oxbow Books. ———. 2020. ‘These Battered Hills’: Landscape and Memory at Verdun (France). In Places of Memory. Spatialized Practices of Remembrance from Prehistory to

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Today, ed. C. Horn, G. Wollentz, G. Di Maida, and A. Haug, 82-96. Oxford: Archaeopress. Galtung, J., and T.  Höivik. 1971. Structural and Direct Violence. A Note on Operationalization. Journal of Peace Research 8 (1): 73–76. Green, S.F. 2005. Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hartmann, R. 2014. Dark Tourism, Thanatourism, and Dissonance in Heritage Tourism Management: New Directions in Contemporary Tourism Research. Journal of Heritage Tourism 9 (2): 166–182. Herscher, A. 2010. Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holtorf, C. 2017. Perceiving the Past: From Age Value to Pastness. International Journal of Cultural Property 24: 497–515. Ingold, T. 2010. No More Ancient; No More Human: The Future Past of Archaeology and Anthropology. In Archaeology and Anthropology, ed. D. Garrow and T. Yarrow, 160–170. Oxford: Oxbow. Jansen, S. 2007. Troubled Locations: Return, the Life Course, and Transformations of ‘Home’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 49: 15–30. https://doi.org/10.3167/foc.2007.490103. Kisić, V. 2016. Governing Heritage Dissonance: Promises and Realities of Selected Cultural Policies. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation. Logan, W.S., and K. Reeves, eds. 2009. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with “Difficult Heritage”. Abingdon: Routledge. Lukes, S. 1975. Political Ritual and Social Integration. Sociology 1975 (9): 189–308. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803857500900205. Macdonald, S. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Abingdon: Routledge. Makaš, E. 2007. Representing Competing Identities: Building and Rebuilding in Postwar Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Cornell University. Meskell, L. 2002. Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (03): 557–574. Mitchell, D. 2000. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Limited. Raleigh Yow, V. 2005. Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Samuels, J. 2015. Difficult Heritage. Coming “To Terms” with Sicily’s Fascist Past. In Heritage Keywords. Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage, ed. Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Trinidad Rico, 111–128. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

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Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Sørensen, M.L.S., and D.  Viejo-Rose, eds. 2015. War and Cultural Heritage. Biographies of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stone, P. 2006. A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions. Tourism 52 (2006): 145–160. Storm, A. 2014. Post-Industrial Landscape Scars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. Trouillot, M.R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Tunbridge, J.E., and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Walasek, H. 2015. Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge. Wollentz, G. 2017. Prehistoric Violence as Difficult Heritage: Sandby Borg—A Place of Avoidance and Belonging. Current Swedish Archaeology 25: 199–226.

PART I

The Theoretical Foundation

CHAPTER 2

Heritage, Violence and Temporalities

When writing this book, theoretical debates in the contemporary academic environment surrounding how to develop and approach difficult heritage have been my primary source for inspiration, and it is these discussions that have influenced the themes that I explore throughout each chapter. In other words, the themes which will be explored are chosen because they are relevant to critically engage with in the current climate of heritage management related to a violent past. Therefore, new theoretical concepts will continuously be presented and discussed through each chapter. In fact, it is my aim of using each individual chapter to discuss different but associated theoretical aspects related to heritage connected to violence, with an overall aim to present perspectives both challenging old views as well as, hopefully, developing them in new directions. Unfortunately, it is impossible to introduce each theory that will be employed and engaged with in this part, and the reader will have to get accustomed to new concepts being introduced and debated in a continuous manner. Nevertheless, there are underlying theoretical foundations which have guided me in this work, which are more or less explicitly present in each and every part. It is these very foundations that will be presented here. The first of these concerns the approach I am having towards heritage in general and difficult heritage in particular. I will begin by outlining a challenge of the traditional and “Western” approach to heritage, the so-called Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) as influentially theorized by Laurajane Smith (2006). Thereafter, I will © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_2

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provide an alternative approach, which can be coined the Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD), as put forward by Višnja Kisić (2016). After my basic approach to heritage has been presented, I will discuss specific aspects of relevance. These concern the future-assembling capacities of heritage, the heritage of violence, and the intricate connection between difficult heritage and different forms of temporalities. In the final part of this chapter all the threads will be tied to together and my aim of challenging a linear understanding of temporality in regards to difficult heritage will be theorized.

Challenging the Authorized Heritage Discourse Smith defiantly describes heritage as inherently intangible and inherently dissonant in her influential volume “Uses of Heritage” (Smith 2006). Such an approach marks a distinct contrast against the traditional and highly “Western” view of heritage as it was developed during the nineteenth century, through what Smith labels the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), representing a view of heritage including inherent and essential values connected to such aspects as beauty, age and monumentality. The glorious remains from the glorious past were instrumental in the building of the European nation-state, during the nineteenth century. This glorious past came to be presented as a linear national narrative through exhibitions of material remains in national museums. Arguably, in practice, heritage management is most often still operating and functioning within a framework inherited from the AHD. In fact, the role of heritage and national museums to build the nation came to lay the foundation for how heritage has been presented well into contemporary times (see also Poulot et al. 2012). The notion of heritage as carrying inherent and essential values can be clearly noted in earlier legislations and frameworks developed surrounding the management of heritage, for example within the Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS 1964). The Venice Charter is to a large extent seen as outdated within critical heritage studies. The main argument against the Venice Charter is that it traces inherent values within the heritage, which has to be preserved (preferably through conservation, not reconstruction), and thus limits heritage to immobile physical objects in need of constant protection in order to maintain its immobility. Change is inherently negative that needs to be fought through the act of conservation. In practice, such an attitude

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towards change is still to a large extent prevailing within heritage management (see Lowenthal 1985 and more recently, DeSilvey 2017 for a critical discussion). In Article 3 of the Venice Charter, where the aim of the charter is being outlined, the following is written: “The intention in conserving and restoring monuments is to safeguard them no less as works of art than as historical evidence” (ICOMOS 1964). Here, it becomes clear that the aim is not only to preserve heritage from the hazard of change in order to save endangered aesthetic values, but also for it to serve as historical evidence. Such an approach illustrates the “inscribing” and “encapsulating” dimensions within the AHD, as they manifest themselves through the Venice Charter. This can be referred to as the “storage model” (see Trouillot 1995: 15), in which heritage is approached as containing historical information that can be retrieved. The material remains of the past thus serve as a testimony of pasts events, that is, past events enter the materiality of objects and monuments and stay there unchanged throughout times, waiting to be retrieved through our gaze or interaction with the material remains. Within recent decades, heritage management is moving towards recognizing also the intangible aspects of heritage and a more dynamic approach has been undertaken within recent legislations, frameworks and conventions.1 However, also within these recent conventions and frameworks, the AHD remains present. For instance, the clear-cut division between on the one side tangible and on the other side intangible heritage, as evident in UNESCO’s 2003 convention on intangible heritage, seems to be largely enforcing a Western “Cartesian dualism” between mind and matter, which may be highly detached from how these places of heritage are being experienced or made meaningful locally (Smith 2006; Harrison and Rose 2010; Harrison 2012). Clearly, the convention was born out of an increased concern within UNESCO to acknowledge other forms of heritage than simply the ones recognized through the AHD (inherent 1  For example in the “NARA document on authenticity” (ICOMOS 1994), and its updated version, Nara +20 (2014), UNESCO’s “Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity” (2001), “Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage” (2003), and its “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions” (2005), Council of Europe’s “Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society”, i.e. the Faro Convention (2005), the Australia ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites): “Charter for Places of Cultural Significance”, “The Burra Charter”, repeatedly updated between 1979 and 2013, or the ICOMOS “Ename Charter” (2008).

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monumentality, beauty and age), through acknowledging other ways of “doing” and “performing” heritage, including traditions such as specific dances or traditional cuisines. However, the separation hides the fact that all forms of tangible heritage include intangible aspects making it meaningful, which demand recognition. After all, these so-called intangible dimensions of heritage may cause “changes” to the physical heritage. Consider for example contested cases such as the World Heritage site Diocletian’s Palace in Split, Croatia, which is still used to accommodate homes and shops for people in the city. However, this way of utilizing the palace, due to not being directly connected to the Romans who built the palace, are not supported by the heritage authorities and regarded as endangering the World Heritage site (Poulios 2011: 148). To live and act, after all, is to change. If the desired outcome is to “freeze” heritage in a protected bubble, this would demand its removal from the sphere of the local community. However, such an outcome would contrast against the aims in both the Nara Document on Authenticity from 1994 and Nara +20 from 2014, as well as the Faro Convention from 2005, which emphasize the importance of so-called “heritage communities”. The Faro Convention (Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society), developed by the Council of Europe in 2005 and entered into force 2011, acknowledges that the right and access to culture heritage constitutes a human right, as written within article 1a: “(…) rights relating to cultural heritage are inherent in the right to participate in cultural life, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (Council of Europe 2005). The Faro Convention succeeds in adhering to heritage as built through relations and engagements rather than through physical monuments carrying inherent meanings and values, and by so doing, advocates a heritage which is open and inclusive, that is, a heritage of pluralizing perspectives (see also Ashworth et  al. 2007). Nevertheless, by focusing on a common European heritage, based on dialogue, mutual understanding and respect, it actually does little to understand the inherently dissonant aspects of heritage, in which dissonance can be perceived as a resource rather than a hindrance. In Article 7b, it is written that those states signing the Faro Convention work to: “establish processes for conciliation to deal equitably with situations where contradictory values are placed on the same cultural heritage by different communities”. Evidently, there is within the Faro Convention a desire for cultural heritage to work towards reconciliation. However, following Smith’s work, contradictory

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values can be found in each form and site of heritage, calling for us to not only deal “equitably” with such situations, but to find them as a potential resource when developing the sites as heritage. In other words: there is a value in dissonance. What would the implications be, in practice, of following through with Smith’s challenge of the AHD? Indeed, how would it alter heritage management, to see heritage, not as based on perceived essential values traced back to a glorious past, but to see heritage as inherently intangible and inherently dissonant? One implication would be to focus on embodied engagements with heritage, rather than on the physical heritage in and of itself. It is through embodied engagements that heritage is created and sustained, and unavoidably, constantly transforming. Indeed, a focus on heritage as born through embodied engagement means that heritage can never be seen as static and immobile. On the contrary, heritage has to be seen as dynamic and in-movement, constantly recreated and made relevant or, as is equally important, denied relevance in our lives, actively as well as unconsciously, through embodied engagements or the lack thereof. This suggests that the meaning of heritage within the present is constantly in a process of being negotiated. The next question would be, which particular values are negotiated through heritage and what role do they serve? Smith expresses them in the following way: Heritage is a multilayered performance – be this a performance of visiting, managing, interpretation or conservation – that embodies acts of remembrance and commemoration while negotiating and constructing a sense of place, belonging and understanding in the present. (Smith 2006: 3)

Following Smith, heritage thus serves to negotiate and construct a sense of place, belonging and understanding, all three aspects fundamentally related with constructing an identity for individuals; constructing a sense of self. After all, identity is not abstract and free-floating, it is anchored in everyday experiences and feelings, in how the physicality of place is produced and made meaningful, and can work to inform and constitute a sense of belonging. Perhaps it is also here where the very materiality of heritage matters the most. Significantly, stating that heritage is inherently intangible does not suggest that its material properties do not matter (see Carman 2009; Jones 2010, 2016; and associated criticism Harrison 2012, 2015: 27; Fredengren 2015). On the contrary, the physicality of heritage is crucial within the construction of place, in which its

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physicality functions to facilitate, transmit and produce a sense of belonging (Ashworth et al. 2007: 1). This occurs not only on an individual level, but also on the level of nations and other forms of collective identities. Thus, heritage does more than simply construct or represent a range of identities or memories. The values that inform any sense of identity or underlie memory are also used to construct ways of understanding and making the present meaningful. Heritage is about a sense of place. (...) In a very real sense heritage becomes a cultural tool that nations, societies, communities and individuals use to express, facilitate and construct a sense of identity, self and belonging in which the ‘power of place’ is invoked in its representational sense to give physical reality to these expressions and experiences. (Smith 2006: 75)

It is also here where the power in place and consequently in the heritage can be actively misused to not only produce a sense of belonging within and for a community, but also to delimit such a sense of belonging within a particular place, ruling out those who are decreed as not belonging. In such situations the heritage connected to violence becomes especially sensitive. In their seminal volume “Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict” from 1996, John E. Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth (1996) outlines the potential within heritage to work as a positive force in conflict resolution. They see dissonance as inherent in each site of heritage, which came to lay the foundation for how dissonant heritage has been understood in later research. It is argued that heritage, as soon as it is given the status of heritage, inevitably holds contrasting interpretations and values for people, which are building shared and non-shared identities. As it is expressed by Tunbridge and Ashworth: “At its simplest, all heritage is someone’s heritage and therefore logically not someone else’s: the original meaning of an inheritance implies the existence of disinheritance and by extension any creation of heritage from the past disinherits someone completely or partially, actively or potentially” (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996: 21). Whether this leads to an open conflict or not, completely depends upon how the dissonance is managed. In such a way, in order for heritage to serve a positive function in society dissonance needs to be managed and “levelled” out; its rough edges have to be made smooth. Thus, while recognizing the inherent dissonance within heritage, they follow the same line of argument as the Faro

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Convention came to do approximately ten years later, and do not develop dissonance as a potential rather than as a disturbance in heritage. When returning to the topic in 2007, Gregory Ashworth, John E. Tunbridge, with the additional help of Brian Graham, call for the need to “pluralise the past” in order for heritage to serve a function in reconciliation. Pluralizing the past, they state, “is an unavoidable condition of post-modern societies (…). (Ashworth et al. 2007: 212). Whether intentional or not, the use of the word “condition” seems more appropriate to designate a patient in a hospital, rather than the fundamentally dynamic and hopefully inclusive process, which constitutes an endeavor of pluralizing the past. In order to manage the “post-modern” condition of the “plural, hybrid and diverse societies worldwide” (212), they argue that heritage, just as identity, always needs to be pluralized and understood as multiple and overlapping (see also Green 2005), and that heritage thus has to focus on a moving target, because: “the past is in continuous creation and so are perspectives upon it” (Ashworth et al. 2007: 208). However, a successful approach also demands and depends “upon the attainment of locally acceptable formulae for the pluralization of the past” (Ashworth et al. 2007: 211). Nevertheless, determining a locally acceptable formula, which is taking all different local perspectives into consideration, may be easier said than achieved in practice. I am very much in favour of pluralizing perspectives upon the past, in order to meet the demands within a post-modern world, but the study risks falling short of seeing the potential within the dissonance, not as a cause for distress that needs to be leveled out through presenting various perspectives, but as a resource in itself for triggering a different set of engagements and perspectives through heritage. Despite such criticism, one of the most important points addressed through the work by Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge is the acknowledgement that heritage has to be directed towards a moving target, in such a way, any approach to heritage has to be process-oriented and dynamic. One effective way to achieve this may be to use heritage in order to pose questions encouraging reflection and dialogue (see also Wollentz 2014). The approach of shaping active critically thinking individuals through museums and sites of heritage needs to be seen within a larger trend of museum management in positioning the museum as a forum and actor in society (Message 2006; Svanberg 2010; Hegardt 2012). The global organization Sites of Conscience (SoC) may be the most far-­ reaching example of where such an approach is undertaken, through

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establishing a network of museums, sites and memory initiatives all over the world, which focuses on how to use the past in the present to foster and advocate human rights issues. The method SoC promotes is not to tell people how to think through exhibitions, but make visitors shape their own answers through reflection and importantly, through dialogue. In order to achieve this the museums and other “sites of memory” which are part of the established network, such as the Peace museum in Guernica, Spain, present events from various perspectives without telling people which perspective would be the right one, and by drawing explicit connections to contemporary issues. They discuss the implications of the past for the present. Furthermore, SoC tries to create environments that involve ongoing debate and action. This includes dialogue through face-to-face discussion as well as publishing, public tours and media attention. Museums transform into arenas for sharing ideas and promoting discussion and reflection. It is argued that this process will ultimately promote action in individuals, instead of passivity (Sevčenko 2010, 2011). Unfortunately, there may also be a darker side to such well-intentioned initiatives. Sites of pluralizing perspectives may be seen as dangerous to those in power, which can be illustrated by the Gulag labour camp Perm-36, near the city of Perm in Russia, which was holding prisoners, most of them political, from 1946 up until 1988. The camp was transformed into a museum in 1995, organized by a local NGO (Non-­ Governmental Organization), and it was a member of the SoC network, with the aim of discussing present-day issues promoting reflection and human rights issues (Williams 2012). However, governmental funding to the museum was completely cut off in 2014, most likely because the museum was declared “anti-Russian” due to it openly dealing with more recent atrocities and crimes against humanity. Furthermore, the leadership of the museum was sacked and replaced by an individual from the Perm Ministry of Culture (see Russia Beyond 2015). I am in favour of a process-oriented approach inducing reflection and dialogue through pluralizing perspectives upon the past (Wollentz 2014). However commendable and inspiring, criticism towards a certain degree of innocent post-modern naiveté within such pluralizing enterprises can also be made, in that presenting perspectives may not be enough. After all, hard and difficult facts of truth and justice concerning war crimes also need to be acknowledged and recognized in order for people to move on and forgive in a post-war environment (Viejo-Rose 2011: 150–195). As expressed by Alfredo González-Ruibal concerning the memory after the

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Spanish Civil War (1936–1939): “Forgetting the painful, murky aspects of history is neither emancipatory nor democratic, but neither it is to put all sides at the same level” (González-Ruibal 2017: 296). The inherent tension between accepting all perspectives as equally valid, of allowing every voice to be heard, while still advocating those voices supporting human rights issues, and not muddying crucial issues such as where responsibility is placed for the acts of war-crimes, is certainly neither self-given nor free of conflict within an overall aim of pluralizing the past. As recently argued by González-Ruibal, Pablo Alonso González and Felipe Criado-Boado: “Communities—the units into which the People are organised—are diverse, fragmented and complex. Some are progressive, some are not; some are cohesive, others are divided by internal conflicts. Archaeologists and heritage practitioners, however, have often transferred the qualities of the critical, enlightened subaltern (…) onto every community with which they work and, in the last instance, to the People as a whole. Almost everything that is popular, bottom-up and local is thus celebrated” (González-­ Ruibal et al. 2018: 508–509). There is a danger in idealizing community perceptions because it may potentially enforce xenophobic values for the sake of pluralizing the past. This tension is in need of a balanced approach, and it is therefore essential that the heritage professional is open-minded to different ways of understanding heritage and relations to the past and to the world (i.e. Harrison 2012), but also have a critical and engaged voice that does not fall prey to “reactionary populism” (see also Brophy 2018). This is more important now than ever, with the influence of right-­ wing nationalism increasing within heritage governance (Niklasson and Hølleland 2018).

Towards the Inclusive Heritage Discourse In my approach to the issue of heritage and dissonance I am going to build upon the concept of an “Inclusive Heritage Discourse” (IHD), in contrast to the AHD, as outlined by Kisić (2016). In her brilliant study focusing on governing heritage dissonance in former Yugoslavia, Kisić outlines an emerging alternative to the AHD, namely the IHD (Table 2.1). The IHD builds upon the recent frameworks on heritage, as the ones outlined above, primarily the Faro Convention and UNESCO’s “Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage”, while aiming to move beyond the limitations and shortcomings within these conventions. As convincingly argued by Kisić, even though recent

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Table 2.1  Kisic Authorized Heritage Discourse Authorized Heritage Discourse

Inclusive Heritage Discourse

Understanding of heritage Scope

Static witness of the past

Value Key concepts

Intrinsic, embedded in heritage Universality, excellence, professionalism, authenticity, monumentality Governments, public memory institutions, experts Inter(national)

Dynamic, (re)constructed in the present, evolving Intangibility which can be materialized Extrinsic, instrumental Participation, diversity, human rights, intercultural dialogue

Authority/actors Level Policy approach

Material remains

Key policy texts

Top-down, democratization of culture Venice Charter; UNESCO 1972

Attitude toward dissonance

Ignoring, marginalization, neutralization

Governance as assemblages of diverse stakeholders Communal, subaltern, regional, local, individual, inter(national) Bottom-up, cultural democracy and cultural utilitarianism UNESCO 2001, 2003, 2005; Council of Europe 2005 Appraisal, negotiation, dialogue, reconciliation

frameworks have been promoting reconciliation through heritage, undoubtedly, the phrase often remains implicitly employed and defined and thus, devoid of clear meaning; rather serving a purpose as a catch-­ phrase than as a substantial contribution to how heritage is managed (Kisić 2016: 21). First of all, the IHD challenges the top-down approach of the expert deciding and determining the significance of heritage, to also acknowledge other stakeholders and communities in society through a bottom-up perspective, with a particular focus on the local perspective among those living with the heritage in their everyday life. This perspective is highly present in the Faro Convention, by recognizing what is termed “heritage communities” (Council of Europe 2005). Second, the IHD sees heritage as inherently intangible and in movement, rather than as represented by static physical objects induced with inherent values and meanings, which can only be read and thus deciphered by the heritage expert. Instead, both meanings and values are constantly and actively produced and negotiated through how the past and its material remains are made meaningful, or denied meaning, in the present. This aspect will be elaborated in more detail in part three, in which I will use this argument as a starting point for analyzing the various narratives produced

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surrounding the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo. This understanding of heritage crucially goes against the traditional conservation paradigm, in that it includes an attitude towards change to heritage, not as a failure and a cause for attempts of reconstruction or conservation, but as an inevitable feature and as a possible positive value of the heritage (DeSilvey 2017: 30). Third, the IHD aims to pluralize perspectives upon the past, which goes hand in hand with the suggestions elaborated by Ashworth et  al. (2007). Here, heritage can serve as a tool in a process of democratization in society, which in turn will make the heritage highly sensitive to those in power. If a governmental institution finds itself threatened by the IHD, it may instead favour the nation-friendly and easier to control AHD, which occurred in the unfortunate case of the Perm-36 museum, mentioned above. Fourth, the IHD advocates dissonance, not only as an inherent feature of heritage, but as a potential positive value for inducing critical thinking and reflection in individuals. As written by Kisić: (...) dissonance can empower de-naturalization of heritage, foster critical thinking and create opportunities for intense intercultural mediation. Therefore, the tension and energy that dissonance in heritage brings is not necessarily the energy of violence, but the energy of action and change, which could be used for the good. (Kisić 2016: 31)

By de-naturalizing heritage through recognition of its dissonance, objects and monuments will no longer be seen as heritage based on inherent and pre-determined values, but as heritage based on cultural and social processes that are not self-given nor can be taken for granted. It opens up the possibility that what constitutes a taken-for-granted site of heritage today, may, in fact, not constitute heritage tomorrow. Instead of seeing this as a cause for concern, however, it may lead us to pose fundamental questions surrounding heritage and the future of heritage that would otherwise not have been asked. Such as, for example, what kind of heritage would the future be in need of (e.g. Holtorf and Högberg 2013; Harrison 2015; Högberg et al. 2017; Harrison et al. 2020)? Furthermore, such an approach will also help us move away from seeing the heritage as a carrier of static and essential cultures, ethnicities or identities often tied to the nation state, where metaphors such “origin” and “roots” determines heritage, instead of approaching heritage as inherently dynamic, in-movement and plural. As Anders Högberg recognized (2013, 2016), the heritage sector is still largely directed towards, and functions within, essential ideas of people and cultures:

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Thus the heritage sector tends to renegotiate the essentialism of the nation state in its theoretical intentions and goals. At the same time, essentialism is maintained as the ontological and epistemological background in professional practices and interpretative frameworks. Old ways of understanding heritage and identity (essentialism) are dressed up using new words ­(plurality, renegotiation). This understanding of heritage has consequences for how citizenship is defined: people are classified according to who they are and what they are supposed to do, not according to what they actually do and who they want to be. (Högberg 2016: 43–44)

This realization is not only significant in understanding the need to move away from essentialism carried on through by linking heritage with metaphors such as “roots” and “blood and soil”, but also in order to see the limitations within the more recent legislation on heritage. In heritage practice, essentialism can be maintained simply through the use of new words such as “pluralism” without it adhering to any much-needed ontological and epistemological changes in approach. My aim is to let the IHD guide me in the fieldwork I carry out within all my three main case studies dealing with heritage connected to incidents of violence: Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Gazimestan monument, Kosovo and Sandby borg, Sweden. This is achieved through my choice of method as well as my focus. By giving a primary voice to the way the local community experiences heritage, and by studying the diverse and sometimes contradicting strategies in how the local community make the heritage meaningful in their everyday life, the approach is necessarily bottom-up in its character. Furthermore, it aims to study variation and dissonance as meaningful and as a potential source for developing sites of heritage, rather than the other way around. The perspectives of the local community will then be compared to the perspectives of the heritage professionals who were interviewed as part of the research. Finally, through studying difficult heritage as not induced with inherent meanings and values in wait of being retrieved, I can approach landscapes of violence as a constantly evolving and dynamic process, in which the violence that landscapes may (or may not) be connected to are never found and thus retrieved within and through landscapes and the heritage within these landscapes, but always as socially and culturally constructed through everyday engagements and habits (and the lack thereof) and the narratives produced or denied relevance supporting these very engagements and habits. I recognize that an approach focusing on the dynamic and evolving aspects of heritage has to acknowledge how the meanings of heritage in

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the present refer not only to memories of the past, but include the potential future scenarios and perspectives imagined in surrounding heritage. After all, as outlined, heritage helps building a sense of belonging within individuals and communities (Ashworth et al. 2007: 1), and the production of the feeling of belonging demands the possibility of finding future perspectives within a given place (Jansen 2009: 57). This serves a particular need in a post-war environment. Therefore, in the next section I will outline the theoretical concept applied to study the so-called future-­ assembling capabilities within heritage (Harrison 2015).

Heritage and the Future It was mentioned that heritage for the purpose of “reconciliation” in a post-conflict environment was often used as an empty catch phrase within more recent frameworks on heritage, in that it seldom was clearly defined nor articulated how the heritage can work towards reconciliation and conflict resolution in a more explicit way. The same argument is also valid for the phrase “future” within (at least) Western policy documents on heritage. The future is often mentioned as a key reason motivating the preservation of heritage, but rarely functions beyond a “catch-phrase”, for example by formulating quite worn-out phrases along the lines of preserving the heritage in order to hand it over to future generations (Högberg et al. 2017). Cornelius Holtorf, Anders Högberg, Sarah May and myself have studied the attitudes towards the future within heritage management in more detail through conducted interviews and analysis of policy documents (Wollentz 2016; Högberg et al. 2017). The results point to there being no discussion within heritage management concerning how the future may look like, for example, how it may differ from the present, and how long the “future” referred to is. The heritage is thus preserved for a future society which is assumed to look like the present one, consequently inhabited with people who value heritage in the same way as we value it today including the same needs and demands of heritage. The question whether heritage may be valued in a different way, which would demand different responses in the present, for example concerning what should be preserved and in which way, was neither posed nor a point of discussion. This serious lack of future perspectives within the sector becomes all the more glaring considering the common use of the word “future” within official policy documents.

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In this book, the temporality of difficult heritage is the focus of research. Temporality does not only concern and relate to a past and a present, but also to a future. When the heritage is made meaningful by the local community, it is always directed towards something, be it future visions, dreams or even fears. Therefore, when analyzing the narratives constructed surrounding heritage among my interview partners, the future remains either implicitly or explicitly present, and it thus plays a role in how the heritage is made meaningful. A discussion of the so-called future-­ assembling capacities of heritage is therefore crucial, and here I will particularly be drawing on the work of Rodney Harrison (2012, 2015) and the collaborative research program named “Heritage Futures: Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage” (Harrison et al. 2020) of which he is the principal investigator (Heritage Futures: https://heritage-futures.org/). In order to fully explore the role of the heritage for the local community, the way the heritage is drawn upon, not primarily in order to imagine different pasts, but to imagine future scenarios is vital. In other words, heritage may constitute a resource when imagining futures, whether these futures are pessimistic scenarios of overflooded cities, positive images of a world in peace or something in-between. Heritage is continuously created/transformed through future-oriented practices. Futures can be constraining and enabling, exclusive and inclusive, disempowering and empowering, actively chosen, unconsciously lived/followed, or forced upon people. This encourages us to try to disentangle the array of different future visions/images, and study how they draw upon and produce different forms of heritage. An approach towards looking at the future assembling aspects of heritage goes hand in hand with a more dynamic and process-oriented heritage practice outlined above. The futures assembled through heritage have to be understood as plural, since different practices and engagements with heritage and the past may generate different futures. This discussion can also be extended to include how different “ontologies” work to assemble different futures, not necessarily restricted to an imagined dualism of “Western” ontologies and traditional ontologies (Harrison 2015). Furthermore, it has to be acknowledged that the future is constantly created through present-day activities. Therefore, the way the future is imagined can play a very real role in its possible realization, through the practice of actively moving towards and gradually creating the future strived for. Also within this process, the heritage can be utilized, for example through creating spaces initiating and allowing a discussion and a reflection upon

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the future and how to realize it (Carabelli and Lyon 2016; Wollentz 2019). Harrison evocatively expresses it in a refreshingly polemic way: As a starting point, we must recognize that “heritage” has very little to do with the past but actually involves practices which are fundamentally concerned with assembling and designing the future—heritage involves ­ working with the tangible and intangible traces of the past to both materially and discursively remake both ourselves and the world in the present, in anticipation of an outcome that will help constitute a specific (social, economic, or ecological) resource in and for the future (…). While heritage is produced as part of a conversation about what is valuable from the past, it can only ever be assembled in the present, in a state of looking toward, and an act of taking responsibility for, the future. We could almost say that the “new heritage” has nothing to do with the past at all, but that it is actually a form of “futurology”. (Harrison 2015: 35)

As became evident for me during the fieldwork carried out which will be presented in the following chapters, the way the future is imagined constitutes a particular concern in a post-war environment. This relates to violence being a practice which tends to disrupt and destabilize relations and identities, while establishing and “conjuring” new ones in the process (Herscher 2010), as will be theoretically expanded upon soon. This characteristic of violence has profound implication for the way the heritage is being drawn upon in a post war environment, both on an individual everyday basis, as well as within political agendas. Violence is “ontologically” challenging and disruptive (González-Ruibal and Hall 2015: 152), and in order to regain a sense of “normality” in the aftermath of war, the possibility of envisioning future perspectives is vital. This relates to the role of the heritage for people to achieve a sense of belonging within a given place, as well to when the heritage fails to contribute with such a feeling (see Wollentz 2017). As the social anthropologist Stef Jansen has stated, a place needs to be invested with hope for the future in order for a sense of belonging to occur: “To practically engage in a feasible home-making project with regard to a particular place (…) required an ability to invest it with at least some dimensions of a future, with some hope” (Jansen 2009: 57). Therefore, the future-assembling capabilities of the heritage will be studied within the case studies, with a particular focus on which kind of futures people imagine and how these futures draw upon and contribute to heritage.

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Heritage of Violence There are many different forms of violence, with the most well-known distinction being that between structural and direct violence (Galtung and Höivik 1971). The structural violence is embedded in social structures of unequal and oppressive power relations, and refers to what Pierre Bourdieu called “symbolic violence”. The symbolic violence is “naturalized” through the dominant ideology, and it is in such a way institutionalized (Bourdieu 1991). My examples of violence within this book are focused on direct, that is, on physical violence, which does not mean that I consider symbolic violence of less significance. On the contrary, I recognize that the violence within structures can be fundamentally crippling on a different level than that which is caused through direct violence. After all, direct violence may often be the consequence for individuals when breaking or disobeying the dominant ideology. However, a focus on direct violence was made for analytical purposes, due to direct violence having a more immediate effect upon landscapes and heritage, as well as to relationships to them. Structural violence is inherently slow-moving and naturalized through a dominant ideology. Therefore, Rob Nixon has referred to such violence as “slow violence” which unfolds over years, decades, and even centuries (Nixon 2011: 3). In contrast, direct violence is often immediately disruptive and destabilizing. Violence against heritage will be approached as a practice which is not only destroying physical buildings of tangible heritage, but also, in the meantime, creates heritage. However uncomfortable such a fact may be, heritage is also created through violence and destruction (Holtorf 2015). If we adhere to the IHD, heritage is now approached as created and sustained through meaningful engagements with places, monuments and objects. Violence may not be the kind of engagement that we would favor, but it does add new meanings and values to heritage. As Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Dacia Viejo-Rose have written, conflict “engenders new sites and adds new symbolic dimensions to existing ones even as others are destroyed and disappear” (Sørensen and Viejo-Rose 2015b: 8). On the topic of violence against heritage it is worthwhile to discuss Cornelius Holtorf’s article “Averting Loss Aversion in Cultural Heritage” (Holtorf 2015). In the article Holtorf is drawing on the theory of “loss aversion” by Daniel Kahneman (2011), which says that people in general tend to prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains of the same value, and Timothy Ingold’s (2010) argument that people and things should be seen

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as in a process of continuously carry on, and thus, continuously being born, rather than including demarcated births and deaths. Applying these two ideas to the destruction of heritage, Holtorf argues that heritage does not “die” through destruction, it carries on, and in fact, the values of heritage may even increase through destruction rather than decrease: The real difficulty lies in determining which cultural heritage objects may be of the same value in society, not in the act of substitution between different heritage objects as such. (...) What we, therefore, need in Heritage Studies is an intensified discussion of how to identify, evaluate and compare the benefits and values of cultural heritage objects in constant transformation in society. (Holtorf 2015: 14)

Such a reasoning would involve profound implications for how post-­ war heritage is understood and managed. Nevertheless, it is very important to recognize that war and the destruction of heritage always involves human suffering that cannot be materially accounted for simply in crass terms of the losses or gains of values. After all, human suffering cannot be satisfactorily quantified. Furthermore, as Holtorf states, heritage contributes with different values and the economic value of heritage needs to be contrasted against “softer” values such as contributing with a sense of belonging for individuals, as mentioned above. The complexity of violence against heritage is closely related to the fact that violence is a disruptive as well as a creative practice. The anthropologist Michael Jackson wrote “Violence sunders things that belong together, makes passive that which has the power to act, renders inert that which moves, muffles and silences that which speaks, and reduces being to nothingness” (Jackson 2013: 90). If we accept the possibility that also violence against monuments and buildings, the destruction of the physical heritage, can render individuals inert, then subsequently the heritage can possibly also serve a role in reinstating direction and movement in individuals, but in so doing, it is necessary to take in consideration other values than simply economic ones. Let us turn our gaze towards two of my case studies, Mostar and the battlefield of Kosovo Field. During the recent wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) and Kosovo (1998–1999), violence was not only directed towards human beings or strategic targets, but the heritage itself was widely targeted for deliberate destruction (Herscher 2010; Walasek 2015). Such widespread destruction of heritage is not, however, best approached as the end of a particular memory from the past, but

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rather as an attempt at manifesting (often ethnic) identities of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, calling these identities into being through the practices of destruction (Herscher 2010). These ethnic identities constitute ways of perceiving and constructing the world (Brubaker 2004: 17). Therefore, being such fluid and dynamic constructions, ethnic identities have to be performed, and the destruction of heritage can be one example of such a performance causing the signifiers of identities to be dismantled and giving raise to the needs for it to be reassembled. Both are processes that draw on and contribute to heritage. These acts of destruction thus serve as “compensations for their [the ethnic identities] otherwise fugitive presence” (Herscher 2010: 91). Destruction of heritage is simultaneously construction of heritage because heritage is not fixed, as mentioned earlier, it is a continuous meaning-making process which is embodied and concerned with assembling futures rather than representing pasts. However, we also need to consider which particular future’s claims are assembled through the heritage of violence: progressive or divisive ones?

Difficult Heritage and Temporality The subfield of “difficult heritage” constitutes a stimulating and growing field of study which can be illustrated through the diversity of the approaches present. However, it is mostly retaining itself to modern or contemporary sites. This leads us to the next point of discussion, which involves the crucial issue of temporality and difficult heritage. What drew me to select my case studies were the temporalities in question. Mostar is focusing on the heritage of recent violence, Gazimestan is focusing on the heritage of a medieval battle, and Sandby borg is focusing on the heritage of a prehistoric massacre. Through such a selection, I can discuss violence and temporality in a way that would otherwise not have been possible. The issue of time is crucial for understanding the relationships people have towards so-called “difficult heritage”, which makes this particular selection of case studies highly relevant. For analytical purposes the term “difficult heritage” will be defined as how to stage and present a particularly violent and/or otherwise unsettling past in the present. While it is important to keep in mind that all heritage is and should to some extent be difficult to present, due to heritage being inherently dissonant, it is still necessary for analytical purposes to define “difficult heritage” as a specific form of particularly unsettling heritage, due to its connection to violence, war and traumatic memories (see

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Logan and Reeves 2009a, b). Difficult heritage, which is sometimes simply coined negative (Meskell 2002), undesirable (Macdonald 2006), or dark heritage (Mcatackney 2014; Seitsonen 2018), is a subfield which has emerged within the last 25 years or so (Samuels 2015), beginning with the above mentioned volume by Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996). However, even though the concept has gained more attention and significance in academia within recent decades, it has been recognized within heritage management for considerably longer time. The anthropologist Joshua Samuels (2015) argues that the various terms are more or less used by scholars to designate the same phenomenon (even though they hold different connotations: that is negative heritage, for instance, is simultaneously a value-statement), which is the meditation of managing a problematic or disturbing past. Within recent years, difficult heritage has become the most common term to use (see Macdonald 2009) and, as emphasized by Samuels, the relative neutrality of the word “difficult” is a benefit. It is important to recognize that within the concept of difficult heritage, there may lie preconceived assumptions concerning what is difficult and, consequently, what is not difficult heritage. This is exemplified by Joshua Samuels study on the heritage of so-called Borghi, which were designed as agricultural centres in Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Samuels is starting the study with the assumptions that the heritage of these centres would be difficult for the residents in present day Italy, due to their connection to fascism. Nevertheless, he surprisingly found that the people he interviewed did not find them difficult at all. As expressed by Samuels: “An outsider like myself might feel its dark aura attaching itself to the old buildings, but this is not the case for the local population interacting with them” (Samuels 2015: 122–123). One of the explanations why, amongst others, is due to sheer pragmatism: there is a potential utility of the buildings which is more significant than any potential dark “aura”. This realization forces each researcher to also challenge their own pre-conceived ideas concerning difficult heritage when conducting fieldwork, and be open to a situation which is much more ambiguous and mundane than expected, preferably without top-down judgements and not necessarily causing the need for the researcher to evaluate “desirable” engagements. Furthermore, the study forcibly contradicts the so-called “storage model”, and showcases how heritage does not carry inherent meanings, instead, the meaning(s) created through heritage may go in unexpected directions.

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The forms of heritage, which is presenting the unsettling past in ways which put attention and focus on suffering and death, works within the category of heritage attraction sometimes coined “dark tourism” (see Foley and Lennon 1996; Stone 2006; Hartmann 2014), which may play with the fascination humans have towards murder mysteries and horrible crimes (Holtorf 2015: 5–6). Nevertheless, the dark tourism industry is not necessarily “exploiting” the fascination of horror in humans in order to make profit, but as in the case of, for example, Auschwitz in Poland (van der Laarse 2013) and Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, use the sites in order to induce deeper reflection and empathy through the recognition that some acts cannot and should not be forgotten, nor completely “heal” (see here Young 1993 for a study of Holocaust memorials). There is thus a larger degree of “educational” impetus behind such sites of difficult heritage. Simultaneously, they are less driven by economic agendas than those sites of dark tourism which simply serve as ways to satisfy a curiosity for the macabre focusing merely on entertainment, such as the Jack the Ripper tour in London (Stone 2006: 151; Hartmann 2014: 172). However, as stated by Tunbridge and Ashworth, education and entertainment may be combined within one and the same site of heritage: “(…) entertainment and education are effectively and often inextricably combined to render atrocity one of the most marketable of heritages and one of the most powerful instruments for the transference of political or social messages” (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996: 94). In their edited volume on difficult heritage, “Places of pain and shame”, William Logan and Keir Reeves (2009a) recognize the possible conflict of interests in heritage sites of atrocities between those who are mourning the death of loved ones and those who are visiting while being desensitized to the horrors of death through media and visits purely out of fascination (Logan and Reeves 2009b: 4). A revealing and recent example concerns the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. In 2017 the Israeli artist Shahak Shapira conducted a project named “Yolocaust” in which he edited selfies of photos of people visiting the Holocaust Memorial (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe)  in which they were smiling, performing Yoga and so on, in the memorial. Shapira edited the photos so that horrible scenes of murdered Jews were added to the background of the seemingly happy visitors posing for selfies (Yolocaust 2017). While the approach of editing these photos can be ethically discussed, it highlights how a site of “difficult heritage” is meant or/and expected to function to facilitate a certain set of engagements and emotions from the visitor, such as empathy

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and reflection, while ruling others out which are seen as unethical and immoral (McIntosh 1999: 43; Smith and Campbell 2015). This is a crucial aspect of difficult heritage, and will be elaborated upon in Chap. 9. Nevertheless, the contrast between desired and undesired engagements at a site of difficult heritage is only one out of several dilemmas that a site of difficult heritage poses in its management. After all, difficult heritage and thus the death of individuals can be economically exploited by governments and heritage institutions, while at the other side of the spectrum there exist sites which are so shameful that there are top-down attempts of forgetting them due to what they signify, yet still drawing “dark tourism” outside of governmentally funded or recognized projects. The nuclear zone of Chernobyl is such a place (see Maxwell 2012). The common approach towards “difficult heritage” and temporality has been to see time as a “force” in itself, which gradually lessens the difficulty of heritage (Meskell 2002; Stone 2006; Hartmann 2014), most likely influenced by the popular saying that “time heals all wounds”. For instance, the Colosseum in Rome is a popular tourist attraction, with tourists happily taking smiling photos while standing next to dressed up Gladiators. Seemingly, the visitors are seldom reflecting on a deeper level upon the gruesome history of the Colosseum and the death of thousands of slaves during Roman times for the sake of sheer entertainment. In developing a spectrum for dark tourism sites, Philip R. Stone discusses Colosseum: Early examples of dark tourism may be found in the patronage of Roman gladiatorial games. With death and suffering at the core of the gladiatorial product, and its eager consumption by raucous spectators, the Roman Colosseum may be considered one of the first dark tourist attractions. (Stone 2006: 147)

This argument is revealing when it comes to temporality since Colosseum is linked to an early form of dark tourism through its role during ancient times, while its present-day status as heritage is not elaborated upon. Perhaps we can gleam from this that the Colosseum does not primarily serve as dark tourism any longer and thus, not as difficult heritage, in the sense that a site of difficult heritage is most often meant to induce a specific set of engagements while ruling others out. Even though it is clear that there are limits as to what is allowed and not allowed as an engagement at Colosseum, these limits are no different than any other form of commercialized heritage site, that is, you are required to pay in order to

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enter and you are not allowed to damage the structure and so on. In other words, Colosseum is not being treated nor researched as a site of difficult heritage, which does not necessarily suggest that it may not be experienced as difficult by some visitors depending on their own experiences at the site. It may serve as an example of how temporal distance has been reducing the “darkness” within the spectrum of dark tourism sites as outlined by Stone. Within the same spectrum and drawing on an article on Auschwitz by William F. S. Miles (2002), Stone makes a clear distinction between “sites of death and suffering”, and “sites associated with death and suffering” (Miles 2002; Stone 2006: 176). According to the distinction, the physical sites where atrocities occurred, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, are darker on the scale than sites which are simply associated to such events, for example, through the construction of monuments, such as the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. I find it questionable whether such a distinction in different scales of “darkness” is beneficial since it carries with it a baggage of seeing events as entering the physical sites and staying there, which may risk perpetuate worn-out ideas that memories can be locked within the fabric of the physical sites waiting to be retrieved. While it is important to recognize the problem in the distinction, I find it valid to the extent that it speaks of the so-called “power in place”, which does not suggest any inscribing power in memories, but simply that places and human beings exist in a dialectic and mutual relationship, in which we shape places as much as places shape us (Mitchell 2000). For those who are mourning the death of loved ones, site-based memorials may play a significant role within the mourning process. This demands an approach to such memorials which do not reduce or silence the amount of suffering, as occurred in the case of the WWII Ustaše2 concentration camp Jasenovac in Croatia, in which the post-war memorial process at the site, including a large stone flower (1966) by the architect Bogdan Bogdanović, was meant to induce light and hope without addressing the horror and brutality of the concentration camp. This was part of Josip Broz Tito’s notion of “brotherhood and unity” which was aimed at moving forward from the war. However, by so doing, past atrocities were not being thoroughly addressed. Therefore, the number of victims in the camp became highly politicized and disputed between Croats and Serbians, 2  The Croatian puppet-state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy which was in power 1941–1945.

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increasing tension and hostility rather than reconciliation. In such a way, the site of Jasenovac “played an active role in the ensuing [1991–1995] conflicts” (van der Laarse 2013: 80). A visit to the Museum of Republica Srpska in Banja Luka showcases that Jasenovac still has not lost its political and emotional significance (as of 2019). The social anthropologist Sharon Macdonald may be the researcher who has most thoroughly researched the relationship between temporality and difficult heritage, primarily through her research on the Nazi rally grounds in Nürnberg, Germany (2005, 2009). In her research she makes highly interesting discoveries concerning how temporal distance can be challenged, as well as actively produced. For instance, there was a long period in post-war Germany in which the heritage of the Nazi Rally Ground was presented as a thing of the past instead of as a thing of heritage due to the fact that heritage fundamentally suggests a sense of continuity between past and present (Macdonald 2009). By positioning a site of difficult heritage as past, not as heritage, a sense of continuity is denied and a larger temporal distance, as well as a temporal border dividing past and present, is actively produced. This may occur in order to position unwanted heritage within an emotionally safe distance. However, more recent heritage management at the Rally Grounds have chosen a different approach, in recognizing it as part of the city’s heritage, for better or worse, and engaging visitors with experiences which prompts reflection and social critique. She argues that it is the very complex multiplicity of different temporalities that the Nazi Rally ground is connected to, which allows for more stimulating engagements. Therefore, a silencing of the multiplicity of the site would reduce its impact. In other words, complexity and dissonance of perspectives should be stimulated and highlighted, not approached as a disturbance. Macdonald refers to the Nazi Rally Grounds as “permanently unsettling” and encourages a management of difficult heritage so that a constant “permanent unsettlement” can be maintained (Macdonald 2009: 192).3 Macdonald’s results are highly stimulating since they pinpoint how “time” cannot simply be seen as a distinct force in itself gradually lessening the “difficulty” or “darkness” of heritage (see, e.g., Meskell 2002), but that temporality is also part of an active strategy when presenting and 3  For a related argument, see Mats Burström and Bernhard Gelderblom’s (2011) study of the neglected heritage of Bückeberg, Germany, where the Third Reich Harvest Festival took place.

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experiencing heritage. Temporality, just as heritage itself, is therefore always actively produced and negotiated and does not exist neither as inherent nor unchanged within physical sites of heritage. Such a realization calls for a more nuanced approach to the connection between time and difficult heritage, which contradicts linear and straightforward notions. Thus, it is unfortunate that the study of difficult heritage has so far mostly been restricted to modern or contemporary sites of conflict. It is my hope to contribute to nuance the research tradition, through selecting not only a contemporary site of difficult heritage, but also a medieval as well as a prehistoric one, allowing the possibility to analyze temporalities and difficult heritage from a new perspective.

Challenging a Linear Understanding of Temporality One aim of this book is to challenge a linear understanding of the relationship between temporalities and difficult heritage. As stated above, heritage management has been influenced by an attitude towards time as a distinct force outside of human control and influence, and while it is true that time goes by whether we want it or not and cannot be stopped or reversed (for discussions on time in anthropology Gell 1992), time is also experienced and lived in our everyday lives, and seen from such a perspective, it is not to be regarded as a distinct force in itself separated from human actions (see especially the fascinating insights from Lisa Baraitser on the temporalities of everyday life: Baraitser 2015). Temporal progression can also be actively challenged. As stated in Chap. 1, one function of many rituals is to re-enact events of the past, causing that which has disappeared to reappear through ritualized habits, giving the past a sense of presentness again (Connerton 1989: 63). Furthermore, the way heritage often works to engage with different temporalities in order for past times to be experienced as present, is far from straightforward nor linear (e.g. Petersson and Holtorf 2017). Within anthropology and archaeology the seminal study of Johannes Fabian named “Time and the Other” (Fabian 2014) is a revealing work, since it discusses how time has been employed within the discipline of anthropology. Fabian shows how so-called aboriginal people have been denied what he coins “coevalness”, which is the time of the present. They have been studied as fossils from the past and used in order to study past societies (see also Gosselain 2016; Hamilakis 2016). This is based on the highly “Western” and Hegelian notion of time and humanity, with there

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being certain determined stages of development, in which “the West” has reached furthest and “aboriginal” people are still on a stage which “the West” left behind a long time ago. In fact, the terms used to designate people who do not choose to adhere to a “Western” way of life, such as “aboriginal” or “traditional”, are also reminiscent of a temporal typology. Within such a “typological time”, there exist dichotomies between “rural” and “urban”, “civilized” and “savage” and so on, which determines the way time is conceptualized. In such a way, within an evolutionary anthropology, time was spatialized (Fabian 2014: 15). This does not constitute an innocent process, but rooted in how anthropology was developed as a discipline during the nineteenth century, and firmly based in a “Western” and unavoidably hierarchical world view between “the west and the rest”, in which the “West” exists in the “Now” and the “rest” exists further back in time. Such a dichotomy also suggests that communication and mutual understanding can never be fully reached, since “today” logically cannot speak with “yesterday”. However, “yesterday” can be objectively studied through research, that is, through anthropological and ethnographical fieldwork. The basic underlying principle rests in how distance was, and often still is, uncritically conceptualized; in that “distance” in both time and in space unavoidably equalled “difference” (Fabian 2014: 16). Even though a more inclusive anthropology has been developed since the nineteenth century, these ideas are still haunting anthropology due to their importance in developing the discipline, such as within the subfield ethnoarchaeology (see Gosselain 2016; Hamilakis 2016). The study by Fabian goes hand in hand with David Lowenthal’s ground-breaking work on heritage from 1985: “The past is a foreign country”. A work that was highly influential in setting the scene for a more dynamic and process-oriented heritage management. In the volume Lowenthal argues that heritage professionals have constructed the past as distinct and separated from the present, while in fact, the past permeates and influences our every action. In such a way, the remains of the past, that is, the physical heritage, cannot be kept within a “foreign” country, in which people did things differently, but incorporated and made relevant within the present and future needs and demands of society (Lowenthal 1985: 412). Lowenthal’s volume represents an early and seminal example of a severe criticism towards the basic principle behind the Western AHD, outlined above. These perspectives exemplify why I call for challenging the understanding of time as linear and/or determined by distinct phases and dichotomies between stages, where certain phases are more or less ahead

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in time. In fact, such an understanding of time and space has helped to create and sustain an “Other” out of the past and the people living in that past, as well as an “Other” out of certain places in the present, and the people living in those places. Removing the clear-cut boundaries between past, present and future, between here and somewhere else, does not mean claiming that people everywhere and everywhen have been the same. On the contrary, it means accepting the people studied, not as an “Other”, which is a projected construction based on what we are not, from the vantage point of those conducting the research, and thus saying more about how we see ourselves, but as fellow human beings, which may or may not be similar to us. Such an approach suggests that we need to have a more dynamic approach to how time is conceptualized and employed within heritage management, and it also suggests that temporal distance is not fixed and unchallengeable. In other words, it calls for us to critically engage with the relation between temporal distance and proximity through altering and comparing studies between different pasts and different places. As I aim to highlight with this book, one implication of such an approach to time makes it relevant to expand the temporal horizons and also discuss difficult heritage from the perspective of prehistoric massacres. Recently there has been a growing body of research focusing on the heritage of war and violence from various perspectives (to mention a few: McAtackney 2014; Sørensen and Viejo-Rose 2015a; Seitsonen 2018; Lähdesmäki et al. 2019). Nevertheless, while being highly relevant and challenging in terms of how the material culture of modern conflict is being theorized, the research tradition seldom connects itself to an equally burgeoning focus on prehistoric violence and conflict (to mention a few: Fernández-Götz and Roymans 2018; Horn and Kristiansen 2018), but often retains itself to modern or contemporary sites of war and conflict, with some notable exceptions. Prehistory is becoming increasingly un-pacified and the romantic idea of the peaceful prehistory is gradually disappearing with the increasing discoveries of more and more massacres, trauma on bones and the realization that the weapons were actually used in combat and not only served a ritual function in society (Horn 2013). Helle Vandkilde (2006) has argued that romantic notions of either noble warriors or peaceful peasants were long prevailing as tales of the past within the Western world, influencing archaeology up until the mid-90s. Lawrence H. Keeley’s volume “War before Civilization”, published in 1996, is often regarded as

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influential in changing such a naïve approach towards the violence of the past within archaeology. Keeley argued that violence seems to have been a relatively common feature of the human life, no matter the time period, and that there may not be an increasing amount of violence with the start of state-societies relative to the population numbers (Keeley 1996: 32–33). Would such a realization hold implications for heritage management of sites connected to prehistoric violence? After all, is it really true that time heals all wounds, and even if it were true, what would the implications be for the heritage of prehistoric violence? How should temporal distance be dealt with in an ethical manner and can/should temporal distance be challenged? The excavation process is in itself a creative practice of bringing something new into the world (Lucas 2001: 42), which may have profound impact upon the communities living around the excavated site leading to new narratives and engagements with the past. What then, is the impact of a discovered massacre? What kinds of values are created in the process, and which kind of new engagements with the past does such a discovery bring into the world?

Moving Forward Throughout the book, I will challenge conceptualizing difficult heritage through a determined and linear conception of time. Instead, the simultaneously present multitude of different temporalities drawing upon and shaping heritage will be emphasized. I will do so by developing some new ways of approaching difficult heritage. I will look at, what I coin, the temporalities of belonging, related to how individuals position themselves on the space/time nexus, and how such a positioning infuse difficult heritage with meanings, values and roles. Furthermore, I will look at how the temporalities of heritage are not inherently residing within the physicality of the heritage, but how they can be actively produced through what I coin temporally positioning heritage. Such temporalities can be produced because they serve a certain need in connection to heritage related to unwanted or uncomfortable emotions and/or memories, and they can serve to challenge the very status of a site as heritage (or not). However, the book will also examine ways in which a sense of temporal distance can be actively challenged and the benefits that could arise from doing so. The relationship between difficult heritage and temporality will be discussed through each of my case studies, and it will be achieved through

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conducted interviews with the local population. In such a way attitudes towards the landscape and the heritage within these landscapes will be studied. Clearly, this relates to how memories are informing the construction of narratives produced in order to give meaning to the past. It follows that my research does not only demand an elaboration on the theory of heritage studies, but also on the intricate connection between landscapes and memories, and its role for the construction of narratives surrounding difficult heritage. This theorization will be undertaken in the next chapter.

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Fernández-Götz, M., and N.  Roymans, eds. 2018. Conflict Archaeology Materialities of Collective Violence from Prehistory to Late Antiquity, EAA Monograph Series Themes in Contemporary Archaeology. Vol. 5. London/ New York: Routledge. Foley, M., and J.J.  Lennon. 1996. JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination. International Journal of Heritage Studies 2 (4): 198–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527259608722175. Fredengren, C. 2015. Nature: Cultures. Heritage, Sustainability and Feminist Posthumanism. Current Swedish Archaeology 23: 109–130. Galtung, J., and T.  Höivik. 1971. Structural and Direct Violence. A Note on Operationalization. Journal of Peace Research 8 (1): 73–76. Gell, A. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg. González-Ruibal, A. 2017. Excavating Memory, Burying History. Lessons from the Spanish Civil War. In Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks New Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, ed. R. Bernbeck, K.P. Hofmann, and U. Sommer, vol. 45, 279–302. Berlin, Reihe: Berlin Studies of the Ancient World. González-Ruibal, A., and M.  Hall. 2015. Heritage and Violence. In Global Heritage: A Reader, ed. L. Meskell, 150–170. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. González-Ruibal, A., P.A.  González, and F.  Criado-Boado. 2018. Against Reactionary Populism: Towards a New Public Archaeology. Antiquity 92 (362): 507–515. Gosselain, O.P. 2016. To Hell with Ethnoarchaeology! Archaeological Dialogues 23 (2): 215–228. Green, S.F. 2005. Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hamilakis, Y. 2016. Decolonial Archaeologies: From Ethnoarchaeology to Archaeological Ethnography. World Archaeology 48 ((5) Debates): 678–682. Harrison, R. 2012. Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge. ———. 2015. Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage: Toward an Ontological Politics of Heritage in the Age of Anthropocene. Heritage & Society 8 (1): 24–42. Harrison, R., and D. Rose. 2010. Intangible Heritage. In Understanding Heritage and Memory, ed. R.  Harrison, 238–276. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harrison, R., C. DeSilvey, C. Holtorf, S. Macdonald, N. Bartolini, E. Breithoff, H. Fredheim, A. Lyons, S. May, J. Morgan, and S. Penrose. 2020. Heritage Futures. Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press. Hartmann, R. 2014. Dark Tourism, Thanatourism, and Dissonance in Heritage Tourism Management: New Directions in Contemporary Tourism Research. Journal of Heritage Tourism 9 (2): 166–182.

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Hegardt, J., ed. 2012. The Museum Beyond the Nation. National Historical Museum: Stockholm. Herscher, A. 2010. Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict. California: Stanford University Press. Högberg, A. 2013. Mångfaldsfrågor i kulturmiljövården: tankar, kunskaper och processer 2002–2012. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. ———. 2016. To Renegotiate Heritage and Citizenship Beyond Essentialism. Archaeological Dialogues 23 (1): 39–48. Högberg, A., C.  Holtorf, S.  May, and G.  Wollentz. 2017. No Future in Archaeological Heritage Management? World Archaeology 49 (5): 639–647. Holtorf, C. 2015. Averting Loss Aversion in Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (4): 405–421. Holtorf, C., and A. Högberg. 2013. Heritage Futures and the Future of Heritage. In Counterpoint: Essays in Archaeology and Heritage Studies in Honour of Professor Kristian Kristiansen, BAR Int. Ser. 2508, ed. S.  Bergerbrant and S. Sabatini, 739–746. Oxford: Archaeopress. Horn, C. 2013. Weapons, Fighters and Combat: Spears and Swords in Early Bronze Age Scandinavia. Danish Journal of Archaeology 2 (1): 20–44. https:// doi.org/10.1080/21662282.2013.838832. Horn, C., and K. Kristiansen, eds. 2018. Warfare in Bronze Age Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ICOMOS. 1964. The Venice Charter. International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites. https://www.icomos.org/charters/ venice_e.pdf. 30 Apr 2020. ———. 1994. The Nara Document on Authenticity. https://www.icomos.org/ charters/nara-e.pdf. Retreived 11 Oct 2020. ———. 2008. Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites. http://icip.icomos.org/downloads/ICOMOS_Interpretation_Charter_ ENG_04_10_08.pdf. 30 Apr 2020. ———. 2014. Nara +20. On Heritage Practices, Cultural Values, and the Concept of Authenticity. http://www.japan-icomos.org/pdf/nara20_final_eng.pdf. 31 Mar 2020. Ingold, T. 2010. Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials. Working Paper #15, pp. 1–14. Department of Sociology, University of Manchester. http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1306/1/0510_creative_entanglements.pdf. 30 Apr 2020. Jackson, M. 2013. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. 2nd ed. Köpenhamn: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jansen, S. 2009. Hope and the State in the Anthropology of Home: Preliminary Notes. In Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology, ed. O. Löfgren and R. Bendix, 54–60. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

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Jones, S. 2010. Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity. Journal of Material Culture 15 (2): 181–203. ———. 2016. Unlocking Essences and Exploring Networks: Experiencing Authenticity in Heritage Education Settings. In Sensitive Pasts: Questioning Heritage in Education. Making Sense of History 27, ed. C.  Van Boxtel, M. Grever, and S. Klein. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Keeley, L.H. 1996. War Before Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press. Kisić, V. 2016. Governing Heritage Dissonance: Promises and Realities of Selected Cultural Policies. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation. Lähdesmäki, T., L.  Passerini, S.  Kaasik-Krogerus, and Iris van Huis, eds. 2019. Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Logan, W.S., and K. Reeves, eds. 2009a. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with “Difficult Heritage”. Routledge: Abingdon. ———. 2009b. Introduction: Remembering Places of Pain and Shame. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with “Difficult Heritage”, ed. W.S.  Logan and K. Reeves, 1–14. Abingdon: Routledge. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lucas, G. 2001. Destruction and the Rhetoric of Excavation. Norwegian Archaeological Review 34 (1): 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/002936501 19347. Macdonald, S. 2006. Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg. International Journal of Heritage Studies 12 (1): 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527250500384464. ———. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Abingdon: Routledge. Makaš, E. 2007. Representing Competing Identities: Building and Rebuilding in Postwar Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cornell University. Maxwell, R. 2012. The Archaeology, Heritage and Ideological Impact of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. Guest Lecture, Linnaeus University, Sweden. Recorded 5th December 2012. https://connect.sunet.se/p78jb3wuw2g/?lau ncher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal McAtackney, L. 2014. An Archaeology of the Troubles The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McIntosh, I. 1999. Into the Tourist’s Mind: Understanding the Value of the Heritage Experience. Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 8 (1): 41–64. Meskell, L. 2002. Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (03): 557–574. Message, K. 2006. New Museums and the Making of Culture. Oxford: Berg.

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Miles, W. 2002. Auschwitz: Museum Interpretation and Darker Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 29: 1175–1178. Mitchell, D. 2000. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Limited. Niklasson, E., and H. Hølleland. 2018. The Scandinavian Far-right and the New Politicisation of Heritage. Journal of Social Archaeology 18 (2): 121–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605318757340. Nixon, R. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Petersson, B., and C.  Holtorf, eds. 2017. The Archaeology of Time Travel. Experiencing the Past in the 21st Century. Oxford: Archaeopress. Poulios, I. 2011. Is Every Heritage Site a ‘Living’ One? Linking Conservation to Communities’ Association with Sites. The Historic Environment 2 (2): 144–156. Poulot, D., J.M.  Lanzarote Gurial, and F.  Bodenstein, eds. 2012. National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts, EuNaMus Report No. 8. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press. Samuels, J. 2015. Difficult Heritage. Coming “to Terms” with Sicily’s Fascist Past. In Heritage Keywords. Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage, ed. Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Trinidad Rico, 111–128. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Seitsonen, O. 2018. Digging Hitler’s Arctic War. Archaeologies and Heritage of the Second World War German Military Presence in Finnish Lapland, Academic Dissertation. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Ševčenko, L. 2010. Sites of Conscience: New Approaches to Conflicted Memory. Museum International 62 (1–2): 20–25. ———. 2011. Sites of Conscience: Heritage of and for Human Rights. In Heritage, Memory and Identity, ed. H.  Anheier and Y.R.  Isar, 114–123. London: Sage Publications. Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Smith, L., and G. Campbell. 2015. The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect and Emotion. In A Companion to Heritage Studies, ed. W.  Logan, M.  Nic Craith, and U. Kockel, 443–460. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sørensen, M.L.S., and D.  Viejo-Rose, eds. 2015a. War and Cultural Heritage. Biographies of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015b. Introduction: The Impact of Conflict on Cultural Heritage: A Biographical Lens. In War and Cultural Heritage. Biographies of Place, ed. M.L.S.  Sørensen and D.  Viejo-Rose, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stone, P. 2006. A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions. Tourism 52 (2006): 145–160.

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Svanberg, F., ed. 2010. The Museum as Forum and Actor. Stockholm: The Museum of National Antiquities. Trouillot, M.R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Tunbridge, J.E., and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. UNESCO. 1972. Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. http://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/. 06 May 2020. ———. 2001. Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. http://portal.unesco. org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13179&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html. 06 May 2020. ———. 2003. Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention. 30 Apr 2020. ———. 2005. Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions. https://en.unesco.org/creativity/convention/texts. 08 Apr 2020. van der Laarse, R. 2013. Beyond Auschwitz? Europe’s Terrorscapes in the Age of Postmemory. In Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Violence of the Past, Studies in European Culture and History, ed. M.  Silberman and F. Vatan, 71–92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vandkilde, H. 2006. Archaeology and War: Presentations of Warriors and Peasants in Archaeological Interpretations. In Warfare and Society: Archaeological and Social Anthropological Perspectives, ed. T. Otto, H. Thrane, and H. Vandkilde, 57–73. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Vandkilde, H. 2013. Warfare in Northern European Bronze Age Societies: Twentieth-Century Presentations and Recent Archaeological Research Inquiries. In The Achaeology of Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. S. Ralph, 37–62. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press. Viejo-Rose, D. 2011. Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War. Sussex Academic: Brighton. Walasek, H. 2015. Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge. Williams, P. 2012. Treading Difficult Ground: The Effort to Establish Russia’s First National Gulag Museum. In National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts. EuNaMus Report No. 8, ed. P.  Poulot, J.M.L.  Guiral, and F. Bodenstein, 111–121. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press. Wollentz, G. 2014. The Cultural Heritage as a Resource in Conflict Resolution: An Overview of the Field. Kalmar County Museum. http://www.bridgingages. com/library/the-cultural-heritage-as-a-resource-in-conflict-resolution. 31 Mar 2017. ———. 2016. Framtidens längd och framtidsbilder inom kulturarvssektorn. In Forntid längs ostkusten 4. Blankaholmsseminariet år 2012–2014, ed. K. Alexandersson and L. Papmehl-Dufay, 276–285. Västervik: Västervik museum.

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———. 2017. Making a Home in Mostar: Heritage and the Temporalities of Belonging. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (10): 928–945. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1347891. ———. 2019. Conflicted Memorials and the Need to Look Forward. The Interplay Between Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar and on the Kosovo Field. In Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict: From History to Heritage, ed. M.L.S.  Sørensen, D.  Viejo-Rosé, and P.  Filippucci, 159–182. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Young, J.E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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CHAPTER 3

Memories, Landscapes and the Production of Narratives

In this chapter I am going to discuss the links between landscapes and memory, and specifically how the landscape helps in producing narratives about the past. I will begin the chapter by outlining the crucial ideas on memory and space as developed through the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ (1980, 1992) influential study on collective memory, since his work came to lay the foundation for how it has later been theorized (e.g. Connerton 1989, 2009; Assmann 2011). I will also discuss some of the shortcomings within his approach. Thereafter, I will present why it becomes necessary to apply a more dynamic approach to memory and landscapes than the one advocated by Halbwachs by looking at one of the case studies in this book, Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina. From there, I will discuss the dissonance within memorial landscapes, through looking at different examples within the Western world of memorial landscapes. Finally, I will present three approaches adopted in this book: the multi-­ temporality of the lived space, drawing on theory from Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Tim Ingold (2000); the embodied dimensions of memory, as theorized by Paul Connerton (1989, 2009, 2011); and the production of narratives, drawing on theory from Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1981).

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_3

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The Social and Spatial Frameworks of Memory Maurice Halbwachs1 (1877–1945) was a student of Emilé Durkheim (1858–1917) and was greatly influenced by Durkheim’s concepts, such as the collective consciousness (Durkheim 1997), which constitutes the set of unifying shared beliefs, norms and morals in society. Halbwachs adopted a similar approach to memory by recognizing its importance within the processes of shaping and sustaining certain group identities, by adopting and developing the concept of “collective memory”. The significance of Halbwachs’ research on memory is that it places memory firmly within a social framework, represented by certain groups (such as the family, a religious institution, or a social class) and that it is these very social frameworks that give meaning to these individual memories. In fact, Halbwachs argues that memories cannot be understood unless they are located within the specific social framework to which they inherently belong (Halbwachs 1992: 53). Thus, in consequence, individual memories are, in fact, devoid of meaning when approached outside of their social frameworks. Furthermore, the group memory is aiming to preserve memory and, therefore, it operates to reject alterations to memories and block change in order to favour continuity. The group memory achieves this through reconstructing memories. The past is thus retrieved through reconstruction. Another contribution in his studies, is that he recognized the significance of space in locating and giving memories directions, as is especially evident in the chapter he wrote named “Space and the collective memory” (Halbwachs 1980). It is argued that each and every memory does not only need to be located within a social framework, but also a spatial framework (Halbwachs 1980: 139–140). Halbwachs argues that it is especially the so-called “enduring” aspects of space that makes it such a crucial aspect for locating memories. He does this by claiming that impressions rush by fast without necessarily leaving much behind in the mind, while the surrounding space remains intact and preserves the past, so that it can be recaptured through our memories (Halbwachs 1980: 139–140). Consider for example this quote, concerned with the role of streets within the spatial frameworks of memory:

1  Maurice Halbwachs died a tragic death in the concentration camp Buchenwald in 1945, detained due to his socialist views and his activities in the resistance.

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But people, be they in a crowd or scattered about in mutual avoidance of one another, are caught up in the current of the street and resemble so many material particles, which, packed together or in movement, obey laws of inert nature. Their apparent insensitivity is wrongly condemned by us as something like nature’s indifference, for even as it insults us, it momentarily calms and steadies us. (Halbwachs 1980: 132)

In other words, there is a calmness to be found in the so-called indifference of the perceived permanence of spatial features such as streets, structuring, and ordering our daily routines through the city. This is beyond a doubt an important perspective on memory, in that it highlights the social and spatial aspects of remembrance. However, Halbwachs’ studies fall somewhat short in explaining and understanding the fragility and transformation of memories, and also how memories are transferred between generations, that is, the communicative aspects of remembrance (see also Connerton 1989: 36–39 for relevant criticism). Focus is regularly placed upon the maintenance of memories through social institutions (forming the group memories) and spatial features, while little effort is placed upon explaining the fluidity and more dynamic aspects of memories, except by seeing it as a gradual and inevitable process inherent in the attempt of recapturing memories while simultaneously altering them in the process through the reconstruction of the past. According to Halbwachs, it seems as if individuals tend to alter their memories in order for them to fit better within the group memory. Consider the following quote: The individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory. In other words, the various groups that compose society are capable at every moment of reconstructing their past. But, as we have seen, they most frequently distort that past in the act of reconstructing it. There are surely many facts, and many details of certain facts, that the individual would forget if others did not keep their memory alive for him. (…) society tends to erase from its memory all that might separate individuals, or that might distance groups from each other. It is also why society, in each period, rearranges it's recollections in such a way as to adjust them to the variable conditions of its equilibrium. (Halbwachs 1992: 182–183)

Following Halbwachs, individual memories are fragile and subject to change, while the group memory serves to position and give stability to the individual memory, even though the past is distorted in the process of reconstructing it. Furthermore, Halbwachs proposes that society

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functions to erase those memories which would disturb social cohesion. Since individual memories are practically devoid of meaning outside of their social framework, cohesion can thus be maintained through the group memory. Finally, those memories which no longer can be located within neither the social nor the spatial framework of memory will unavoidably be forgotten. It is argued that different social frameworks serve to constitute different group memories, and that the inevitable changes to frameworks over time are causing memories to be forgotten. As elaborated upon with his own words: “But forgetting, or the deformation of certain recollections, is also explained by the fact that these frameworks change from one period to another. Depending on its circumstances and point in time, society represents the past to itself in different ways: it modifies its conventions” (Halbwachs 1992: 172–173). Nevertheless, such emphasis assumes a heterogeneity within groups. But can such an assumption really be maintained? Consequently, the processes that lead to the alterations and transmission of group memories are not revealed in any detail, except as to be understood as a gradual and inevitable process as a result of contrasting individual and collective memories, which is in itself not a very satisfactory revelation without any more detailed accounts. In a revealing line of reasoning, Halbwachs elaborates upon how the demolition of space may change (or not) the spatial frameworks of memory: Urban changes—the demolition of a home, for example—inevitably affect the habits of a few people, perplexing and troubling them. (…) Any inhabitant for whom these old walls, rundown homes, and obscure passageways create a little universe, who has many remembrances fastened to these images now obliterated forever, feels a whole part of himself dying with these things and regrets they could not last at least for his lifetime. Such individual sorrow and malaise is without effect, for it does not affect the collectivity. In contrast, a group does not stop with a mere display of its unhappiness, a momentary burst of indignation and protest. It resists with all the force of its traditions, which have effect. It searches out and partially succeeds in recovering its former equilibrium amid novel circumstances. It endeavors to hold firm or reshape itself in a district or on a street that is no longer ready-made for it but was once its own. (Halbwachs 1980: 134)

The quote is interesting because it illustrates that even in contexts of spatial destruction, Halbwachs chooses to put emphasis on the enduring aspects of the spatial and social framework, in how a group always resists

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with the force of its traditions such alterations of the physical space, and at least, partially, succeeds in reclaiming the spatial framework in the process. While individuals suffer from the sorrow of destruction, this does not affect the collectivity. This is certainly an interesting point, but yet again it puts attention on aspects of continuity and social cohesion, while it leaves us little in the way of understanding the change and transmission of group memories in the context of spatial demolition.

The Destruction of the Spatial Framework The alterations and changes to memories becomes an especially crucial area of focus within a post-war context, in which the heritage may be directly employed in order to direct certain memories while silencing other ones, which are deemed unwelcome (Sørensen and Viejo-Rose 2015). This relates to the production of a sense of “place”. Wars may leave places irrevocably altered. After all, violence alters, changes, and transmutes both social and spatial frameworks which carries with it implications for how memories are maintained and ultimately, transformed. This may be exemplified by looking in more detail at one of the case studies in this volume: Mostar. Focusing on the destruction of the heritage during the two sieges of Mostar, by Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) between 1992 and 1994, Emily Makaš writes: During the first siege of the city, which lasted only two months in 1991[sic], most of the city’s religious, cultural, historical, and architectural monuments were severely damaged or completely destroyed. (…) the artillery shelling of Mostar was not arbitrary, but rather deliberately focused on the city’s most important cultural and religious sites, as well as its infrastructure. The Catholic Cathedral was one of the first buildings shelled, even before the war officially began (…). Other religious buildings clearly targeted by the VRS and JNA included the Bishop’s Palace, the Franciscan Church and Monastery, and twelve of the city’s fourteen mosques. In retaliation, both the Old and New Orthodox Churches were attacked and burnt by the HVO (…). (Makaš 2007: 178–181)

The widespread destruction of religious buildings in particular and cultural heritage in general was not restricted to Mostar, but occurred all over Bosnia and Herzegovina and hit Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic buildings. However, the mosques were most extensively damaged. In a

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post-war survey, Andras Riedlmayer concludes that not a single one of the 277 documented mosques within Republic of Sprska (the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Bosnian Serb majority) in which he conducted the survey, were documented as undamaged, while only 22 were deemed to be lightly damaged. Mosques numbering 255 were deemed to have been heavily damaged or completely destroyed, of which 119 were heavily damaged and 136 were either almost or completely destroyed (Riedlmayer 2002). In 1992, when Branko Grujić, the Serb-installed major of Zvornik, Republika Srpska, commented on the destruction of all mosques in the city to journalists, he unabashedly claimed that “(t)here were never any mosques in Zvornik” (Walasek 2015: 57). This statement becomes all the more remarkable considering that Zvornik had a majority of Muslim/Bosniak inhabitants before the war. The number of destroyed mosques is eye-opening regarding the sheer magnitude of the destruction, but should not be interpreted as signifying that only mosques were targeted. In the city of Mostar, both the Franciscan Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and the Old Orthodox church (Church of the Birth of the Most Holy Virgin) and the New Orthodox Church (Cathedral of the Holy Trinity) were destroyed and has since then been reconstructed or, as is the case with the New Orthodox Church, is currently in the process of being reconstructed (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2) (Walasek 2015: 225–227). Related to the destruction of the physical heritage, the most heartbreaking incident for many citizens of Mostar happened during the second siege of Mostar when many of the Ottoman-era buildings in the old city were targeted for destruction by the HVO, including the sixteenth-­ century Ottoman bridge Stari Most. The bridge was struck by shells shot by the HVO and on 9 November 1993, it fell down in pieces into the river Neretva. The implications for the citizens of Mostar will be elaborated upon in part two, in which I present the fieldwork I carried out in Mostar. For the argument within this chapter, it is necessary to pinpoint how a place has to be seen as a dynamic and fluid construction built upon and infused by habits and activities within the said place and is in such a way always a “process” continuously being created while never being finalized (see also Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996: 24). In other words, wars such as the one that occurred in Mostar during the 90s, may pose a considerable challenge to the so-called enduring aspects of the spatial framework, as defined above by Halbwachs. Furthermore, if the perceived permanence and stability of space can serve as a spatial framework, fundamental in the maintenance, localization and direction of our memories, what role does

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Fig. 3.1  The New Orthodox Church. Spring 2015. (Photo: GW)

then the perceived sudden impermanence and instability of space, as a result of war-time destruction, serve within the same spatial framework, in re-localizing and re-directing memories?

Landscapes as Created or as Creating Meanings? In order to consider a more process-oriented and dynamic approach to landscapes and memories, than the one advocated through the works of Halbwachs, it may be beneficial to first briefly turn towards how the role of the landscape has been developed within the discipline of archaeology, which is the discipline I come from and which has had profound significance in the development of heritage studies (not necessarily an altogether positive one, see Smith and Waterton 2009). Within the processual turn of Archaeology, the so-called New Archaeology (Binford 1962) of the 60s, 70s and 80s, space was often approached simply as an arena in which actions took place. In such a way, the relationship was not dialectic but

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Fig. 3.2  The Old Orthodox Church. Spring 2015. (Photo: GW)

one-sided, in which landscapes was mostly seen as an arena of resources or the lack thereof, either limiting or opening up specific engagements and social activities. Since the processual turn was focusing on developing archaeology in a more natural scientific way, this approach towards landscapes emphasized ways to determine the relationships between landscapes and human beings in a manner that could be quantified and scientifically tested and proven. Therefore, the aspects of landscapes which were considered impossible to measure or quantify tended to be left out from analysis. When the post-processual turn gained significance, the active role of the landscape itself was given a higher precedence (e.g. Hodder 1982; Tilley 1994; Ashmore and Knapp 1999). In other words, “space” was suddenly made into “place” within a new research environment. This is based on the realization that places shape us while we simultaneously shape places (Ingold 2000: 191). Meanwhile, it has been argued that post-­ processualism went too far in emphasizing what material culture and places represented as an explanation for motivating actions (Fahlander

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2013; Arponen and Ribeiro 2014), and that places solely became meaningful as social constructions, simply as a form of visual ideology, in which their material properties became essentially devoid of meaning. Nevertheless, it was undeniably beneficial to recognize a more dynamic relationship between people and landscapes within archaeology. As the cultural geographer Don Mitchell has stated: “Landscape is best seen as both a work (it is the product of human labor and thus encapsulates the dreams, desires, and all the injustices of the people and social systems that make it) and as something that does work (it acts as a social agent in the further development of a place)” (Mitchell 2000: 94–95). Within the role of the landscape as a social agent, it is particularly its force in and place for the social reproduction of society which is emphasized, where it serves to naturalize and regularize relations between people (Mitchell 2000: 144) The landscape often serves to naturalize an unequal relationship between people. Often, places may serve to legitimize and naturalize social relationships and social hierarchies. Consider for example the way hierarchies often manifest itself through the claiming of certain spaces and through the active restriction of space, making space exclusive and demarcated through negative zones and embodied limits of movement (e.g. Munn 1996). The claiming of space is often a power-statement, and as Halbwachs insightfully recognized, the spatial framework invest memory with a feeling of endurance and permanence (Halbwachs 1992). While this was presented mostly in positive terms in the research of Halbwachs, due to his concern with aspects of continuity and cohesion through the maintenance of memories, undoubtedly, there is another side of it as well, which is far less innocent. The production of space is also the production of power; space as a means of control and domination (Lefebvre 1991: 26). The spatial framework may serve to naturalize and legitimize an inequality expressed through the landscape. Consequently, if we use landscape as an analytical concept which is immobile, enduring and static, we may further cement an idea that certain spaces cannot be re-claimed and hierarchies cannot be flattened. Therefore, following the post-processual paradigm, landscapes have to be approached as the result of processes of interactions and embodied engagements. Landscapes are lived and experienced, they are acted upon, and through this, they are also remade. Therefore, landscapes are never created as in signaling a finished state. However, they do play a role in the creation and maintenance of specific values and identities, as well as to the transformation of them. Arguably, it is through tracing

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this constant negotiation that we may be able to achieve a more dynamic picture. However, before I outline my own approach more clearly, I will present the possible dissonance within memorial landscapes, to highlight the complexities present.

The Dissonance of Memorial Landscapes Memorial landscapes connected to atrocities are often studied using the concept “sites of memory”, or “lieux de memoire”, which is a highly influential concept that the French historian Pierre Nora developed. Nora saw a necessity to maintain special sites in the landscape, to bridge a perceived division between “memory” (as in oral histories and traditions) and “history” (as in the official canonized national history). He feared that memory was disappearing in post-war France and was being gradually replaced by history. For that reason, Nora saw a need to maintain “lieux de memoire” as special places in the local environment (which also includes certain objects, texts, events or even concepts) where individuals can produce meanings out of the past. Due to the assumed diminishing role of memory in post-war France, these “lieux de memoire” were regarded as “substitutes” for the real environments of memory. In many cases, these special sites were battlefields, most likely because war-time memories are often the forms of memories which are the most difficult to reconcile with (Nora 1989, 2001). Unfortunately, his definition of “lieux de memoire” is so broad as to be quite limited in its analytical applicability (see Winter 2008 for a more focused definition), and the clear-cut division he makes between history and memory is criticized in more recent studies. A more nuanced and layered approach is advocated by Jan Assmann (2008, 2011: 34–41). Instead of using the concept of collective memory, as introduced by Halbwachs, Assmann distinguishes between three forms of memories: inner (individual), social (communicative) and cultural (see Table 3.1). The latter is the official canonized memory often taught in schools, presented through national museums and monuments of commemoration, and in present-day contexts it is often meant to legitimize and naturalize the nation as an imagined community, making the present-day nation the natural culmination through a chronological development from then to now (see also Anderson 2006; Balibar 2002). The communicative memory is on the contrary fluid and in movement, and may challenge the cultural memory. As seen in Table 3.1, these forms of memories

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Table 3.1  Assmann’s distinction between inner, social and cultural memory Level

Time

Inner Inner, subjective time (neuro-mental) Social Social time Cultural

Historical, mythical, cultural time

Identity

Memory

Inner self

Individual memory

Social self, person as carrier of social roles Cultural identity

Communicative memory Cultural memory

Reworked from Assmann (2008: 109)

also engage with different temporalities, which is an aspect I will develop later. I am not going to adopt Nora’s concept of “sites of memory” due to the above-mentioned critique. However, with that being said, it is important to recognize that the very intention behind the creation of a memorial landscape is often to inscribe (Connerton 1989) memories into the physicality of places, and thus making certain events so entangled with the experience of the place, that they cannot, nor should be, disconnected. Whether such an endeavor is successful or not, however, is certainly not self-given but is dependent upon factors such as the negotiation between remembering and forgetting within the local community, as well as the negotiation between the cultural memory (which is often presented through official memorials) and the communicative memory (Assmann 2008). After all, individual memories of a war, which informs the communicative memory, may contrast against the cultural memory. Consider the devastated landscape after the twin towers, the World Trade Center, in New York, which collapsed due to the terror attack of 9/11 (Meskell 2002). Since then a memorial landscape consisting of voids, so-called empty spaces have been put up where the two towers once stood (Bevan 2007: 198–199), signalling loss and the impossibility of certain wounds to heal (Winter 2008: 6). This is based on a perceived need of signalling and manifesting an emptiness of the social sphere (of family members who will never return), within the physical landscape itself, of signalling that landscapes can also be wounded, and may never heal. This shows how the meaning of landscapes may change irrevocably through one event in time, in which any attempts of reclaiming previous meanings is not only impossible, but also undesirable; even unethical. A physical emptiness has been created in order to showcase that we are not allowed to ever forget and that some things cannot nor should ever heal nor be

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reclaimed (see also Young 1993). However, whether such an endeavour is successful or not, and for how long it can be maintained, is another issue altogether. The wish to represent absence is also present in the contested design for the Utøja memorial in Norway, by Jonas Dahlberg, in remembrance of the victims who were brutally murdered by the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik on the island of Utøja on 22 July 2011. The plan of the memorial was to create a physical wound in the landscape of a peninsula in Sørbråten, at the mainland of Norway, in which the names of the victims would be written. Furthermore, the soil that would be removed from the peninsula was to be transported to the Governmental quarters in Oslo and used to build another monument, in remembrance of the victims of the bomb Breivik detonated in order to divert attention (Ekman 2013). The realization of the memorial has been scrapped by the Norwegian government after protests from individuals in the local community of Sørbråten (The Guardian 2017). In some cases, there may be, as Halbwachs noted, a sense of calmness within the reclaiming of previous meanings, rendering such a brutal and violent infliction upon the landscape contested among the local population. This is not an elaboration on whether Dahlberg’s design for the memorial should be implemented or not, but rather a way to highlight a common dissonance within memorial landscapes: between the need of mourning and the need of moving forward. Relevant within this context, is that the local community living in Sørbråten did not lose family members in the massacre. While some of the people in Sørbråten did help out in the rescue operation, they may experience a different mourning process than those who lost sons and daughters in the massacre. In the meantime, the architectural firm 3RW put up a different kind of memorial, revealed on the 22 July 2015, on the island of Utøja, consisting of a suspended steel ring where victims’ names have been inserted. Here, nature was integrated into the experience, instead of nature being physically “wounded”: The Clearing exposes nature’s ongoing transformation. Leaves and acorns falling in autumn are clearer on the stone floor than on the forest floor. We want to showcase as many as possible of the natural cycles that take place on the island. We believe there is solace and beauty in them. Nature has the ability to create logic in the life cycle, a logic that for most of us is hard to find when it touches our own lives. Therefore, we believe that all visual parts of these cycles and the activities that belong – be it sweeping of leaves or care

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of plants – are important elements of the memorial. The stone floor offers a venue for nature to reveal itself. (3RW 2015)

This represents a different approach of how to integrate nature in a memorial than the plan by Dahlberg. 3RW integrated nature in order to achieve solace, while Dahlberg intends to “wound” nature in order to achieve a physical memory wound. Furthermore, 3RW were encouraging volunteers to participate in its construction and thus to take part in the whole process. The memorial by 3RW shows that more subtle ways of remembering through the landscape can be achieved, but the follow-up question has to be whether dissonance should be levelled out or not? After all, memorials do not necessarily aim to be, nor perhaps should they be, easy and mild experiences of continuity and stability. Sometimes, they aim to be difficult, raw and brutal experiences of discontinuity, violence and instability. Nevertheless, few people would wish to live their everyday life next to a monument of perpetual disturbance and disharmony. This dissonance within memorial landscapes is perfectly illustrated by the contested memorial plan of Jonas Dahlberg. The tendency to signal absence as a form of memorial is a fairly recent phenomena and seems to be first occurring within a more post-modern approach to memorials, where static and fixed messages of heroism and martyrdom and/or victory, so prevailing within earlier memorials (often focusing on the male body), are avoided in favour of highlighting the complex and non-linear processes of remembrance and the inherent meaningless and un-reclaimable disturbance of violence (e.g. Young 1993). Therefore, there are very few redeeming qualities of such memorials. In fact, ideas of redemption are avoided. Nevertheless, these forms of memorials currently seem to be a largely Western occurrence, and traditional memorials consisting of male heroes and martyrs are still the most common form, for example, within the memorial landscape of Kosovo which will discussed in more detail in part three. Within the context of memorial landscapes, it is important to identify how place itself can be irrevocably entangled within the often contested negotiation of remembering or forgetting atrocities, and how place is claimed within a never self-given endeavour of maintaining either continuity or discontinuity with the past. Within this process, memorials serve a central role. However, it would be misleading to claim that memorials are solely concerned with remembrance. In fact, there are silences in memorials, a type of silence which is inevitably inherent within all narratives constructed in

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order to make meaning out of the past, since such a process always involves a negotiation between what is revealed and what is hidden (Trouillot 1995). Memorials are not only concerned with remembrance but also with forgetting. Paul Connerton phrased it in the following way: The relationship between memorials and forgetting is reciprocal: the threat of forgetting begets memorials and the construction of memorials begets forgetting. If giving monumental shape to what we remember is to discard the obligation to remember, that is because memorials permit only some things to be remembered and, by exclusion, cause others to be forgotten. Memorials conceal the past as much as they cause us to remember it. This is evidently so with war memorials. They conceal the way people lived: where soldiers are directly represented in war memorials, their image is designed specifically to deny acts of violence and aggression. They conceal the way they died: the blood, the bits of body flying through the air, the stinking corpses lying unburied for months, all are omitted. They conceal the accidents of war: the need to make past actions seem consolingly necessary impels people to make sense of much that was without sense. And they conceal the way people survive. (Connerton 2009: 29)

This is an interesting argument in the light of the above-mentioned memorials representing absences instead of heroism and martyrdom. However, undeniably, there are silences within these more modern forms of memorials as well. After all, if they do represent anything, it is silence itself that is looking back at us. Absences stare at us with an empty gaze, for example, from the empty holes where the World Trade Center once stood, devoid of any attempts of redemption. These absences are thus lacking a linear narrative serving to connect past, present and future. They are lacking answers or a search for meaning, and are instead forcing us to look within ourselves for answers. Here, silence itself is the message. It follows that a highly sensitive approach to landscapes which are connected to incidents of violence is required in order to be able to grasp all the nuances and complexities present. In the following sections of this chapter, I am going to present more concretely my own attitude and approach, through focusing on three aspects related to the relationship between memory and the so-called production of space (Lefebvre 1991), which are the multi-temporality of the lived space, the embodied dimensions of memory and the production of narratives.

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The Multi-temporality of the “Lived Space” Arguably, the most influential study on the theory of space within the last decades has been Henri Lefebvre’s volume “The Production of Space”, originally published in 1974. My primary concern is how space is made meaningful, that is, how space is made into place through embodied social practices. This constitutes what the sociologist Lefebvre would call a “lived space”. The lived space can be regarded as a “subjective space”, in that there may not be a consensus concerning its role and meaning. This stands in contrast as well as in a mutual relationship to the so-called “conceived space”, which is the space produced by, for example, urban planners and architects when developing, managing and analyzing space, as well as to the space of spatial practice which is the physical space that can be mathematically measured and studied (Lefebvre 1991: 38–39). It is this very “spatial triad” which produces space according to Lefebvre. The lived space is based on the practices occurring in a landscape and is produced through often subconscious engagements with spaces, and it may hold diverging meanings for the people experiencing and thus producing it. Furthermore, Lefebvre acknowledges that “space” is not a passive empty arena to be filled with human activities and material culture, that is, that space exists prior to whatever come to “fill it”, but that it is in fact the other way around, space is created and thus produced through that which comes to “fill it” (Lefebvre 1991: 15). This entails an approach in which it is possible to study the processes underlying the “production of space”, and as mentioned above; how place is entangled in a continuous state of becoming. Heritage is often meant to facilitate specific engagements from the visitor setting it apart from other experiences (McIntosh 1999: 43; Smith and Campbell 2015). Landscapes, on the other hand, are continuously produced without necessarily any implicit intentions of being “set apart” from other landscapes. While some landscapes may be holding a strict set of allowed engagements, such as in highly ritualized landscapes, others are open to a wide array of different engagements. Furthermore, some landscapes may be produced with a defined agenda and aims, such as when a field is picked for cultivation, or a park is maintained for leisure activities by landscape architects, while many others are devoid of a plan or an over-­ arching mastermind, but are created and sustained through the diverse and different engagements and uses that occur in them. To put it simply and drawing on theories from New Materialism (Olsen et al. 2012): some

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landscapes can be produced in a chaotic and fragmented manner, resisting attempts of order and control (for comparisons see Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2017). Intriguingly, the same can be valid for heritage as well (DeSilvey 2017; Olsen and Vinogradova 2019), and indeed, landscapes constitute one form of heritage. It follows that the “lived space” is unavoidably plural in the way it is experienced. Secondly, the landscape has to be seen as multi-temporal, in the way past events always leave traces in the physical environment, waiting to be interpreted by later generations. As brilliantly expressed by Tim Ingold through his concept of “dwelling”: “To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past” (Ingold 2000: 189). The concept “dwelling”, is therefore aiming to locate the individual as a being actively engaged with its surroundings, emphasizing how “through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it” (Ingold 2000: 191). The benefit in the concept is that it highlights the embodied and tangible dimensions of remembrance, which will be further elaborated upon in the next section through the theory of Paul Connerton. One reason for the inherent plurality of the landscape is that it is unavoidably caught up in a selective process of remembering and forgetting. Even though the landscape is, as Ingold evocatively phrased it, “pregnant with the past” (Ingold 2000: 189), it does not hold a representational selection of each and every event and experience of the past. Some events are not deemed worthy of “remembering”, and some events might even be shameful. In terms of memory, forgetting is as important as remembering (Connerton 2008, 2011: 51–82), and if we would see the landscape as a conveyor of memory, despite its inherent problems as argued above, it is certainly one that suffers from blackouts as well as pure distortions. This is partly due to the fact that human beings constantly use the landscape as a tool to influence and direct humans in certain directions, but it is also because remnants from the past experience a natural process of decay and ultimate eradication. The so-called multi-temporality of a landscape is thereby both a human process connected to oral traditions and the transmitting of stories as well as a process happening because of molecules disintegrating within the material culture and because of wind and rain battering and changing the monuments (see DeSilvey 2017: 30). It is not one or the other: it is both (see Horn and Wollentz 2019).

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The Embodied Dimensions of Remembrance Within my own approach to memory I am going to be drawing largely upon the work of the British social anthropologist Paul Connerton (1989, 2009, 2011). This is based on three reasons. Firstly, Connerton recognizes and pays attention to the embodied aspects of remembrance, through what he coins “incorporating practices”, which I will present in more detail soon (Connerton 1989). Secondly, Connerton has studied how the so-called spatial framework, introduced by Halbwachs, does not only help us remember, but also, as in cases of rapid development and re-­organization of the urban space within modernity, causes us to more swiftly forget (Connerton 2009). Therefore, the physical landscape is not simply seen as a visual ideology or purely as a social construction (for an overview see Dubow 2009), but as something that also includes tangible aspects which influence our memories in profound and unexpected ways. This entails a more fluid approach to memory and spatial frameworks than the one advocated by Halbwachs. Thirdly, Connerton does not make any pre-­ supposed value judgements concerning remembrance as inherently positive and forgetting as inherently negative. Instead, he acknowledges that the process of forgetting is not only inevitable but also prerequisite, not solely for the shaping of a sense of self, but also for finding a direction for the self when moving forward (Connerton 2008, 2011: 51–82). Connerton (1989) is arguing for two forms of social practices in connection to how memory is amassed; incorporating and inscribing ones. Incorporating practices are messages imparted by current bodily activity, they are in such a way embodied, routinized through habits and often ritualized. A study of how memories are preserved demands a recognition of the body and the performative dimensions of memory, as stated by Connerton: “I believe, further, that the solution to the question (…)— how is the memory of groups conveyed and sustained?—involves bringing these two things (recollection and bodies) together in a way that we might not have thought of doing” (Connerton 1989: 4). Inscribing practices on the other hand, constitutes the acts of trying to preserve, trap and store information through physical means. As mentioned above, memorial landscapes often represent a form of inscribing memorial practice, in that memories of a horrible incident are physically inscribed in the landscape, with the aim of it never being forgotten and influencing future generations. In fact, all monuments are forms of inscribing practices, be they megalithic graves from the Neolithic or war memorials in Verdun.

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Monuments are projected towards an indefinite future (Holtorf 1996), with the futile aim of encapsulating memories. Note that there is a vast difference between approaching memories themselves as physically inscribed, and the practice and process of attempting to preserve memories by physical means. Practices can include elements being incorporating and inscribing simultaneously, and are not to be seen as mutually exclusive. After all, the act of writing a document is both an inscribing and incorporating practice at the same. While holding the pencil and moving it with the hand in order to form sentences on a paper is an incorporating practice, that is, being a highly routinized and subconscious memorial practice. The outcome, on the other hand, is an inscribing practice, in that memories are attempted to be preserved through physical means, that is, through physically inscribing memories within the document (Connerton 1989). In relation to Jan Assmann’s (2008) distinction between three forms of memories, both incorporating and inscribing practices are contributing to individual, communicative and cultural memory. However, while inscribing practices are to a higher degree adding to the cultural memory, for example, through presenting a linear history at a national museum (Aronsson and Elgenius 2011) or through the production of text books for schools (see Šebek 2010), there is a larger degree of flexibility and freedom in incorporating practices to also employ it in order to challenge the cultural memory, through, for example, acts of demonstrations or the embodied avoidance of particular places. The landscape (or a piece of paper for that matter) cannot be approached as an archive that may simply be accessed through our perception and engagement of the surroundings. Instead of being a vessel, the narrational power in the landscape is central in this work, where the landscape forms an imagined/remembered past narrated to us through our present-day experiences of and engagement with landscapes. Such perspectives on landscapes have also been argued by Tim Ingold, through recognizing that the landscape tells a story through its material remains, connected to the “dwelling” of past generations; or perhaps more accurately described: the landscape is a story (Ingold 2000: 189), one that is being repeatedly re-told and re-imagined. This does not mean that we are prisoners of the past nor in power of completely constructing the past independently from the past (Appadurai 1981). The past is present through its silence (Trouillot 1995); more precisely, in what is narrated through the landscape and what

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is excluded in said narration. This leads us into the next part of this chapter, which concerns the way in which the past is retrieved through narratives.

The Production of Narratives The physical landscape itself plays a very direct and crucial role in the production of narratives. Narratives are thus not immaterial (see also Porr and Matthews 2016). When analyzing narratives I will be drawing on the work on silencing the past by the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) and on the concept of “chronotopes” as theorized by the Russian literature professor Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). Let us begin with the basic premise that the production of narratives is crucial in order to make meaning and create order out of the past, and cannot be seen simply as a less “scientific” and historically inaccurate way of understanding the past. The construction of narratives is in itself not a value judgement, that is, narratives are not regarded as inferior to other, presumably more scientific, ways of understanding the past. This is not a claim that all narratives are equally valid or true, but simply an acknowledgement that narratives are a prerequisite element and results from the constant negotiation in how the past is made relevant in the present, and consequently aimed towards a future. In other words, religious creationists create narratives, as well as professors in archaeology. Undeniably, the narratives will be different in content because they are retrieved by different means. While professors hopefully construct narratives based on sound methods and traces of material culture, creationists employ the bible in the process and let any material remain fit the frame of the bible. However, in both cases narratives are produced, and the value judgements that we can make are based on the content of the narratives, not on the form of narratives themselves. It is beneficial to put emphasis on narratives, because such an approach forces us to move outside of the idea that the landscape can be seen as a passive “vessel” of memories, away from the so-called storage model. As explained by Trouillot: If memories as individual history are constructed, even in this minimal sense, how can the past they retrieve be fixed? The storage model has no answer to that problem. Both its popular and scholarly versions assume the independent existence of a fixed past and posit memory as the retrieval of that content. But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to

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something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past—or more accurately, pastness—is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past. (Trouillot 1995: 15)

The past is only made meaningful from the vantage point of the present, and it is solely from such a vantage point narratives are being produced. In fact, there lies the danger of the storage model, through its highly positivistic approach to science, since it blinds us to the way we, when analyzing the past, are influenced by our own background and research traditions. Trouillot continues with stating that professional historians, and we may presume, archaeologists, have made a good enterprise out of creating a separate world out of the past which can be objectively studied (see also Lowenthal 1985). However, as Trouillot insightfully recognizes, in order for science to be relevant, a change in approach is required: “(...) we move closer to the era when professional historians will have to position themselves more clearly within the present, lest politicians, magnates, or ethnic leaders alone write history for them” (Trouillot 1995: 152). Trouillot’s volume was written in 1995, but arguably, this realization has become all the more relevant with the growth of right-wing nationalism all over the Western world who commonly employ heritage within their questionable political agenda (Gustafsson and Karlsson 2011; Niklasson and Hølleland 2018). Furthermore, these narratives unavoidably include silences (Trouillot 1995: 25), which are sometimes actively produced and may not be enforced. In such a way, silences are in themselves neither positive nor negative but an essential category in each narrative, and fundamental in order to understand the meaning and relevance of the narrative. Silences can be incorporated into bodily practice (Connerton 1989, Connerton 2011: 51–82), for example through the avoidance of certain places, creating so-called places of avoidance in the landscape (Munn 1996). These silences may even form parts of narrating your own life history in the way you choose to, which is fundamental in regaining a sense of agency; especially if you narrate incidents strongly connected to periods of helplessness and powerlessness as is often the case during a post-war recovery process (Jackson 2013: 70–74). It is thus possible to combine Connerton’s concept of incorporating practices, with the production of narratives. It is also in this context, where it becomes especially crucial to study narratives within a post-war environment, since the act of narrating your own life

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story includes empowering dimensions for the people affected. For instance, people who were imprisoned in war camps during the breakup of Yugoslavia did not have much power in the situation of imprisonment, but at least they gain the power to afterwards narrate to others about their experiences, and in so doing providing a sense of empowerment to the former powerless self (Jackson 2013: 73). According to Trouillot, silences enter the historical production at four moments. The first one is during the moment of fact creation, when sources are being created. The second one is the moment when the sources are being assembled, during the making of archives. The third one is at the moment of fact retrieval. This is the moment when narratives are being produced. Finally, the fourth one is at the moment of retrospective significance, when history is being made (Trouillot 1995: 26). All these four moments involve the gathering of silences, meaning that each narrative produced and the silences within them are the result of unique processes where the silences enter at different stages during the production process, demanding an approach which recognizes variation. Furthermore, the production of narratives is simultaneously the production of power (see, e.g., Anheier and Ray Isar 2011). In fact, by exposing the silences within narratives, power relations are also exposed. Who is included and who is excluded in the narratives? Which voices are being heard and which voices are being silenced? Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of power relates to the way it is being naturalized and self-given, to the way silences may be seen as normal and innocent. It becomes necessary to expose the underlying mechanism at play in the production of silence, as well as to challenge that which may be regarded as “natural” or “self-given”. There is always a reason behind a specific silence, which may not mean that it is deliberate or even perceptible as a silence at its time of construction (Trouillot 1995: 152–153). After all, oppressive power relations are often hidden behind slow-moving structures in society, which are being naturalized through the dominant ideology and therefore seldom put under scrutiny (Bourdieu 1991). As Trouillot pinpoints (1995: 30), the physical remains of the past help create these narratives. In fact, a sense of place and a sense of time are necessary components in the narratives constructed. The close link between spatial and temporal relations within narratives can be approached through the concept of chronotopes, outlined by the Russian literature professor Mikhail Bakhtin: “We will give the name chronotope, (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial

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relationships (…)” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). This concept, which builds upon Einstein’s theory of relativity, is useful when trying to understand the relationship people have towards specific places and how this relationship ties to different temporalities within the production of narratives. Bakhtin also states that it is through the intricate space/time relations, that “time” becomes visible and concrete: We cannot help but be strongly impressed by the representational importance of the chronotope. Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins. (Bakhtin 1981: 84)

In his essay, Bakhtin studies the chronotopic dimensions of five different genres of literature: the ancient Greek romance, the ancient adventure novel of everyday life, the ancient biography and autobiography, the medieval chivalric romance and finally Rabelais’ novels. In all these cases, Bakhtin pinpoints how space and time gets interrelated in various ways depending on the context. One revealing example concerns the way Bakhtin explains the role of the road: On the road the spatial and temporal series defining human fates and lives combine with one another in distinctive ways, even as they become more complex and more concrete by the collapse of social distances. The chronotope of the road is both a point of new departures and a place for events to find their denouement. Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it (…) (Bakhtin 1981: 243–244)

Note here how Bakhtin explains how a certain space (the road) also gets tied to a specific temporality (one where social distances collapse and events both start and end). Bakhtin is focusing his research on novels, but the concept of the chronotope is also applicable to other types of constructed narratives (see, e.g., Guttormsen 2013; Goldhahn 2015). One significant example within the context of Mostar in particular, is the role of the “bridge” metaphor within narratives, which often serve to link a space (a specific bridge such as the destroyed and rebuilt Stari Most) with a temporality of durability and meetings across space and time (see, e.g., Andrić 1995; Šola 2001). The same argument was also used by UNESCO for motivating the reconstruction of Stari Most, finished in 2004 (UNESCO 2005) in that the bridge was serving as an “eternal” symbol of

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co-existence (see also Makaš 2007 for a more critical examination). With this I do not make a claim that there are any chronotopes that exist unchanged throughout times, that is, they are not to be confused with a concept like Carl Jung’s archetype. Chronotopes, like “the bridge” and “the road”, may signify different spaces and temporalities depending on the specific context in which they are being used, forcing an approach which studies each narrative in its own light and acknowledges variation. While my study does not concern literature, the narratives that I gather through interviews can be studied as a different form of storytelling, involving its own chronotopic elements.

Moving Forward Based on these observations we can conclude that violence disrupts old and creates new narratives, drawing on embodied (incorporated) practices and engagements with landscapes, which both contribute to and draw on heritage. It is this very dynamic relationship that will be studied through each of my case studies, with the realization that also narratives in themselves are not only created through heritage, but also play a role in (re) creating heritage. It follows that the heritage of violence has the possibility to lead to new relationships to the past, drawing on various temporalities of continuity and/or discontinuity including practices serving to make or deny heritage as “heritage”. It is in this context that it becomes especially relevant to compare case studies connected to different temporalities, such as recent times, medieval times and prehistoric times. After all, violence of the past is not restricted to a foreign country forever disconnected from the present, neatly and linearly (chronologically) positioned within the past. On the contrary, as will be amply demonstrated through the case studies, violence does not only disrupt relationships to landscapes and (re) creates narratives, but inherent within this process lies a challenge of the very temporalities of the landscape itself.

Bibliography 3RW. 2015. The Clearing  - Memorial at Utøya “Lysningen”  - Minnested Utøya. Bergen: 3RW Arkitekter. Available from the Following Location: https://3rw. no/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/3rw_utoya_contact-sheet_credits_fullversion.pdf. Retrieved 13 Feb 2018.

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Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso. [First Edition Published in 1983] Andrić, I. 1995. The Bridge Over the Drina. London: Harvill Press. [First Edition Published in 1945]. Anheier, H., and Y.  Raj Isar, eds. 2011. Heritage, Memory and Identity. Sage Publications: London. Appadurai, A. 1981. The Past as a Scarce Resource. Man, New Series 16 (2): 201–219. https://doi.org/10.2307/2801395. Aronsson, P., and G. Elgenius, eds. 2011. Building National Museums in Europe 1750  – 2010: Conference Proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Bologna 28–30 April, 2011, EuNaMu Report No. 1 (WP2). Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/ diva2:450373/FULLTEXT01.pdf. Arponen, V.P.J., and A.  Ribeiro. 2014. Understanding Rituals: A Critique of Representationalism. Norwegian Archaeological Review 47 (2): 161–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2014.938107. Ashmore, W., and A.B.  Knapp. 1999. Archaeological Landscapes: Constructed, Conceptualized, Ideational. In Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspective, ed. W. Ashmore and A.B. Knapp, 1–32. Oxford: Blackwell. Assmann, J. 2008. Communicative and Cultural Memory. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A.  Erll and A. Nüning, 109–118. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Balibar, É. 2002. Nationsformen: Historia och Ideology. In Ras, Nation, Klass, ed. B. Étiene and W. Immanuel. Uddevalla: Boförlaget Daidalos AB. Bevan, R. 2007. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books. Binford, L. 1962. Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity. 28 (2): 217–225. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Seven Types of Forgetting. In Memory Studies, vol. 1, 59–71. London: Sage Publications. ———. 2009. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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DeSilvey, C. 2017. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dubow, J. 2009. Landscape. In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 124–131. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Ekman, M. 2013. Edifices: Architecture and the Spatial Frameworks of Memory, PhD Thesis. Oslo: Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo. Fahlander, F. 2013. Articulating Relations: A Non-Representational View of Scandinavian Rock Art. In Archaeology after Interpretation: Returning Materials to Archaeological Theory, ed. B. Alberti, A.M. Jones, and J. Pollard, 305–324. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Goldhahn, J. 2015. Contested Worlds – A Chronotopic Essay About Mortuary Monuments and Cultural Change in Northern Europe in the Second Millennium BC. In Ritual Landscapes and Borders within Rock Art Research – Papers in Honour of Professor Kalle Sognnes, ed. H. Stebergløkken, R. Berge, E. Lindgaard, and H. Vangen Stuedal, 13–30. Oxford: Archaeopress. Gustafsson, A., and H.  Karlsson. 2011. A Spectre Is Haunting Swedish Archaeology – The Spectre of Politics. Archaeology, Cultural Heritage and the Present Political Situation in Sweden. Current Swedish Archaeology 19: 11–36. Guttormsen, T.S. 2013. Arkeologi i all offentlighet: Arkeologihistorie i Norge belyst ved fortidens veier som historie- og minnekunnskap. Gothenburg: Gothenburg University. Halbwachs, M. 1980. The Collective Memory.  New York: Harper & Row. [First Edition Published in 1950] ———. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [First Edition Published in 1925] Hodder, I. 1982. Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holtorf, C. 1996. Towards a Chronology of Megaliths: Understanding Monumental Time and Cultural Memory. European Journal of Archaeology 4 (1): 119–152. Horn, C., and G. Wollentz. 2019. Who is in Charge Here? Material Culture, Land Scapes, and Symmetry. In Past landscapes. The dynamics of Interaction between Society,  Landscape, and Culture, ed. A.  Haug, L.  Käppel,  and J.  Müller, 107–129. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jackson, M. 2013. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. 2nd ed. Köpenhamn: Museum Tusculanum Press. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [First Published in 1974]. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Makaš, E. 2007. Representing Competing Identities: Building and Rebuilding in Postwar Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cornell University. McIntosh, I. 1999. Into the Tourist’s Mind: Understanding the Value of the Heritage Experience. Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 8 (1): 41–64. Meskell, L. 2002. Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (03): 557–574. Mitchell, D. 2000. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Limited. Munn, N. 1996. The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape. Critical Inquiry 22 (3): 446–465. Niklasson, E., and H. Hølleland. 2018. The Scandinavian Far-Right and the New Politicisation of Heritage. Journal of Social Archaeology 18 (2): 121–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605318757340. Nora, P. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Memory and Counter Memory 26: 7–24. ———., ed. 2001. Rethinking France. Les Lieux de Mémoire. Volume 1. The State. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Olsen, B., and S.  Vinogradova. 2019. (In)significantly Soviet: The Heritage of Teriberka. International Journal of Heritage Studies. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13527258.2019.1620831. [Online First]. Olsen, B., M.  Shanks, T.  Webmoor, and C.  Witmore. 2012. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pétursdóttir, Þ., and B. Olsen. 2017. Theory Adrift: The Matter of Archaeological Theorizing. Journal of Social Archaeology 18 (1): 97–117. https://doi. org/10.1177/1469605317737426. Porr, M., and J.  Matthews. 2016. Thinking Through Story: Archaeology and Narratives. Hunter Gatherer Research 2 (3): 249–274. https://doi. org/10.3828/hgr.2016.20. Riedlmayer, A. 2002. Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1996: A Post-war Survey of Selected Municipalities. Bosnia-Herzegovina Cultural Heritage Report. Cambridge, MA, USA. Šebek, N. 2010. How Turkish Is Your Coffee. The SEE Joint History Project. In The Museum as Forum and Actor, ed. F. Svanberg, 115–124. Stockholm: The Museum of National Antiquities. Smith, L., and G. Campbell. 2015. The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect and Emotion. In A Companion to Heritage Studies, ed. W.  Logan, M.  Nic Craith, and U. Kockel, 443–460. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Smith, L., and E. Waterton. 2009. There Is No Such Thing as Heritage. In Taking Archaeology out of Heritage, ed. L. Smith and E. Waterton, 10–27. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Šola, T. 2001. Bridges: a Museum for a Globalizing World. Museum International (UNESCO, Paris) No. 209, 53 (1): 57–60. Sørensen, M.L.S., and D.  Viejo Rose, eds. 2015. War and Cultural Heritage. Biographies of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Trouillot, M.R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Tunbridge, J.E., and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. UNESCO. 2005. Nomination Dossier “The Old City of Mostar”. http://whc. unesco.org/uploads/nominations/946rev.pdf. 08 Apr 2020. Walasek, H. 2015. Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge. Winter, J. 2008. Sites of Memory and the Shadow of War. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A.  Erll and A. Nüning, 61–74. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Young, J.E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Internet Sources The Guardian. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/artist-hits-back-over-norways-decision-to-scrap-utya-memorial. Retrieved 31 Mar 2020.

PART II

Mostar Post-war Heritage and the Making of Home: Examining the Temporalities of Belonging

For me, it is important that you, as a person, as Gustav, listen to me now, and that you go from here and that you remember my words and my stories. That is why I am going into detail. That is why it is important that I transmit my knowledge to you, so that you know what I experienced and so you know that normal people live here. It is not like we are crazy or something. These ideas are being implemented from the outside, all the time. I don’t even hate the people who were shooting at me during the war. These people can’t sleep anyway. I know that they can’t sleep. They were shooting at kids. At families. You can’t sleep normally after that. Hotel owner in his 40s, living in the old city of Mostar.

CHAPTER 4

The Temporalities of Belonging

A sense of home does not only concern a “where”, but also a “when”. The realization that temporal dimensions have to be included when studying the project of “re-making” a home after war became increasingly relevant for me during my work in Mostar (Fig. 4.1). I travelled there to study how the relationship to the landscape of the city changed through the war, and how it affected the role and meaning of the heritage in the city. As elaborated upon in Chap. 2, heritage is very much tied to feelings of belonging, feelings which are crucial within the process of making a home. These feelings do not need to be exclusive nor tied to specific ethnic or national identities. In a post-war context these feelings receive a heightened relevance because they are vital within the envisioning of a future invested with hope. Therefore, the question of belonging and disassociation is given a particular focus within my study of Mostar, outlined as the temporalities of belonging within the city. This part will focus on answering the following questions: How is belonging and/or disassociation negotiated through the post-war heritage of Mostar, and how does belonging/disassociation relate to the produced temporalities of the heritage of the city? What kind of memorials and memory practices connected to the recent war are present in the city, and what role do they serve in terms of remembering and/or forgetting the war? Are there any specific sites of heritage in the city of Mostar, which serve to inform a sense of continuity or discontinuity between pre-war and post-war Mostar, and if so, what are the implications of these sites? © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_4

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Fig. 4.1  Map is made by Jessica Bustamante. Photos used are taken by GW. Map service by Google.

Furthermore, the attitudes to the heritage among the local population will be put in relationship to the attitude among the local heritage professionals who were interviewed as part of the project. The first chapter on Mostar will give a general overview of the situation of the heritage in the city, as well as how I intend to approach the issues involved. It will also discuss the way the heritage has been employed by international organizations as well as local institutions. Thereafter I will present in which ways my interview partners expressed a sense of belonging, or alternatively, a sense of disassociation, towards the heritage of

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Mostar, by looking at the temporalities of belonging in the city. The second chapter will more specifically study the memorials and the practices of memorialization in the city of Mostar, and discuss their role in remembering/forgetting in a post-war context. The final chapter will examine the role the heritage serves in locating a sense of continuity and/ or discontinuity between pre-war and post-war Mostar.

A Divided City? In both popular and academic representations, Mostar is most often described as a “divided” city (Calame and Charlesworth 2009: 103–120; Laketa 2015), as a result of the wars that disintegrated Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Yugoslavia), specifically the Bosnian War which lasted between 1992 and 1995 and ended in the Dayton Agreement.1 The division of Mostar goes between a Bosnian Croat western side, and a Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) eastern side (see Bringa 1995; Sorabji 1995 for more information on the dynamics of ethnic classification in Bosnia and Herzegovina). However, it may be worthwhile to further scrutinize what the term “divided” implies, namely a city split between two sides where two separated groups of people live. This division is expressed through monuments and buildings, that is, the tangible heritage, as well as through habits and ceremonies, that is, the intangible heritage. Importantly, framing it in such a way may be detached from how the heritage is being used or understood locally—after all, heritage is a slippery concept, while a clear-cut division between tangible and intangible heritage is arbitrary at best. Problematically, “divided” implies stagnation and non-movement; it implies a frozen relation. Thus, picturing Mostar as divided conceals as much as it reveals. Therefore, the sociologist Giulia Carabelli has called for seeing Mostar as more-than-divided (Carabelli 2018; see also Carabelli et al. 2019). These insights suggest that we risk enforcing and thus reproducing division by referring to Mostar as divided (Bourdieu 1991: 220; Brubaker 2004: 10). Consequently, this chapter aims to look beyond the division, in order to expose some of its underlying mechanisms. It will do so by exploring the temporalities of belonging within Mostar. I will look at how individuals “temporally position” themselves and how this practice relates and 1  The Dayton Agreement, ending the Bosnian War, was reached in Dayton, USA, and signed in Paris, on 14 December 1995.

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contributes to heritage. To be more specific, when presenting the local attitude towards the heritage, I will focus on how my interview partners position themselves on the space/time nexus. The results will be compared to how local heritage professionals and international organizations are working with the heritage in Mostar. It is important to recognize that temporal positioning, and associated narratives, does not only build upon a past and a present, but also build upon an envisioned future (Silberman 2013). The ability to envision future perspectives within a given place plays a fundamental role in order to achieve a sense of belonging, as part of a “struggle to create possibility” (Jansen and Löfving 2007: 17). Thus, at the end of the chapter, I will look at how a place can be “invested” with hope for the future through a specific action carried out in the city of Mostar during the summer of 2016, and how that practice (of investing hope) draws upon, and produces, tangible/intangible heritage. Before presenting the results from Mostar, it may be worthwhile to briefly explain why I find it beneficial to examine how belonging ties to temporal dimensions. As presented previously, inducing a sense of belonging constitutes an important value of heritage. However, unfortunately, the concept of belonging runs the risk of exclusive and essentialist connotations, as sometimes framed within the politics of belonging. Problematically, belonging often gets closely connected to a country/ place of birth, or in the case of children of immigrants, the birthplace of the parents. Due to the continued social significance of a sense of belonging, instead of abandoning the concept, it needs to be theoretically adapted to our globalized world of increased mobility and connectivity, where a static association between belonging and birthplace is untenable. This demands a dynamic approach to belonging, recognizing the significance of emotional values (i.e. being safe), social relations (i.e. family, friends), spatial relations (i.e. a sense of place—not necessarily place of birth) and temporal relations, for instance, future visions/images (i.e. hopes, dreams, fears). This chapter will specifically focus on temporal relations.

Method During my field work in Mostar, I carried out 24 interviews with 26 people. Furthermore, many informal conversations were carried out which deepened my understanding. A majority of the interviews took place in Mostar in April and May 2015, which included months of preparation. I also returned in May 2016 for more interviews, and additional

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conversations and interviews were carried out in 2019 and 2020. I focused on interviewing people who experienced the war from within Mostar, including not only Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims, but also Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Jews and people who would not readily identify themselves within any such ethnic category, such as those declaring themselves as Yugoslav. It was also seen as important to capture different sides of the political spectrum. Damir Ugljen, who is Bosnian Muslim, assisted as translator in interviews with Bosnian Muslims, and Marko Barišić, who is Bosnian Croat, assisted in interviews with Bosnian Croats. Interviews in English were carried out without the help of a translator. At the time of carrying out the fieldwork, I was living in Germany while I am originally from Sweden, which often caused interesting interactions since many people in Mostar have relatives living in those countries. When presenting the results, the ethnicity of the interview partners will not be disclosed. While this approach is unusual, I deem it as beneficial because (1) people do not necessarily identify themselves within such strict categories of ethnic classification, and (2) I aim to move beyond understanding the city solely in terms of ethnic division. Additionally, I interviewed heritage professionals in the city within the following institutions: at the “Institute for the protection of the Cultural Heritage of Herzegovina-Neretva” which is responsible for the heritage within the canton; at “Agency Stari Grad”, which is responsible for maintaining the World Heritage Site “Old Bridge Area of the Old City of Mostar” in cooperation with city agencies and in so doing making sure that the management plan is implemented; as well as at the recently opened Mostar office of the “Commission to Preserve National Monuments”, which is responsible for the national monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I also interviewed and had discussions with several local heritage professionals. The next step would be to interview people at international organizations, as well as people at the “Federal Ministry of Culture and Sports” at the Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. However, the focus here is on heritage professionals who are living and working in the city of Mostar.

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Beyond a City of Two Ethnic Categories The heritage of Mostar was widely destroyed and damaged during the Bosnian War in two separate sieges. The first siege occurred in 1992 when Mostar was primarily defended by the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) and the Croat Defense Force (HOS) against the occupying Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). During this stage of the war, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims were allied against the JNA, which consisted mostly of Serbs. However, this changed in 1993, when the HVO turned against the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), which had recently been formed. The aim of HVO was to carve a Croatian republic named Herceg-Bosna out of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was to be “ethnically” and exclusively Croat and thus “emptied” of Bosnian Muslims. During the second siege, Bosnian Muslims were occupied within Stari Grad, the old town of Mostar. International media attention turned towards the siege, when in November 1993, the most well-known symbol of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Ottoman bridge Stari Most (the Old Bridge) (Fig. 4.2), was destroyed by the HVO. This act has been interpreted as part of a conscious endeavour to erase the Ottoman heritage of Mostar because of its perceived Bosnian Muslim connotations. The perpetrators of the attack claimed that Stari Most constituted a legitimate military target in war.2 However, research suggests that the Old Bridge was devoid of military significance and that its destruction broke international law (Petrovic 2013: 194–195). The second siege ended with the Washington Agreement, signed in March 1994, in which Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats joined in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Without going into details of these two sieges (for more information see Bjelaković and Strazzari 1999), it is important to highlight that the heritage was deliberately targeted during the war (Riedlmayer 1995, 2002; Walasek 2015) and has been politically misused in post-war Mostar to enforce a division between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. However, what is often missed when focusing solely on ethnic classification is how the war uprooted a sense of home and belonging: Thousands were killed [in Mostar] and tens of thousands were displaced from their homes and from the city. At the same time, tens of thousands of 2  Slobodan Praljak had command responsibility during the destruction of the bridge. He dramatically committed suicide in 2017, while being sentenced in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

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Fig. 4.2  Stari Most. (Photo: GW) others fleeing from western Hercegovina and central Bosnia moved to Mostar. (Makaš 2007: 136)

Such a movement of people affected the meaning and role of the heritage. Other research has highlighted the presence of constructed dichotomies such as that between what is regarded as civilized (urban) and what is regarded as uncivilized (rural) (Stefansson 2007) and between those who are classified as ordinary (or normal) people and those who are classified as corrupt people (Hromadžić 2013, 2018). Furthermore, Monika Palmberger has presented an in-depth study of how different generations in Mostar relate to a sense of home and belonging in different ways (Palmberger 2016). These factors often underlie and may even subvert ethnic categories (Bougarel et al. 2007). In sum, a more nuanced approach to Mostar may be possible by attempting to move beyond static ethnic classifications by exposing the more fluid identities that they build upon.

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Influenced by the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), I will now try to locate the main narratives produced through the heritage of Mostar and trace the inherent silences within them. It is only necessary to spend a few hours in Mostar to notice that the heritage of western Mostar primarily emphasize Catholic (Croat) values, while the heritage of eastern Mostar primarily emphasize Muslim (Bosniak) values (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4), which in turn helps to enforce and sustain a narrative of a divided Mostar. There are more mosques in Mostar now than before the war because mosques that were destroyed decades ago, for instance during WWII, are also being rebuilt. In the beginning of the 2000s there were 38 mosques in Mostar in comparison to 16  in 1980 (Makaš 2007: 294; Strandenes 2003). A contributing factor is that the money to rebuild Ottoman heritage has predominantly been donated from countries with a majority of Muslims, for instance Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as from organizations focusing specifically on Muslim heritage, including international ones such as

Fig. 4.3  The Franciscan bell tower with the Cross on Hum Hill in the background. (Photo: GW)

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Fig. 4.4  Minarets in the old town of Mostar. (Photo: GW)

the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, as well as local ones such as the Islamic community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the other hand, actors, often tied to the Catholic Church, contributed with money for the rebuilding of Catholic churches (Makaš 2007: 256–337). Unfortunately, this means that the institutions providing money to the reconstruction process have often been divided along the ethnic lines of the city. Additionally, local political parties, particularly Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica (HDZ), in the Croat-dominated western side of Mostar, have supported the renaming of street names in order to present an exclusive national Croat history and in commemoration of Croat nationalists, such as a brief attempt in 2004 to rename a central roundabout in western Mostar, the Rondo Square, into the Mate Boban square, the infamous Croat-nationalist president of Herceg-Bosna (Palmberger 2018). While this renaming was stopped by the then High Representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina,3 Paddy Ashdown, other similar attempts of renaming streets and squares 3  The Office of the High Representative was created after the Bosnian War, with the purpose of overseeing the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, manifesting a strong presence and influence of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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have been acceded to. On the other hand, the socialist heritage of the Yugoslavian past is not taken care of and streets with names associated to Yugoslavia have most often been renamed. We can therefore conclude that the heritage of Mostar creates narratives which silence a part of history in a highly systematic and non-arbitrary manner, a topic which we will return to later. However, not only local actors but also international ones may have contributed to enforce narratives of division. Indeed, the international community has focused greatly on Mostar, but perhaps at the expense of other places in search of obvious symbols for the Western world (Walasek 2015: 212–215). The most well-known case would be the rebuilding of Stari Most by UNESCO, the World Bank and several other national and international actors, finished in 2004. It was an attempt to invest the bridge with universal values of peaceful coexistence between the “two sides” of Mostar. Nevertheless, a closer examination reveals the flaws within this idea. The Serbian population, who consisted of around 19% of Mostar’s inhabitants before the war, are not present within this binary representation of the city, revealing another silence within the dominant and all-pervasive narrative of Mostar as only consisting of two parts and two ethnic groups. Perhaps even more problematic from a symbolic perspective is that the bridge does not cross the actual division of the city during the second siege, namely the boulevard in the city, Bulevar Narodne Revolucije, which goes west of the river Neretva. While this does not translate to the interpretation that it was a mistake to rebuild the bridge (see the next two chapters), it would be safe to say that the goals expressed in the documents, which suggest that the bridge would serve to “heal” the city (UNESCO 2005: 5), have not been met. Another example of how the international community may have further enforced narratives of division rather than overcome them would be a World Bank project finished in 2005–2006. The World Bank selected three buildings to reconstruct from a tentative list of 21 possible ones, provided by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the World Monuments Fund (Aga Khan Trust for Culture 2004: 51). Instead of aiming for finding a shared heritage, the World Bank selected the Napredak Cultural Centre designated as Croatian Heritage, the Vakuf Palace designated as Bosniak heritage and the Orthodox Bishops's residence, designated as Serbian heritage. The criterion for selection was to reconstruct: “three monuments representing each ethnic community in Mostar (…)” (World Bank 2005: 3). The project was based on the good intention of increasing

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co-operation and rehabilitation between the communities, but by its focus, it also served to cement a divided heritage (Makaš 2007: 324–329; Walasek 2015: 224–225). This is an example of how problematic it can be to use the ethnic division as the starting point for an intervention, rather than looking at examples of how heritage may serve to challenge the very idea of a divided heritage. This phenomenon has been expressed by Ger Duijzings: “By understanding the conflict in the former Yugoslavia exclusively in ethnic terms, it [the west] has contributed to the triumph of nationalist forces and has encouraged the use of ethnic principles in organizing political and social life” (Duijzings 2000: 207). We can conclude that the narrative of ethnic division has served to silence several other narratives in Mostar, such as that of its Yugoslavian past as well as that of its Serbian population. Let us now turn to how local heritage agencies are navigating the complexity of Mostar’s heritage.

Local Commitment to the Heritage in Mostar In order to get a picture of how local heritage professionals approached the heritage of Mostar, I interviewed the head of the “Institute for the protection of the Cultural Heritage of Herzegovina-Neretva” as well as one person who was employed at the institute (in 2015), and one who was working at the institute for protection of heritage before and during the war, which was a different institution at that time. I also interviewed one person at the “Agency Stari Grad”, which was formed in 2005 with the goal of maintaining the World Heritage Site “Old Bridge Area of the Old City of Mostar”, in accordance with the management plan approved by  UNESCO. Additionally, I interviewed one person working at the Mostar office of the “Commission to Preserve National Monuments”. The institution was set up as a result of the 1995 Dayton Agreement and it is responsible for the national monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally, I interviewed several local heritage professionals, many of them connected to the University of Mostar. Needless to say, this selection is not representative of every heritage professional in Mostar, but it does provide important insights from some of the most significant heritage institutions in the city. In the interviews, I examined how they approached working with the heritage in the purpose of reconciliation. One exchange with a key individual went as follows:

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GW: Do you think that the heritage can work to unite Mostar, somehow? It cannot. (…) The problems didn’t have anything to do with the cultural heritage so it cannot unite Mostar. GW: You don’t think it can do anything about changing the mind of people? No. Do you think that the reconstruction of the Old Bridge had something to do with getting people together? (…) The idea that monuments are connecting us is very nice, but actually they are dividing us.

This perspective may need to be analyzed in comparison to aims expressed by international organizations that often refer to reconciliation as the purpose of initiating and implementing projects. Perhaps it is the failure of international organizations to “heal” the city despite lofty claims on the contrary, that promotes a lack of belief. Another key individual expressed it in the following way: GW: Do you think the heritage can work as a positive force in Mostar? No! It could be physically reconstructed, but with new meanings. That is the problem.

Nevertheless, there are individuals committed to working with heritage in order to make a positive change in Mostar. However, they seem to be quite disillusioned about the possibility for change coming from within the institution themselves: GW: Do you see any hope in how things are progressing? Yes, I must. I Must stay optimistic because of the situation here. I really think there is a space for change, but not only [within the] institutions, they are not enough for new narratives. We need people (…) here in Bosnia (…) and tell [other] kind of stories here. People need to hear these stories. The institutions, (…) it is just a mechanical process. It has no value for community, for the people that live here. GW: That must be frustrating for you? Yes, (…) [national] narratives are the only narrative we have right now. What kind of heritage is belonging to which ethnicity or group. With more people (…) here, talking about heritage on this [critical] level. This level is unknown for most people that is dealing with the heritage, who are working in the institutions for preserving heritage.

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Based on my interviews with heritage professionals in the city, it seems as if there is no clear engagement or commitment to issues of reconciliation through the heritage within the institutions. This may seem surprising considering how it is often the expressed goal and aim of international organizations involved with the heritage of the city, as already detailed in the context of UNESCO and the World Bank, but also significantly in relationship to the works carried out by smaller Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), such as the Swedish NGO Cultural Heritage Without Borders (CHWB) (Kälvemark 2007; Stengård and Legnér 2019). CHWB has focused greatly on the Balkans in general, by reconstructing buildings in Mostar amongst other cities, where different ethnic communities have cooperated in the reconstruction work, as well as in establishing regional networks for museum professionals named the Balkan Museum Network, a network for women as directors of museums (Women’s International Leadership Development, WILD) and a network for regional cooperation and exchange between NGOs (the South Eastern Europe Heritage Network). I had the privilege of attending one of the meetings of the Balkan Museum Network, in Novi Sad, April 2015, where one person representing Museum of Herzegovina, based in Mostar, was present. The meeting included an ambitious and thought-provoking engagement with issues of identity, outreach, social commitment and the role of the museum in society. The follow-up question needs to be to what extent these perspectives are incorporated within the work of the museum in Mostar? The Museum of Herzegovina based in Mostar constitutes three different branches. First, there is the regular Museum of Herzegovina, which focuses on archaeological finds of the area, ethnology depicting the traditional home of a “Bosnian Muslim” as well as tools from the traditional life in a Herzegovinian village. Furthermore, it addresses key individuals within the Yugoslavian history of the city, especially that of Džemal Bijedić who was the prime minister of Yugoslavia between 1971 and 1977 and who was born in the house of the museum. Second, there is the Old Bridge Museum, which focuses on the history of Stari Most, archaeological discoveries made and on the reconstruction process of the bridge. Finally, there is the Museum in Mostar (MuM), which was opened in 2014 and is an interpretative museum working with sound, poetry and videos from the region. It has a distinctly ethnographic approach and is primarily aimed to promote the beauty of the region (personal communication with employee at the museum in 2015). In the Old Bridge Museum there is an outline of the history of the bridge and of its reconstruction, but not of its destruction. While detailing the reconstruction process of the bridge,

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several info panels focus on technical aspects, but not of the main aim of UNESCO driving the reconstruction process, namely the issue of reconciliation and how the new Old Bridge would serve to heal the city (UNESCO 2005: 5). When interviewing local people about the museum, most people had never visited it and several people told me that they did not even know it existed. This suggests that the museum is not an important presence within the city for the local community. This is perhaps not surprising, considering how the museum is aiming for tourists, in which a supposedly neutral and unproblematic history is presented, mainly in order to promote the city and the region. There are examples of more community-­ driven initiatives at the museum, and  it has  for instance been involved in  poetry evenings focusing on the work of the famous Mostarian poet Aleksa Šantić. However, these are exceptions. As this disillusioned woman in her early 40s, engaged in a local NGO, explained to me: GW: Do you ever go to the museums? Not really. We don’t have any museums. We call these institutions museums, but have you seen how they look inside? It is the same problem as with the agency that is supposed to support and protect the heritage. They have no money.

When considering these perspectives on heritage and taking the local/ global initiatives into consideration, there is a contradiction present when comparing local and global commitment to the heritage of Mostar, and one wonders how these contradictions play a role in constituting the heritage of Mostar in terms of finding shared values and meanings. One post-war initiative which is using that which is shared in the past as a starting point, instead of the division, is a Bruce Lee statue inaugurated in 2004 by Nino Raspudić and Veselin Galato through the NGO “Mostar Urban Movement” (Fig. 4.5). It is meant to represent the shared love for Bruce Lee amongst all of the communities in Mostar (Raspudić 2004). My interview partners expressed varied responses to the Bruce Lee statue, and it became clear that it mostly had relevance for a particular generation within Mostar, namely those born in the 70s, whereas older or younger generations were either indifferent towards it or openly expressed that it had nothing to do in Mostar. Often it was connected to the acts of vandalism against it, occurring in the first year of its revelation and prompting it to be relocated to Zagreb for a considerable amount of time. Furthermore,

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Fig. 4.5  The Bruce Lee statue. (Photo: GW)

the use of Bruce Lee in Mostar in order to express shared values sometimes prompted responses filled with dark humour. People found it ironic that a person with no obvious links to Mostar was used in order to find shared values among people from Mostar. It was often used as a sad indicator for the present-day situation, as this woman in her mid-­60s, working as the director of a home for elderly, expressed to me: GW: What do you think about the Bruce Lee statue? [Laughter] It is a good thing because if you put a Bosniak it is not good, if you put a Croat it is not good, if you put a Serb it is not good. There will always be someone not being satisfied. So put Bruce Lee, we are OK. This is funny. For the situation today it is good. Better this than somebody else.

In such a way, the Bruce Lee statue is still, more than ten years after being revealed, able to say something darkly ironic about the situation in Mostar. This initiative is certainly ingenious within a globalized world

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where culture is increasingly moving beyond the nation-state while individuals are still being focused on producing locality within their specific contexts (neighbourhoods) (Appadurai 1996). The Bruce Lee statue does express something that several of the people I interviewed consider as specifically connected to Mostar, represented by the moral that Bruce Lee famously expressed in his movies, as well as to the dark humour found in the initiative itself. This is a realization that expresses something about the heritage in Mostar: in order to find shared (or not shared) values through the heritage, a wide variety of issues have to be taken into consideration, connected to both tangible and intangible aspects, which generation the person belongs to and the social background of the person. Within the process of finding shared values in Mostar, perceptions of the past (of pre-­ war Mostar) are co-mingling with expectations for the future. It is in other words a process which is highly related, not only to the space of Mostar, but also to the time of Mostar. Therefore, in the next section, the temporalities of belonging in Mostar will be presented, and how these affect the role of the heritage in the city.

The Temporalities of Belonging I will now specifically look at the temporalities of belonging among the local population interviewed. A majority of the people interviewed who grew up in pre-war Mostar, told me that they constantly went back to pre-­ war Mostar in their memories. Most often, it was highly related to the time of belonging: people expressed that they felt more at home in pre-­ war Mostar. Interviewees did express a need to remember, but occasionally it did not always seem to be based on a conscious decision. As expressed to me, memories were “hitting” people while they were taking walks in Mostar. Palmberger (2016) has referred to how the breakup of Yugoslavia has led to “ruptured life-courses”. It is easy to agree with such sentiments. The war caused a substantial break in the lives of most people I interviewed, leading many to regard their lives in terms of before and after the war. Some interviewees even refer to themselves as still living in pre-war Mostar. As a female in her late-30s, who is a teacher at the University of Mostar, told me: I always think back. Not that I live in that period, but one part of me does, because I feel more, let’s say, safer at that period.

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Instead of reducing this narrative to “yugo-nostalgia” which is commonly employed as a derogatory term in former Yugoslavia (Petrović 2007; Maksimović 2017), it can be approached as the creation of a bottom-­up narrative in opposition to present-day Mostar. In order to avoid analyzing such a narrative as a personal and private creation, I think it may be beneficial to approach it as a narrative produced in a very specific context: as a separate Mostar in dialogue with and in opposition to the current Mostar. Pre-war Mostar represents the time and place of belonging. Furthermore, pre-war Mostar is used in order to understand post-war Mostar and vice versa. In so doing, they tend to become polar opposites. As expressed by a woman in her mid-60s, who is a pensioner and engaged in a local NGO: As soon as I leave my house I think about pre-war Mostar because I look at the garden just in front of my buildings. It was filled with roses before but now it is just a place for garbage.

People often struggle to come up with anything from pre-war Mostar that is still present, which is a topic I will develop in more detail in Chap. 6. Consider for example this quote by a female in her early 40s, working in a local NGO: GW: Is anything left of Old Mostar? I am not the best person to answer this question. I am one of those stuck in Old Mostar, and I am in contact and socializing with other people from that period. We stick together. I am not an expert of what is a reality in Mostar.

Thus, it is not only life courses that are ruptured in Mostar, but the very narratives connecting the pre-war and post-war Mostar. Furthermore, the narratives of two disconnected Mostars are sustained by the gardens, streets and houses that people spend their daily lives in. On the topic of how narratives are affected by personal ruptures, the anthropologist Michael Jackson has written: “In death or disaster, succession or seriality, give way to simultaneity. The present is stuck like a gramophone needle in the groove of one fateful moment in the past” (Jackson 2013: 103). Jackson was building his perspectives upon the work of Hannah Arendt, who stated that disasters make life an “unbearable sequence of sheer happenings” (Arendt 1968: 104). Instead of the

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comforting narrative which provides a link between past and present, people venture to a romanticized pre-war Mostar. However, pre-war Mostar is not positioned in a foreign country but it is instead surrounding them through the physical environment and the narratives that the physical environment helps to create. Nevertheless, it is not an issue in itself that there are multiple Mostars simultaneously “present”. After all, as highlighted in Chap. 3, every place is multi-temporal. Instead, the problem lies in how these two Mostars are lacking a connecting narrative. This leads some people to question their own happy recollections and experiences. As expressed to me by a woman in her 50s, working at the University of Mostar: I am searching for explanations for what happened in the last year. In Yugoslavia, something must have been twisted. It was not real, because it ended the way it ended. GW: Do you think of the Yugoslavian times as happy? It was my happy times. But in war I realized that maybe that was not the case for everyone. Because I really believed in the idea, that we were all equal. I never thought who was who back then. But in the war, at some point, everybody cared. Then I asked myself if I was delusional or if it was only a small group of people thinking in that way. But even now, for me, this is still impossible to understand, this way of thinking about nationalities. But maybe, after all that happened in the war, this division is very deep within people. And it existed even before the 90s.

Temporal Displacement and the Spirit of Mostar As a consequence, many of my interviewees showed signs of displacement. However, not a geographical displacement (see Zetter 1999: 9), but a temporal one, as argued by the anthropologist Stef Jansen: many of the people I worked with [in Bosnia and Herzegovina] were not only displaced persons, but, for all intents and purposes, they were actually distimed too. Namely, their location had been overhauled in both spatial and temporal ways (…). (Jansen 2009: 55)

A temporal displacement has similar effects to a geographical one: namely passivity, a romantic longing, as well as an “othering” of the new neighbors (Jackson 2013: 88–89). One significant difference between geographical and temporal displacement is that the new neighbors are not

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residents in a different village, city or country—which is the case in geographical displacement—but the new inhabitants who have moved in. As this woman in her late-30s who works as a teacher at the University of Mostar expressed to me: I don’t think they [newcomers] have much love for the place, even though they live here, they work here. Like, everybody is homesick, even I am homesick, for the Mostar that used to be.

In order to construct a narrative which serves to connect pre-war and post-war Mostar, approximately half of those interviewed who grew up in Mostar blamed the current division and ethno-religious conflict on the residents who moved to Mostar during and after the war. The newcomers are perceived to be uncivilized, uneducated, nationalistic and - crucially without love of Mostar (for a comparison, see Stefansson 2007). A factor which has contributed to this situation is that many of those who gained political power in post-war Mostar arrived during or after the war (Bjelaković and Strazzari 1999: 95). Furthermore, the heritage serves as a rhetorical tool within these narratives. Tellingly, the current neglect of the heritage as well as its ethno-religious employment, are often blamed on the newcomers. It is argued that the newcomers do not care about the heritage, and they are therefore neglecting it and/or employing it for political gains. Thus, the heritage constitutes part of the building blocks within a process of “Othering” those recently arrived in Mostar. What is often regarded as lacking from Mostar is the “Spirit of Mostar” (see Kolind 2008 for an elaboration on a similar occurrence in Stolac). There is no clear definition of what this spirit signifies, and perspectives upon it could differ depending on who I spoke to. However, it does include a love for the city and all of the people living in the city. Furthermore, it was either destroyed or almost destroyed by the new residents, primarily because of their perceived lack of love for the city. However, the spirit does not reside within the city itself, but rather within its people. As emotionally expressed to me by this man in his mid-50s, who is currently unemployed but engaged in the Serbian community: GW: Do you often think back on pre-war Mostar? Yes, I think back on it more than I actually should. Very often. There is probably no person from Mostar who doesn’t think about old Mostar all the

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time. We are dreaming about Mostar as it was. All the time. Seeing the old Mostar in our dreams. (…) GW: What is the biggest difference, would you say? Every town has its soul, its spirit, and the spirit of Mostar was amazing. It was huge. But the spirit of Mostar was the people that lived in Mostar. The spirit of this garden is me, and the spirit of Mostar is Mostarians. You could meet the spirit of Mostar everywhere because you could actually meet the people of Mostar everywhere. That is why the spirit was all over [the city]. But when the war started the spirit started to disappear. 70% of Mostarians left Mostar and they went all over the world. They were all Mostarians. It didn’t matter who was who back then. Then new people came from all around. These people just came here to commercialize Mostar. They don’t even like Mostar. They just come here to take their salary, if they are employed, and go back. It is like their life is not here. They don’t like Mostar. GW: Is something left of the spirit of Mostar? There is. There is. The spirit of Mostar is still here, not as it was, but it is here and it is in the people. There are still people here who love Mostar. Even some people who came to Mostar in the war or later started to love Mostar. And they became Mostarians, because they love [Mostar].

It is not possible to relate the Spirit of Mostar solely to a specific ideology, that is, communism or socialism. Indeed, a longing for the Spirit of Mostar was expressed to me by people from all sides of the political spectrum. Furthermore, it crosses generations: there were interviewees who were too young to experience or remember Yugoslavia addressing the Spirit of Mostar. Perhaps we can best approach it through the work of Benedict Anderson (2006), and see it as a romanticized “imagined community”. When looking at the general attitude towards the way heritage has been employed in post-war Mostar, my interviewees argue that there has been an un-proportional attention given to reconstructing religious buildings, and the general opinion among my interviewees is that these risk cementing ethnic division. In such a way, these initiatives are in opposition to the Spirit of Mostar. People are tired of how the heritage has transformed into a blunt tool in a symbolic warfare, which manifests itself through the amount of religious buildings, in the volume of the prayers and in the height of the bell towers and the minarets. This was often expressed along the following lines, here articulated by a woman in her early 40s, working at a home for elderly:

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GW: Do you think that the heritage can serve a way to realize the Mostar you wish was here? Heritage is very important, and should serve to bring all people together. Other parts of the heritage than the religious ones. Theater. Cinemas. Poet nights. (…) Lots of attention is “going to Church” or “going to Mosque”. Or just speak about war time and just this victim and that victim (…) and who is aggressor. OK, just stop talking about this!

Even though many people interviewed think that heritage should serve a positive role in Mostar, there is a common agreement that this is not taking place. On the contrary, people often lack a belief in heritage as a means to create a better Mostar—unless there is a major political change. As expressed by this woman in her mid-60s, working as a director of a home for elderly: GW: Do you think that the history of Mostar can help bring people together? All three politics today work on the division of people, so they don’t put any effort into combining the people and bringing them together. I am not optimistic concerning this. I have Croat, Bosnian and Serbian friends and they were my friends, and stayed as my friends (…). I am 65, I am not going to fight with my friends because of politics. But there is nothing here that can unite people that live in Mostar today.

In sum, the narrative of ethnic separation has contributed to a sense of disassociation to the present-day city. As a result, my interviewees have constructed narratives of home pertaining to pre-war Mostar, instead of present-day Mostar, leading to a sense of temporal displacement. The unfortunate consequence is a lack of belief in the present-day purpose and future role of the heritage. However, there is also potential within such a narrative, which will be explored in the next section.

Looking Towards the Future In this section we are going to look at the future-oriented dimensions within the narrative explored previously. Indeed, within Mostar there is often an urgency to move forward. As told to me by this currently unemployed man in his mid-50s:

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I would ask one young and perceptive person. First I would ask him if he likes Mostar or not. If he likes Mostar I would give him freedom to make any kind of monument he wants. (…) It is enough of all these monuments that commemorate killings. About “Who killed who?” (…) Let’s face positive things, and positive futures.

There are cases, primarily among the youth, where the very narrative of pre-war Mostar is aimed at challenging the current ethnic division. These initiatives are often connected to specific spaces in the city where young people, no matter their ethnic community, can meet and interact, such as the left-wing Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević, often regarded as the most important meeting space for young people in Mostar (see Nikolić 2012; Carabelli 2018). I was lucky enough to see first-hand how such an initiative was being planned in the summer of 2016, involving a group of young people from Mostar who overpainted an electric substation as a popular type of shelf common in the Yugoslavian households during the 70s and 80s (Fig. 4.6). It is important to add that even though I knew many of those who carried out the initiative and could thus follow the process from a distance, I was myself not directly involved in it. The monument was dedicated to the miners of Mostar, because the neighborhood in which the monument was constructed, Rudnik, had been the location of an important coal mine which opened in 1918. Rudnik means “mine” in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, and the neighborhood itself developed around the mine (see Wollentz et al. 2019: 203). The monument received the following title: “Monument to the miners and to the Mine (Rudnik), from the youth of Mostar” (Spomenik rudarima i Rudniku – od mladih Mostara). Furthermore, it was a direct response to a nationalistic monument commemorating the HVO that had recently been inaugurated in Rudnik, which forced the demolishment of the previous monument standing on the spot, built in remembrance of the miner Ahmet Pintul (1923–1944), who died at a young age in WWII. On the shelves of the monument to the miners, the creators painted books dealing with the history of the miners and academic literature about workers’ rights. Furthermore, spaces were left empty on the shelves so that people could add their own paintings or texts. In such a way, the monument was designed to be in a continuous state of “becoming” rather than having a demarcated beginning and end. Additionally, everyone in the local community was invited to participate in the creation of it, and therefore it served to bind the community together involving different generations.

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Fig. 4.6  The monument to the miners of Rudnik. (Photo: Marko Barišić)

Importantly, many of those who were working in the mine are still residing in Rudnik. This can serve as an illustrative example of how a narrative of pre-war Mostar, or more specifically, of Yugoslavian Mostar, was used in a forward-oriented activity. Interestingly, most of those responsible were too young to personally experience the time period of the 70s and 80s at any length (see Wollentz et al. 2019 for a more in-depth description and analysis of this monument). The narrative constructed here can be seen as an active distancing from an ethnically divided Mostar. In such a way, it is an incentive for a dialogue of what kind of future people would like to shape through present-day actions, that is, an attempt of investing Rudnik with hope for the future. Instead of prompting passivity, this is an act encouraging control of one’s own narrative. This exemplifies how heritage and associated narratives may constitute an empowering tool in order to envision a future of belonging that transcends ethnicity. Furthermore, the monument builds upon memories from the socialist period. In other words, the monument

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connects to the industrial and ideological heritage of former Yugoslavia,4 and especially to how the identity of being a worker fundamentally transformed in the process of moving from an industrial to a post-industrial and neo-­liberal society. This process silenced the workers’ identity within the public space, an identity which had previously been so significant. Therefore, the industrial heritage of socialism evokes “potential for negotiation of identities that would offer an alternative to divisions along ethnic and religious lines that currently dominate the post-Yugoslav spaces” (Petrović, 2013: 96).

Conclusions We can conclude that Mostar is in need of narratives which can initiate grounds for a discussion concerning what a common future may look like (Silberman 2013: 183). This chapter has showcased how the construction of a bottom-up narrative of pre-war Mostar can serve such a role, through being oriented to the future and to the past simultaneously. Such a narrative can point towards a different future, while challenging the way the current institutions are and have been employing heritage. Significantly, the birth of such a narrative is a gradual process coming from a new engaged generation within the city, who—without having experienced Yugoslavia at any length themselves—can draw upon it in order to assemble new futures. This constitutes an example of nostalgia as a basis for action (Smith and Campbell 2017), or using Svetlana Boym’s (2001) concept: an example of “reflective nostalgia”.5 Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes, presented in the previous chapter, pre-war and post-war Mostar shape two distinct chronotopes inhabiting their own temporal and spatial relations. Pre-war Mostar is a chronotope of “home”, representing peaceful tranquility, solidarity across ethnic groups and of belonging in a specific time and place. It represents everything that post-war Mostar is not. The temporal dimensions of this chronotope are oriented as much towards the future as to the past, that is, as a way to envision an alternative future for Mostar. Post-war 4  See also Martinović and Ifko (2018) for an example of how it is possible to focus on the industrial heritage of Mostar in the purpose of urban regeneration (in this case the Žitopromet factory). 5  According to the distinction made by Boym, the active and future-oriented reflective nostalgia stands in contrast to what she coins restorative nostalgia, which is instead aiming to restore a version of the past in the present.

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Mostar, on the other hand, is a chronotope where time seems to be standing still - a chronotope of immobility and stasis. In line with the study of Jansen et al. (2017: 17–18), instead of being “home”, this is a chronotope of being hopelessly stuck in a “waiting room” without an end in sight. While these two chronotopes exist in a mutual and dependent relationship, they are at the same time disconnected. Additionally, these results point to a need to not only focus initiatives on the ethic division - since such initiatives have tended to reinforce the division rather than to overcome it—but also focus on the distance between the newly arrived and the former residents of Mostar. I found no initiatives working with—or even acknowledging—the “Othering” of the newcomers within the city. Second, there is a need to bridge the two Mostars that are being narrated through the heritage. A sequence needs to be constructed between pre-war Mostar and post-war Mostar. Here, focus does not explicitly need to be on the war itself, but instead there would be a value in trying to transfer the elusive Spirit of Mostar from pre-war to post-war Mostar. However, this process cannot be enforced from the outside or from above. Clearly, there is a potential role for heritage to play here, but only if initiatives move beyond solely the tangible aspects of heritage, that is the reconstruction of buildings, to include elusive feelings, such as the one of being at home in both space and time.

Bibliography Aga Khan Trust for Culture. 2004. Historic Cities Support Programme Conservation and Revitalisation of Historic Mostar. Geneva: The Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed.. London: Verso. [First Edition Published in 1983] Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, H. 1968. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harvest Book. Bjelaković, N., and F.  Strazzari. 1999. The Sack of Mostar, 1992–1994: The Politico-Military Connection. European Security 8 (2): 73–102. https://doi. org/10.1080/09662839908407407. Bougarel, X., E. Helms, and G. Duijzings, eds. 2007. The New Bosnian Mosaic. Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

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Bringa, T. 1995. Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brubaker, R. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Calame, J., and E. Charlesworth. 2009. Dividid Cities. In Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carabelli, G. 2018. The Divided City and the Grassroots. In The (un)making of Ethnic Divisions in Mostar. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Carabelli, G., A.  Djurasovic, and R.  Summa. eds. 2019. Challenging the Representation of Ethnically Divided Cities: Perspectives from Mostar. Space and Polity 23 (2) 116–124 . Duijzings, G. 2000. Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. London: Hurst. Hromadžić, A. 2013. Discourses of Trans-Ethnic Narod in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41 (2): 259–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.747503. ———. 2018. Streets, Scum and People: Discourses of (in)civility in Postwar Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Anthropological Theory 18 (2–3): 326–356. Jackson, M. 2013. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. 2nd ed. Köpenhamn: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jansen, S. 2007. Troubled Locations: Return, the Life Course, and Transformations of ‘Home’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 49: 15–30. https://doi.org/10.3167/foc.2007.490103. ———. 2009. Hope and the State in the Anthropology of Home: Preliminary Notes. In Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology, ed. O. Löfgren and R. Bendix, 54–60. Jansen, S., and S.  Löfving. 2007. Introduction: Movement, Violence, and the Making of Home. Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 49: 3–14. https://doi.org/10.3167/foc.2007.490102. Jansen, S., Č . Brković, and V. Č elebičić. 2017. Introduction: New Ethnographic Perspectives on Mature Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina Semiperipheral Entanglements, ed. S. Jansen, Č . Brković, and V. Č elebičić, 1–27. New York/Abingdon: Routledge. Kälvemark, T. 2007. Cultural Heritage for Peace and Reconciliation: An Evaluation of Cultural Heritage Without Borders (ChwB). Unpublished Report. Available at http://chwb.org. Kolind, T. 2008. Post-War Identification: Everyday Muslim Counterdiscourse in Bosnia Herzegovina. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Laketa, S. 2015. The Geopolitics of Daily Life in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. PhD Thesis. The University of Arizona, School of Geography and Development. Makaš, E. 2007. Representing Competing Identities: Building and Rebuilding in Postwar Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cornell University.

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Maksimović, M. 2017. Unattainable Past, Unsatisfying Present – Yugonostalgia: An Omen of a Better Future? Nationalities Papers 45 (6): 1066–1081. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2017.1312324. Martinović, A., and S.  Ifko. 2018. Industrial Heritage as a Catalyst for Urban Regeneration in Post-conflict Cities Case Study: Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Cities 74: 259–268. Nikolić, D. 2012. Tre städer, två broar och ett museum. Minne, politik och världsarv i Bosnien och Hercegovina. PhD Thesis, Lund University. Palmberger, M. 2016. How Generations Remember. Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina, Global Diversities Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Nationalizing the Streetscape: The Case of Street Renaming in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. In The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes. Naming, Politics, and Place, ed. R. Rose-Redwood and D. Alderman, 168–184. Routledge: Abingdon. Petrović, T. 2007. The Territory of the Former Yugoslavia in the “Mental Maps” of Former Yugoslavs: Nostalgia for Space. Sprawy Narodowościowe 31: 263–273. Petrovic, J. 2013. The Old Bridge of Mostar and Increasing Respect for Cultural Property in Armed Conflict. Leiden: Brill-Nijhoff Publishers. Petrović, T. 2013. Museums and Workers: Negotiating Industrial Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia. Nar. umjet 50 (1): 96–120. Raspudić, N. 2004. The Monument of Bruce Lee  – Yes and Why? Unpublished Speech Held November 5. Riedlmayer, A. 1995. Killing Memory: The Targeting of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage. MELA Notes 61 (Fall 1994): 1–6. ———. 2002. Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1996: A Post-war Survey of Selected Municipalities. Bosnia-Herzegovina Cultural Heritage Report. Cambridge, Massachusetts USA. Silberman, N. 2013. The Tyranny of Narrative. History, Heritage, and Hatred in the Modern Middle East. Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 1 (2): 175–184. Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ neil_silberman/47. Smith, L., and G. Campbell. 2017. ‘Nostalgia for the Future’: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (7): 612–627. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1321034. Sorabji, C. 1995. A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In War, a Cruel Necessity?: The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, ed. R. Hinde and H.E. Watson, 80–95. London: Tauris. Stefansson, A. 2007. Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo. In The New Bosnian Mosaic. Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, ed. X.  Bougarel, E.  Helms, and G. Duijzings, 59–77. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

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Stengård, M., and M. Legnér. 2019. Funder and Facilitator: Swedish Development Aid Aimed at Cultural Heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1995–2008. International Journal of Cultural Policy. https://doi.org/10.1080/1028663 2.2019.1621302. [Online First]. Strandenes, J.R. 2003. Riven and Cleansed, Stabilized and Democratized. Norsk Senter for Menneskerettigheter: Oslo. Trouillot, M.R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. UNESCO. 2005. Nomination Dossier “The Old City of Mostar”. http://whc. unesco.org/uploads/nominations/946rev.pdf. 08 Apr 2020. Walasek, H. 2015. Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. London: Routledge. Wollentz, G., M. Barišić, and N. Sammar. 2019. Youth Activism and Dignity in Post-war Mostar, Envisioning a Shared Future Through Heritage. Space and Polity 23 (2): 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2019.1635443. World Bank. 2005. Report No: 32713. Implementation Completion Report. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/237201468016467607/ pdf/327130rev.pdf. 01 Apr 2020. Zetter, R. 1999. Reconceptualizing the Myth of Return: Continuity and Transition Amongst the Greek-Cypriot Refugees of 1974. Journal of Refugee Studies 12 (1): 1–22.

CHAPTER 5

Remembering and Forgetting in Mostar

In this chapter I will discuss the official memorials and other forms of memorialization in the city of Mostar. Of the latter, a focus will be made on the role of the ruins in the city due to their potential role as unintended (or intended) memorials of the war. In the previous chapter it was highlighted that memory, in the forms of a constructed narrative surrounding an imagined/remembered past of pre-war Mostar, where a sense of “home” and “belonging” can be found, is used as a form of counter-­ memory to the official one of ethnic separation present in the city. Furthermore, the imagined pre-war Mostar was sometimes employed, not for the purpose of looking backwards, but for the purpose of looking forward and imagine different futures, a point which I will further elaborate in this chapter. Such a realization makes it relevant to ask what forms of memorials and acts of memorialization that exist in Mostar, and in addition to that, what kind of role these play for the local citizens of Mostar in terms of envisioning futures in which they can achieve a sense of belonging? This chapter will critically engage with the relationship between remembering/forgetting in Mostar by studying the memorials and other forms of memorialization in the city. It will do this in order to challenge some routinely repeated assumptions concerning negative and positive valuation of remembering and forgetting, in which the loss of memories is most often approached as inherently negative for society (see Wollentz 2019). At the same time, the much needed delivery from certain memories in a post-war situation is either overlooked or disregarded, despite the © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_5

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existence of a kind of forgetting that is not forced but initiated by individuals themselves (Connerton 2008, 2009: 51–82), that may serve a particular need for people in a post-war society. After all, not only forced forgetting is a political tool, but also specific reminders of certain events can be as well, and may be used as a form of political oppression (Clark 2013). Therefore, I am arguing for the necessity to recognize these dynamics when working with the heritage in a post-war society. Within heritage studies, memory is often understood as endangered, while heritage is approached as a medium to counter the fading of memories. This is based on the assumption that the loss of memories is an inherently negative process (Connerton 2008): by forgetting elements of our past we forget elements of ourselves. However, if we accept that forgetting can be an active and even a conscious process (Forty and Küchler 1999), and that all narratives constructed about the past include silencing parts of history (Trouillot 1995), it becomes difficult to maintain this as a simplistic truth. In other words, forgetting is part of creating who we are and who we want to be. Even though these ideas are not necessarily controversial within heritage studies, their implications are rarely discussed, despite their potential significance for how post-conflict communities may navigate a future that is not totally constrained by their past. Within heritage and memory studies the loss of memories is usually studied in connection with political top-down attempts at controlling and regulating certain narratives of the past, while silencing what is regarded as unwanted ones. Although the motivation behind agreements to forget are varied, they are often forced and can be a real concern for marginalized people. Forgetting is often used as a form of oppression by political institutions (see Anheier and Raj Isar 2011). It is, however, important to recognize cases of deliberate forgetting initiated by individuals themselves as a much-needed delivery, especially in post-war contexts. Since memory has spatial dimensions and can be stimulated by visual clues, it is clear that memorials may play a highly important role within such processes. With the post-war period in former Yugoslavia ethnical identities came to be the primary marker of the heritage, to the exclusion of other values and meanings. A clear-cut correlation between specific elements of the heritage and certain ethnical identities has been articulated both through political initiatives within Bosnia and Herzegovina and through the activities of international organizations (Makaš 2007; Walasek 2015). The connection between ethnicity and heritage would be ably illustrated by any studies of the memorials and memorialization activities in Mostar; the city

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therefore also provides a potent basis for reflecting on future forms and purposes of such cultural practices. Jörn Rüsen discusses different types of narratives (1987), and concludes that narratives of mourning and forgiving can be made to serve as “cultural strategies in overcoming ethnocentrism” (Rüsen 2004: 70), through “integrating negative historical experiences into the master narrative of one’s own group” (Rüsen 2004: 69). With negative historical experiences, Rüsen explicitly refers to experiences which challenge the concept of perpetrator (the others) and victim (the own group). This idea is relevant in the context of memorials, since they commonly engage with narratives of mourning; but it also raises questions about how mourning and forgiving are physically represented, and if the lack of integration of negative historical experiences can explain why some memorials increase ethnocentrism rather than decrease it? Looking at recent memorials within the Western world, it has been argued that focus is placed upon the sacrifices of the dead, or even the unexplainable nature of violence (Winter 2008: 69), but rarely on any aspects of forgiving. We may therefore have to ask whether, as Janine Clark states, too much memory can serve as a hindrance to narratives of forgiving (Clark 2013), and in extension of that whether and how memorials may act beyond past-orientated mourning?

Places Oriented Towards the Future In a post-war situation, there is often a desire to forget certain memories, because they are difficult to cope with and prevents the moving forward. Due to memories’ spatial dimensions, this desire for forgetting may be projected on to certain physical elements in the landscape, be it a particular monument representing certain values or a ruin that reminds people of the war. This does not mean that memories can and should be erased just by removing a physical construct, but it means that there may be benefits arising from places that can be orientated towards the future through initiating discussions, activities or reflections concerning what the future may look like and how the future may be actively shaped through our present-­ day activities. By a place of looking forward, I refer to places where individually constructed, and thereby unavoidably plural, aspirations for the future explicitly play a role in how they are experienced. In turn this will inform attitudes to the heritage of these places. Their pluralism will make the heritage of such places open and subject to change. This is different from

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political top-down attempts of employing the past to institutionalize a specific view of the future, since these attempts often serve to silence the plurality of perspectives within a community (Wertsch and Billingsley 2011). Significantly, places of remembrance and places of looking forward are not opposites, but mutually constituted; many memorials include more or less explicit imperatives for the future, often expressed through the idea of ‘never again’ (Macdonald 2009: 95). Furthermore, looking forward does not necessarily mean forgetting crimes against humanity by sweeping them under the carpet (Viejo-Rose 2011: 63). On the contrary, in order for forgetting to “work” it seems that a notion of truth and justice needs to be satisfied—without some kind of closure it is difficult to move forward (see, e.g., Viejo-Rose 2011: 150–195 discussion of the post Franco “Pact of Silence” in Spain). The complex interplay between imagining the future and remembering the past in the aftermath of conflict, or between a desire for change and forgetting, and a need for stability and continuity, is often embodied by memorials. In the Western world, a growing acknowledgement of this complexity has led to a move from memorials consisting of concrete figures of war heroes or national symbols, to attempts at materializing absences, signifying loss (Winter 2008: 69), as mentioned in Chap. 3. In this context, monuments have sometimes been replaced by “empty”, unmarked rooms or buildings (such as in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, Walther 2012) or by spaces/landscapes (as in the commemoration plan for the World Trade Center, Bevan 2007: 198–199). However, within Mostar, such “empty” or “open” memorials have not been constructed after the 1990s wars, raising questions about the narratives communicated by the public memorials and places of memorialization at these places. Do they only communicate narratives of mourning, or do they also contain messages about forgiving? With these questions in mind, the case study provides us with a means of critically discussing the interplay of remembering and forgetting, as it manifests itself through specific memorials and practices of commemoration, or, as is also the case, through specific practices of looking towards the future rather than the past.

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Memorials in Mostar Most of the official memorials in Mostar can be approached in the light of the division of the city, because there are no monuments commemorating all the victims from the two sieges of Mostar. Furthermore, there are tensions concerning the memorials as illustrated by the destruction in January 2013 of a memorial for the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), which was erected close to the city hall on the so-­ called western part of the city, next to, and possibly as a direct reaction to, a memorial for the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) (Balkan Insight 2013). In 2019, more than six years after its detonation, the monument still stands in ruins (Fig. 5.1). By letting the monument stand in pieces next to the city hall, many of those interviewed interpret it as a conscious attempt by politicians to enforce the memory of a divided city and in such

Fig. 5.1  Detonated memorial for the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo: GW)

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a way consciously perpetuate division. Whether this is true or not, it showcases that memory is a political and contentious tool in Mostar. Through the interviews conducted it became clear that the official memorials dotted around Mostar are seen by most of the people interviewed as a political and forced attempt at constructing memory, in which specific one-sided views of a divided past are reinforced in the present and aimed towards a future of division. Many of the interviewees expressed that they are tired of a city filled with so many memorials but with so little meaning in terms of mourning and forgiving. In fact, there are so many memorials often including the same or similar messages that there is little constructive point in venturing into details about each and every one. Furthermore, new ones are continuously added making it difficult to keep up even for the local citizens (see Wollentz et al. 2019 for a bottom-up “reaction” to a new HVO monument). Based on these factors, instead of discussing each and every monument, a focus will be placed upon presenting the general attitude expressed to me through the interviews. One of the most contagious monuments specifically used as a memorial in Mostar is the “Monument to the Fallen Croat Defenders in the Homeland War”, which is used as a memorial for the HVO, located on the Rondo square in front of the Hrvatski dom herceg Stjepan Kosača, often referred to simply as Kosača, which is a Croatian cultural centre. The planning of the monument started in 1997, by the Mostar Southwest Municipality, and a competition was set up for the design. However, the monument was not revealed on the spot until March 2004, two days before the official re-unification of the city (Makaš 2007: 276). The monument is a black marble cube and the sides of it are decorated with Christian Catholic symbolism (Fig.  5.2). Slightly more than half of the people I interviewed about this monument, dislike it. In some cases, it is disliked because of the sheer ugliness of it, at other times it is seen as an outright provocation similar to the Cross on Hum Hill and the Franciscan bell tower which I will return to later. However, sometimes, it seems to be nostalgia for pre-war Mostar that constitutes the main driving force behind the dislike; several people mention that they miss the previous restaurant/ café that was located at the spot. It is not only memorials that can serve as (unwanted) reminders of the war in the city, but also initiatives with the expressed reason to serve as incentives for peace. In particular, two post-war initiatives are especially disliked by the local population. One is the cross on Hum Hill, the so-­ called Jubilee Cross, which is a huge cross overlooking the city built in the

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Fig. 5.2  Monument to the Fallen Croat Defenders in the Homeland War. (Photo: GW)

year 2000 in celebration of 2000 years of Christianity and initiated by the Bishop Ratko Perić. Another one is the 107.2-meter tall reconstructed bell tower for the Franciscan Church of Saints Peter and Paul, initiated by the Franciscan Church after the war and funded through the local Croat community, despite the fact that the previous bell tower was not destroyed during the war. Looming above all other buildings in the city, the new bell tower was built three times taller than the previous tower (Makaš 2007: 260–268; Walasek 2015: 121; Connor 2017: 66). None of these two cases were specifically constructed as memorials of the war, instead they include messages of multiculturalism and were meant to serve as symbols of peace. These messages are still [2020] expressed by the initiators of the monuments. The Franciscan bell tower was recently [2016] opened to the public and there are plans to create an “international peace gallery” next to the “tower of peace”. However, the non-inclusive symbolism employed and the imposing size of these initiatives often serve as signs of deliberate

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provocation towards the Bosniak community (Halilović 2013: 98–103). In regards to the Franciscan church, one individual working at one of the institutions for heritage in Mostar, frustratingly told me: The Franciscan church was destroyed. It was built in the end of nineteenth century, when Austria-Hungary came here, and it was destroyed in the last war. And it wasn’t rebuilt, they built a whole new church that has nothing to do with the past one. (…) That old church, before it was destroyed, was a national monument. And when they built this new one, the same decision is staying for the new church, but it is not the same church that was nominated as a national monument. (…) It is still listed as a national monument and no one wants to deal with it, to say “OK, it is not the same building that we nominated. It has nothing to do with it. It is not old, it is not authentic, it doesn’t have integrity, so let us remove it from the list.” But no one wants to do that, because everyone is going to make it a political thing. “You don’t want a church as a national monument? You don’t want Croats to have a national monument? This is our heritage! Bla bla bla.” I mean, what heritage!?1

Ceremonies at the Cross on Hum Hill sometimes specifically serve to remind people of the war and blame the Bosnian Muslim community for the current situation in the city (Nikolić 2012: 70–73). In addition to this, the fact that snipers from the HVO shot at people in the old city of Mostar from Hum Hill, does not make it easier for people to accept its imposing presence. As an old man selling crafts to tourists in the old city, told me: For me, it [the cross] is like a marker of a space. Like when a dog marks a space by peeing. I don't like this. Before everybody was going to Hum to collect herbs, and now this is a nationalized place which is not OK because Hum belongs to everyone. Young couples were climbing there in order to have privacy. Today only one side is going there, not the other. The churches are ok yeah, but now we have more churches than we had before the war. It is just same situation with churches as with the cross. It is an important symbol. The cross. This cross [on Hum] is for me the symbol of shooting civil people. It was from there that the Croatian soldiers were shooting at all people. We had only two places with water, and all from east Mostar must go to a certain place to bring water. Then, if you go to bring water you must kiss all [your] family, because maybe you don't come back. You die. Because 1  The Franciscan Church is listed as a monument on the provisional list of national monuments, however, “property on the Provisional List shall be regarded as a national monument and shall enjoy the protection prescribed by the Law on the Implementation of Decisions of the Commission to Preserve National Monuments” (Decision about provisional list, http:// old.kons.gov.ba/main.php?id_struct=89&lang=4).

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the sniper was on Hum, this place the cross is now, they shoot every time. Bam. Bam. Bam. If I see the cross … shooting and the cross, they don’t go together.

The interviews conducted show that it is not only Bosnian Muslims that are provoked by these monuments that are created with the intention of being singularly “Croat”, but also Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs. It would therefore be a mistake to understand the attitudes solely alongside ethnical lines. Simply because the physical space is employed by religious and political institutions to manifest clear-cut ethnical identities, does not mean that this ethnic differentiation is accepted by people (see also Palmberger 2012: 24). Rather, these kinds of monuments can and do lead to counter reactions, as illustrated through the example of the overpainted electrical substation presented in the previous chapter, which may be initiated jointly between communities. In contrast to the above-mentioned post-war initiatives which were criticized by a majority of my interviewees, no matter ethnic community, I did not come across a single post-war initiative serving as a memorial of the war that received a positive response from a majority of my interviewees. I also noted that several of my interviewees faced these monuments with a sense of humour and sarcasm within more informal conversation. That is, outside of the more formal environments of recorded interviews in which my interviewees often took on a firmly negative attitude. Sarcasm and humour were, for example, expressed through the cross on Hum Hill by exclaiming that it provided some much-needed shadow to Mostar during the hot summertime. Based on these observations, there was also a certain degree of absurdity in the cross on Hum Hill and in the height of the Franciscan bell tower that could be met with laughter and ridicule. This is similar to what the anthropologist Hariz Halilović noted, in how citizens of Mostar sometimes jokingly state that the cross is a “big plus for Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Halilović 2013: 102). These activities of banalization and trivialization (Macdonald 2009) can be interpreted as a way to resist the messages of ethnocentric division that these monuments or architectural pieces arguably are intended as well as often perceived to convey, and in such a way to distance themselves from them through the use of humour (Jackson 2013: 183; see also Holtorf 2017 and the concept of “ironic heritage” in order to move beyond cultural particularism).

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Practices of Commemoration in Mostar A similar negative attitude, is also expressed for the events of commemoration in the city. As a woman in her late 50s living in the old part of the city told me: These commemorations always make me sad. They make me sad, I don’t like these kind of places because they want us to remember bad things from history and the past.

However, the people interviewed are often not aware that any events of commemoration are happening, and if they do know of such events, the whole process is often regarded as a political charade. As this woman in her early 40s, active in an NGO, told me: GW: Are you joining any practices of commemoration? No, I am not attending. There are no official commemorations occurring. Because they are always organized, you know how the politics is. If you are Serb Orthodox you couldn’t really go to any commemorations. I don’t feel welcome there. I am very clear about my responsibility. I can’t accept this collective guilt. If someone does something, he should be held responsible for it. It is the same about me, my mother, everyone. I can feel sorry, but I will not join. For these war crimes I will not be held responsible. (…) If we can keep political figures out of any official commemoration [I would join] and at the same time have religious leaders all together [including Catholic, Muslim and Orthodox].

A man living in the old city of Mostar told me that he sometimes went to these commemorations. However, he continued with stating that “I do not want to be seen among these people”, clearly indicating what he regarded as a politicized and dishonest use of these events. In her study, the architect Emily Makaš highlights sites within the city with the potential for joint mourning, but which have not been used in such a way. An example is the burial site at Liska Street in the western part of the city. Prior to the removal and reburial of Croat people, this burial site included victims of the war from both the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population. However, instead of employing such a shared space of burials for the sake of joint mourning, the site unfortunately led to a tragic incident of violence. On the day of the Muslim holiday of Bayram in 1997, a group of people from eastern Mostar, led by the then mayor Safet Oručević,

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crossed into western Mostar in order to pay their respect to those buried at Liska Street, as is the custom on Bayram. However, despite being notified in advance of the group, the West Mostar police set up road blocks in order to prevent the group from entering the western part of city. When the group entered the western part of the city despite the road blocks, the West Mostar police started beating them with batons and finally fired shots into the group, killing one man. According to the report of the UN International Police Task Force (IPTF), then stationed in Mostar, the police brutality was unwarranted and unprovoked. Soon after this incident, the Croat individuals buried at Liska Street were removed and reburied. This very tragic example highlights how the authorities, in this case the West Mostar police, did not allow certain spaces to be used for shared mourning. Even though movement and communication between west and east Mostar has improved considerably since 1997, there is still little effort from the authorities to create and support shared spaces (Makaš 2007: 287–292). In terms of commemorations occurring in the city, there are a few events which are not specifically related to any of the ethnic communities. However, as documented by the ethnologists Dragan Nikolić (2012) and Monika Palmberger (2016), participation in these ceremonies often presents a different picture. One of these ceremonies is the commemoration of the destruction of the bridge Stari Most, occurring on 9 November. Following UNESCO’s concept of Stari Most as a symbol of coexistence, this event may be able to gather people from different communities. However, Nikolić noted that only Bosnian Muslims participated in the event. On 9 November 2007, when Nikolić conducted his fieldwork, people (many of them being children from school classes) gathered on the bridge of Stari Most, throwing lilies into Neretva while watching a diver jump from the bridge into the river. The event ended with speeches by veterans from the ARBiH, with political connotations (Nikolić 2012: 82–84). Another event of commemoration occurs on 14 February, to celebrate when Mostar was liberated from the German/Ustaše occupation during WWII. The imperative behind the gathering is to stand behind the Yugoslavian values of brotherhood and unity and to proclaim anti-fascist beliefs, which in principle could attract people from all the different ethnic communities in the city. During the event, buses go from the eastern part of the city to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery (Partizansko Groblje) on the western side. The Partisan Memorial Cemetery (see more in Chap. 6) was built by the architect Bogdan Bogdanović in 1965 as a symbol against

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fascism and includes burial of victims from WWII (Murtić and Barišić 2019). The ceremony, known as Liberation Day, originates from Yugoslavian times, and up until 2019 (see Cateux 2020), it was organized by the association UABNOR (Udruženje Antifašista i boraca Narodno-­ oslobodilačkog rata, Associations of Antifascists and Veterans of the National Liberation War), consisting mostly of elderly people. However, this does not mean that it serves the same kind of purpose for people now, as it did during Yugoslavian times. During her ethnological fieldwork in Mostar, Monika Palmberger demonstrated how this event has Bosnian Muslim connotations. The event mostly gathers people from the Bosnian Muslim population. Furthermore, on its way towards the memorial complex, the bus which collects participants for the ceremony, makes a stop at the Šehitluci, which is a graveyard for Bosnian Muslim victims during the war. In such a way, the event involves commemoration of fallen soldiers from the ARBiH, but not the HVO. By these forms of commemoration, the event makes explicit—and highly exclusionary—links between the anti-fascist struggle during the 40s by the Partisans, with the defence of Mostar by the ARBiH, during the 90s (Palmberger 2016: 146–159; see also Cateux 2020). The event is contested as was clearly illustrated in connection to the ceremony during 14 February 2014, which occurred simultaneously with waves of protests against the Government across Bosnia and Herzegovina, the so-called Bosnian spring (Zwart 2015; Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017). On 14 February 2014, the entrance was set on fire using tires and wood to fuel the flames. The motivation behind this act of vandalism was most likely to stop or frighten those attending the ceremony. It led people to climb over walls in order to enter the memorial complex and participate in the event (A Mostar Radiography 2017; Cateux 2020). On a related side note, the so-called Bosnian spring is a highly significant event. Even though it is beyond the scope to discuss the Bosnian spring in any detail, it is important to highlight that it may be the first case when the (mostly unemployed) youth, as well as others primarily from the poor and the working class community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, explicitly and collectively regardless of their ethnic community employed parts of the socialist “vision” of Yugoslavia to challenge the post-war corrupt government through protests (see Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017 for a detailed analysis). The burning of the entrance to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery on 14 February 2014 was most likely a reaction against the

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socialist views expressed through the protestors in the Bosnian spring, and not part of the movement itself which was fundamentally pro-socialist. Unfortunately, many of my interviewees expressed a sad concern that the Bosnian spring did not result in the concrete changes in politics which were desired, and that the same corrupt politicians and the same system is still in charge. Even though the protests did not lead to any profound political changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it showed that there is large-­ scale will for change and a dissatisfaction in a corrupt system which can be mobilized jointly between ethnic communities. In addition to these events of commemoration, there are also purely national ones (as in Bosnian Muslim or Bosnian Croat) meant to commemorate fallen soldiers during the war, from ARBiH or HVO respectively. These are highly politicized events and are often used to induce feelings of victimhood and suffering. The general impression is therefore that for many people in Mostar, the official memorials and practices of commemoration have little positive meaning in terms of overcoming ethnocentrism, and my interview data suggests that these events are often ignored, disdained or avoided by people in Mostar.

The Ruins in Mostar: Contested Places of Remembrance and Activism The problematic aspect of memorials raises the question of how, where and why should specific memories of the war be materialized. Ruins have come to represent a different form of memorialization of the war in Mostar, and if we accept that heritage is not solely concerned with representing pasts, but also of assembling futures, we need to ask what kind of future claims and visions the ruins assemble, and if these represent futures where people could feel that they belong, in other words: futures that people aspire to live in. Due to the fact that Mostar is still covered with abandoned buildings, ruins and “negated spaces” (see Fig. 5.3), it becomes relevant to ask what kind of role these spaces and buildings play in the city. During a recent international conference (World Archaeology Congress, Kyoto, September 2016), a discussion opened up about whether the famous Ottoman bridge Stari Most should have been reconstructed at all. This discussion was probably inspired by examples such as the Frauenkirche in Dresden, Germany, where the ruin of the church was an important and contested place of remembrance, while the reconstructed church lost

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Fig. 5.3  Ruin in Mostar with graffiti celebrating the football fan club “Red Army 1981” for the team FK Velež Mostar, consisting mostly of Bosniaks. Football is highly politicized in Mostar. (Photo: GW)

some of that significance (Rehberg and Neutzner 2015). In the introduction to The Art of Forgetting, Adrian Forty writes: “The lesson of both the Dresden and the Moscow projects is that the filling of a void, whose emptiness has exercised diverse collective memories, ends by excluding all but a single dominant one” (Forty 1999: 10). Drawing on two cases, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche and the rebuilding of Christ the Saviour church in Moscow, Forty makes a general statement concerning the problem of filling “voids”. However, may there not be cases where there is a danger in not filling a void, depending on the various practices of remembering that this void is employed for and the futures assembled through these practices? Even though there are many aspects of the reconstruction process of Stari Most that deserve to be criticized (Grodach 2002; Calame and Pašić 2009; Walasek 2015: 212–215; Forde 2016; Cateux 2020), the absolute

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vast majority of those I interviewed were happy that the “new” old bridge was reconstructed. People often told me that Mostar would not be Mostar without the bridge. The bridge was even referred to as an important family member or as part of the body of the person, like an arm or a leg. One person reflected that he probably would not survive if it was destroyed again. It seems as if the reconstructed bridge is important since it can help manifest a sense of stability and permanence within the city, primarily through the practices (for instance, diving from it or simply crossing it) occurring on and in relation to it. Many people have romantic recollections of spending time with, or even meeting, their loved one next to the bridge. One unemployed man who was living in Serbia during the war but who has since then returned to Mostar, told me: But when I got to hear it [the destruction of the bridge] I was completely devastated, because for me, it was like one part of me was completely destroyed. Everything in my life happened on the bridge. I told my wife, who was my girlfriend back then that I was going to the army [now]. I was born on the old bridge. I was born in this house, which is very close to the bridge. However, I never jumped from the bridge, but one of my sons is jumping every year. Everything in my life was about the bridge. GW: What do you think about the reconstruction of the old bridge? For every normal person it is great. It has to be great.

The use of the word “normal” is no coincidence (see also Hromadžić 2013 for a discussion of “ordinary” people). A “normal” person loves Mostar, and consequently takes care of the heritage of Mostar. A “normal” person wants Mostar to be a “normal” city again. This “normality” is represented by an imagined pre-war Mostar, undivided and beautiful. In other words, normality is represented by the so-called Spirit of Mostar (see Chap. 4). When interviewing older people about the ruins as a form of memorial, the idea was often met with an incredulous response. For example, an elderly woman, living in the area of the old city of Mostar, told to me: “It is ugly to see them. It reminds me of bad memories of the war. I am also angry at tourists that are coming here to take photos of buildings that are destroyed and of the bullet holes. Why are they taking pictures of something that is so ugly?” For this woman, the ruins are not only unnecessary reminders of a war of which she does not need constant reminders, they are also ugly. The picture of the Mostar she considers as home is one of a

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beautiful city. One hotel owner in his 50s, living in the old city, also seemed to get angry: It is sick to even think that someone leaves buildings in their destroyed state just to remind you of the war. I cannot believe that someone has theories that these buildings are left to remind people. It is a sick theory. How can a human mind be that sick to think of such a theory?

The perspective of ruins as ugly and unnecessary reminders of war, are often contrasted against people’s own personal memories of Mostar as a city that was and should be beautiful. Pre-war Mostar is explained as a “normal” and “beautiful” city, whereas the ruins are seen as a hindrance to achieve the same state of “permanence” that was found before. However, this should not be misinterpreted as suggesting that most people would like the ruins to simply be destroyed and replaced with new buildings, as highlighted by the protests in January 2017 against the destruction of the ruin of an important Austro-Hungarian building built in 1900 by the architect Josip Vancaš (DPUMH 2017). The protests argued for a reconstruction (partially or completely) of the building rather than gradually demolishing it, as has been proposed by Stranka demokratske akcije (SDA, the largest Bosnian Muslim political party).2 This further exemplifies the need to move towards normality expressed by several of the interviewees, a normality which is being represented by the imagined/ remembered beauty of pre-war Mostar. On writing about the role of ruins within heritage management, Caitlin DeSilvey has provided one of the most intriguing perspectives (DeSilvey 2017). In challenging the preservation and conservation paradigm that governs many of the heritage legislations and frameworks, she calls for an increased sensitivity to the stages of decay and ruin which material culture undergoes if it is not constantly maintained. Here, inevitable changes to heritage does not need to be seen as a failure which heritage professionals need to apologize for, but should instead be seen as an opportunity for engaging people in new and different ways with heritage (DeSilvey 2017: 2  Since this occurred in January 2017, there has been plans by the City of Mostar to restore the building, and in the nomination for making Mostar a European Capital of Culture in 2024, it was stated that the restored building would be used as the new space for the Museum of Herzegovina (p.  21  in the unpublished nomination: “Mostar 2x24 Everything is Bridgeable” from 2019). Mostar lost the process to become European Capital of Culture to Bodø in Norway.

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9). Within this kind of approach, ruins can serve a specific role in the way they can signal change and transformation, and thus challenge singular and static perceptions of heritage. However, DeSilvey’s brilliant study does not consider ruins in a post-war environment, in which they may enforce war-time narratives of victimhood and suffering (Moshenska 2015; Rehberg and Neutzner 2015). My interview data among the older generation in Mostar, as presented above, contradicts notions of ruins as signalling change in Mostar. Instead, the ruins mainly serve to represent non-change for this generation, hindering the process of moving forward. However, when switching focus group from the older generation towards the young generation, the situation of the ruins in Mostar becomes more complex, partly due to the generally unruly and chaotic character of ruins, highlighted for example through the works of Gabriel Moshenska (2014, 2015) and the above-mentioned study by DeSilvey (2017). For many young people, some of the ruins have been transformed into places of meeting and gathering. The walls of the ruins are constantly painted with graffiti with messages mostly related to football and politics (from all sides of the political spectrum). Furthermore, artwork is made in them, and political activism is sometimes expressed through them. Some of the ruins even serve as vibrant and future-oriented pieces of heritage, vastly contrasting the picture expressed by older people. The ruin close to Mostar Gymnasium  (Gimnazija Mostar), which was used as a university library before the war, is an example of such appropriation. The entrance to the ruin has been declared a fascistfree zone through graffiti, while the combination of colours painted on the pillars was  deliberately chosen so as to not represent any of the national identities, that is, Bosniak, Croat or Serbian (personal communication 2017) (Fig. 5.4). However, some of the young people interviewed told to me that the ruins are not used for this purpose due to their connection to war and trauma, but first and foremost because they can serve as zones where they can escape the kind of rules of conduct that would be expected in a normal household. This makes these spaces ideal for being transformed into places of youth activism. This is not based on an ignorance of the past; the young people are well aware of the war that caused these buildings to stand in ruin, but rather it can be interpreted as a way for some young people to gain a certain degree of authority over the past. By these forms of youth activism, the narratives of suffering and victimhood that may otherwise be

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Fig. 5.4  Ruin made into a fascist free zone. This is  an Austro-Hungarian house  initially built as the private home of the mayor  of Mostar,  Mujaga Komadina. Spring of 2019. (Photo: Jessica Bustamante)

generated through the ruins are challenged, and more progressive (forward-oriented) values and meanings are highlighted. However, it is also important to keep in mind that this use of ruins may be dangerous and unsafe. When looking at the varied uses of a ruin that was supposed to be a home for elderly in the city of Bihać, Azra Hromadžić notes that young people indeed used the ruin for art and poetry, and they told her that they felt protected and cared for by the building itself. However, Hromadžić highlights the dark irony in young people finding care in such a dangerous place—people died in that very ruin due to falls. According to Hromadžić, this reveals how the post-socialist state has failed to care for the youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Hromadžić 2019; see also Forde 2019: 184). There have been attempts in Mostar to reclaim the ruins from negative wartime associations, perhaps most strongly achieved through Marina Mimoza’s annual Street Arts Festival in Mostar, which is now attracting professional street artists from all over the world. Mimoza said the following concerning what motivated her to start the festival in 2012: “I was

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always inspired by our public space. After 20 years we still have lots of damage and ruins on the street like the war was yesterday. All around us still are ruins. And that in some way inspired me to bring art in our public space” (CGTN 2019). Therefore, during the Street Arts Festival, ruins and abandoned spaces are reclaimed and made beautiful again, through street art which do not necessarily convey political messages in themselves, but which nevertheless constitute a political act of resistance.

Reclaiming Memories The interview data suggests that many of the official memorials and commemoration ceremonies in the city are met with either disdain or neglect. This is primarily caused by the impression that they are political charades institutionalized in order to cement a division between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. As the previous chapter highlighted, such a division stands in opposition to the so-called of Spirit of Mostar, which represents the beauty and permanence of pre-war Mostar, where the informant often feels that he/she belongs and where Mostar is not divided. Instead of dismissing it as nostalgia, it would be more fruitful to engage with it as an active and at times empowering narrative constructed in opposition to the one of ethnic separation. A narrative that is crucial for understanding the role of the heritage in the city. Furthermore, the ruins in the city exemplify what Paul Basu (2013) coined a memoryscape, which signifies the multiplicity of different forms of remembering that takes place in each and every site. The ruins in Mostar are seldom employed distinctly as memorials of the war. One exception being tourists who often take photos of them, within the trend of war-­ tourism belonging to a more broadly defined category of dark-tourism (see Chap. 2). However, my interview data suggests that most people in Mostar do their best not to see the ruins, through the incorporated practice of passing them by without noticing them. A majority of those interviewed would instead like to see all the ruins reconstructed, and this can be interpreted as another reaction to the will to move closer to the beauty of pre-­ war Mostar, and the normality and the values it represents. In other words, the ruins are approached as a hindrance to recreate the Spirit of Mostar. In contrast, the use of these ruins by some young people in the city, employs a different form of memorial practice, which is sometimes distinctly engaging with the ruins through looking towards the future rather than the past, that is, becoming places of looking forward. This kind of

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practice is concerned with denying significance to negative narratives specifically related to these ruins as ruins, where they play a role within narratives of victimhood and suffering, towards more progressive values and meanings. Through this study it becomes clear that the ruins may be employed within different memory-practices depending on which generation the persons belong to, and that these practices involve various negotiations in how specific pasts are made meaningful (or denied relevance) in the present. The presentation of memorials and memorialization in Mostar makes it difficult to maintain any simplistic idea of remembering as inherently positive and forgetting as inherently negative. Rather, it exemplifies the importance in focusing on how, why and by whom certain memories are used and what kind of purpose and role these memories serve in society. The role of the ruins in Mostar underlines that there is a dynamic negotiation taking place determining how the past is made meaningful in the present, and that this negotiation is fluid (in movement) and embodied (experienced and lived). Moving away from the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), towards an Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD), calls for a recognition that changed and altered “memories” can be worth reclaiming as well and that deliberate acts of not remembering a specific enforced version of the past, may be just as empowering as deliberate acts of remembering.

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Wollentz, G., M.  Barišić, and N.  Sammar. 2019. Youth Activism and Dignity in Post-war Mostar, Envisioning a Shared Future Through Heritage.  Space and Polity 23 (2): 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2019.1635443. Zwart, D. 2015. City of Symbols: Reimagining the Public Sphere Through “In-Between” Spaces in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Unpublished Bachelor Thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge.

Internet Sources A Mostar Radiography. 2017. http://amostarradiography.org/alija-bijavica-ormy-tribute-to-the-14th-of-february/. Retrieved 13 Feb 2018. Balkan Insight. 2013. http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/memorialdedicated-to-bosnian-army-members-blown-up. Retrieved 01 Apr 2020. CGTN. 2019. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674d334d444d3445 7a6333566d54/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2TixL8Z1fKmxnXXJamg7DgF-R9_ WBP2nzA3dBkm7wqjMycF-2QdraMymc. Retrieved 01 Apr 2020. Commision to Preserve National Monuments. 2002. http://old.kons.gov.ba/ main.php?id_struct=89&lang=4. Retrieved 12 Oct 2020. DPUMH. 2017. https://dpumh.org/2017/01/16/o-donosenju-odluka-idegradaciji-urbanoga-tkiva-mostara-uz-najavljeno-rusenje-ostataka-robne-kucenama/. Retrieved 01 Apr 2020.

CHAPTER 6

Places of Reclaiming Continuity

The results from Mostar highlight how war, including the destruction of cultural heritage, does not only disrupt old, as well as conjure new, identities and identity relations, it can also fundamentally alter the very landscape in which we carry out our daily tasks, both physically and how it is conceptualized. It can make a place once considered as home, a sign of stability and belonging, into a place of disassociation and instability. Therefore, what is considered home, the place of belonging, may need to be reassembled. Here the heritage can play a fundamental role, both as a stabilizing factor, but also as a destabilizing factor. Gregory Ashworth, Brian Graham and John E. Tunbridge have been writing about how “contemporary society use heritage in the creation and management of collective identities, most especially as expressed through the shaping of senses of belonging defined and transmitted through the representations of place” (Ashworth et  al. 2007: 1). In Mostar there seem to be multiple representations of place, leading to multiple senses of belonging. Among my interview partners, most stated that pre-war Mostar was the place where the informant felt that he/she belonged, whereas post-war Mostar often was actively distanced from through the narratives constructed. The heritage of Mostar can certainly be approached as a specific kind of dissonant heritage in the sense that different interpretations of it can be highly oppositional and may even lead to open conflict. However, all heritage inevitably holds a dissonance which can be used a resource rather than a hindrance in how the past is negotiated as heritage, possibly © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_6

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opening up a space for multiplicity, complexity and ultimately reconciliation. Nevertheless, despite the positive aspects of dissonance, the lack of an overall consensus or agreement concerning the war makes the heritage of Mostar particularly difficult to manage. In the context of the Nazi Rally Grounds of Nürnberg in Germany, Sharon Macdonald has been arguing for the need for difficult heritage to be “permanently unsettling” (Macdonald 2009: 192), in order to constantly prompt reflection and social critique. It is the very multi-layered aspects of difficult heritage that makes it a suitable arena for such engagements. The Nazi Rally Grounds, forms a palimpsest, where different time-periods are simultaneously present, which challenges the visitor in profound ways (Macdonald 2009: 191; see also a related discussion concerning the multi-layered history of the Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Pollock and Bernbeck 2015). Macdonald is arguing for the relevance of this realization for other cases of difficult heritage. However, two crucial aspects of the heritage of Mostar make it a different kind of difficult heritage than Nürnberg. The first aspect is of temporal character. While it has been more than 70 years since the end of WWII, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is only approximately 25 years in the past. The second aspect concerns the specific post-war environment. In Bosnia and Herzegovina there is no consensus concerning what or who caused the war, that is, there is no master narrative, and depending on which ethnic group you belong to and consequently which school you will most likely attend, you will hear different stories and perspectives.1 The same is not true in Germany, since there is a larger agreement (more so today than before the Berlin wall came down) concerning the causes and development of WWII serving as a master narrative. The results of my interviews in Mostar point to the unsettling character of difficult heritage. In fact, it can be argued that the heritage of Mostar is permanently unsettling for many of the people interviewed. The sociologist Giulia Carabelli phrases the general situation of Mostar in the following way: “The resolution of the Yugoslav-emergency did end the conflict and its related atrocities, but it also normalised an understanding of citizenship as an ethno-national matter, which maintains the country on the constant verge (and permanent status) of political crisis” (Carabelli 2013: 50). As argued by Carabelli, this in turn prompts immobility and 1  See especially Hromadžić (2015) for a revealing study of the youth in Mostar Gymnasium (Gimnazija Mostar), the first integrated school of Bosnia and Herzegovina in post-war times, i.e. the first school including both Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.

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stasis, actively producing and maintaining stillness and inactivity among the citizens of Mostar (Carabelli 2013: 52–54). As my results showed, the heritage plays a role in this process through how individuals temporally position themselves. This permanent unsettlement does prompt reflection and social critique. After all, my interview partners were repeatedly drawing upon the heritage to engage in criticizing the current political situation. Furthermore, as brilliantly pinpointed by Carabelli, the refusal to be affected is also a political act of resistance, a “preventive action that obstructs the logics of the divided city and allow for fluidity and border crossing to exist alongside nationalist narratives, symbols, and practices” (Carabelli 2018: 111). Seen in this light, immobility is far from apolitical. Due to the recurrent misuse of the heritage to further enforce ethnical division and the violent break with the recent past, a sense of belonging is cut off for many of my interviewees. This permanent unsettlement is a result of the discrepancy between the Mostar people long for and would feel a sense of belonging within, and the Mostar people experience as their current home. As often expressed to me, the city my interview partners live in is constantly reminding them of what has been lost. As this elderly woman living in the old town explained to me, while speaking about the ruins of the city: We are telling the same story all the time. It is a kind of refreshing memory all the time. But I don’t think it is good for young people to everyday watch these kind of things on the streets. I would like to reconstruct everything.

With “we”, she is most likely referring broadly to the people living in Mostar (who are perceived as not moving forward), and more specifically on politicians using the heritage within their own personal agenda. In general, the people interviewed are tired of constant reminders of the war, be it in the form of ruins or commemorations. As already outlined, this leads to the construction of bottom-up narratives of home pertaining to a different time-period. Within an environment where there are top-down attempts of erasing continuity with the recent past, one forward-oriented engagement with the heritage is ironically one that stresses continuity with the past and uses nostalgia as a basis for action and for envisioning different futures (see also Boym 2001; Petrović 2007; Palmberger 2008; Smith and Campbell 2017). In contrast to aspects of continuity with pre-war Mostar, reminders of the war (e.g. in the forms of specific memorials commemorating the

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victims or the ruins of destroyed buildings) are present all over the city. In other words, one of the main aspects which makes the heritage of Mostar difficult for people, is the negation of continuity, hindering the process of achieving a sense of belonging within the city. In this final chapter on Mostar, I will therefore discuss the role of continuity and discontinuity through the heritage of Mostar. However, before such an undertaking, I will present theories by Maurice Halbwachs and Paul Connerton that link stable/unstable spatial environments with aspects of remembering/forgetting, in order to theoretically approach the issue.

The Spatiality of Continuity (…) it is the spatial image alone that, by reason of its stability, gives us an illusion of not having changed through time and of retrieving the past in the present. But that's how memory is defined. Space alone is stable enough to endure without growing old or losing any of its parts. (Halbwachs 1980: 156)

The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (see also Chap. 3) perceptively recognized the significance in space for locating, defining and giving direction to memories. The implication is that each memory has to be located within a spatial framework. Furthermore, it is this spatial framework that gives memories the perception of endurance. As expressed by Halbwachs: “Now space is a reality that endures: since our impressions rush by, one after another, and leave nothing behind in the mind, we can understand how we recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings” (Halbwachs 1980: 139–140). Significantly, the spatial framework of memory is very much connected to specific ways of “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger 1996). This way of being, is tied to the traces left of previous generations’ ways of being in the world, what Tim Ingold coined “dwelling” (Ingold 2000). The spatiality of memory is embodied, lived and experienced which is the very feature which makes it meaningful and helps to re-create and re-­ direct the memory. It may be of no surprise that Paul Connerton (Connerton 2009), building on the work of Francis Yates (1966), has found that modernity fundamentally affects the way we remember. Due to the increased spatial reworking occurring in modernity, especially in cities, spatial change is constant. Connerton even goes so far as to say that these processes, are

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part of what has eroded the foundations of sharing and building memories in modern societies.2 However, Connerton adds the important insight that place is never a fixed entity, but always a social process in transformation (Connerton 2009: 51). Place can imbue memories with the illusion of endurance and permanence, but place itself is never static. Just as memories are open to constant change, so is the conception of place. However, Connerton argues that a stable spatial environment may form a crucial part in the process of locating memories as well as directing them, and consequently, an unstable spatial environment may have impact upon the way memories are being formed (Connerton 2009). Importantly, this negotiation is certainly neither self-evident nor straightforward, and no immediate correlation can be drawn between forgetting on the one hand and the destruction of heritage on the other hand. On the contrary, destruction of heritage is simultaneously creating memories (see Holtorf 2015). Nevertheless, according to Connerton, the short life-spans of urban architecture within modern cities especially affects the long-term memory (Connerton 2009: 5). It follows that spatial frameworks are never singular, but multiple. Different spatial frameworks may overlap within the same city, similar to how pre-war Mostar and post-war Mostar are superimposed on each other. In this particular case, without serving as the same spatial framework, one is often applied to understand and approach the other. However, even within a rapidly changing spatial environment, or as is the case of Mostar, a city experiencing widespread destruction and reconstruction of its heritage, certain features may serve as “constants”, defined as features re-affirming a sense of place and time through the tracing of continuity. These particular features become crucial for individuals in spatially and temporally (re-)positioning themselves and their memories. With this, I do not claim that something defined as a “constant” is an actual feature of any landscape, as stated above, landscapes are open to continuous transformation, both by natural features such as the wind or the rain, as well as by human actions, such as the building of houses (DeSilvey 2017: 30). “Constants” are part of what Henri Lefebvre would call lived space (Lefebvre 1991: 362), which is the subjective space based on individual experiences of living within a landscape. It is an experience highly based on emotional and personal engagements with the 2  Together with consumerism being disconnected from the labor process and the way social relationships are less clearly defined.

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surrounding landscape. However, this does not mean that such perceptions cannot be shared with other people with similar experiences within the same environment. I recognize that the concept of “constants” may seem to be a contradictory argument within the theoretical branch which I am building upon. After all, the idea of inherent “eternal” values residing within the physicality of the heritage was one of the founding principles behind the development of the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) during the nineteenth century, and prevailed in heritage legislations such as the Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites from 1964. As outlined in Chap. 2, my aim is to move away from the AHD towards an Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD). It is therefore necessary to underline that I do not approach “constants” as inherent and residing within physical sites. On the contrary, “constants” are culturally and socially produced, negotiated and altered. Therefore, “constants” are also in (constant) movement. However, within a post-war context they may serve a particular need (see, e.g., Hadžimuhamedović 2008 for a similar argument). The widespread destruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as that of Stari Most, was not only challenging the idea of co-existence, but also that of the supposed “continuity” of the physical heritage itself. The reaction to such a challenge was evocatively phrased by the Slovenian journalist Slavenka Drakulić in her piece for “The New Republic”, published on 13 December 1993, in response to the destruction of Stari Most: We expect people to die; we count on our own lives to end. The destruction of a monument to civilization is something else. The bridge in all its beauty and grace was built to outlive us; it was an attempt to grasp eternity. It transcends our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us – but the bridge is all of us forever. (Drakulić 1993)

Here, we can note how the “inscribing” practice of encapsulating eternity within the built bridge, of building the bridge to outlive individual human lives and project it towards an indefinite future, served a purpose to make the bridge a symbol going beyond individual life destinies in Mostar, to make it a “constant” within the lived space of the city. Consequently, the destruction of the bridge shook the citizens in profound ways, affecting both spatial and social frameworks. In such a way, the practice of (re)locating “constants” within the spatial framework of

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memory becomes especially important within a post-war context, in which the perceived stability of the spatial framework has been challenged and may need to be reassembled.

Constants in Mostar Most people I interviewed had to struggle to find aspects from pre-war Mostar that were still present in post-war Mostar. Occasionally people were not able to find a single aspect. This does not mean that there are no such things that can be defined as “constants” in Mostar, but it indicates that such features may often not be already conceptualized for people, but serving a function sub-consciously, through incorporated practices. However, occasionally there were exceptions. As this woman in her 50s, working at the University of Mostar, told me: GW: Is there anything left of old Mostar in this Mostar? A little. A little. Some physical things stayed. They are the same. GW: Some buildings? Not buildings. The hills, the river, the sky, the light. Those things are more used to identification of Mostar. The light, the river, the blue sky. Physical heritage? In a way it is still here. In a way. But I am very aware that this is not the Old Bridge [we are sitting next to Stari Most]. I know that it is an old bridge built in 2004. GW: It is not the same? No. It has a new meaning. Extra meaning, due to its destruction and its reconstruction, and all of those things. In non-material way, also a lot of things have changed. GW: I guess the people too? People. Way of living. Way of perceiving things. GW: What is the biggest difference in the way of perceiving things? Knowledge about how to live together.

Significantly, this interview took place while we were having a coffee next to Stari Most, with the sound and the view of the river Neretva flowing past us, including a clear sight of divers jumping into Nereteva from the bridge, adhering to the Ottoman tradition. The physicality of this experience may be crucial in understanding why these “constants” in the landscape were expressed to me during this particular interview, possibly showcasing the power in place while conducting interviews. The interview is significant because it highlights the break in continuity that the war

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caused, and how this break is further enforced through the heritage and through something defined as a “way of living”. However, within this negation of continuity, there are still aspects that serve as “constants”. In this case, “the hills, the river, the sky, the light” are mentioned. These are aspects of the landscape which are here perceived as “un-changing”, and can thus serve to re-produce a sense of continuity with the past, of stability and of permanence. A similar occurrence was noted by Torsten Kolind, in his ethnographic study in the city of Stolac, approximately 40 km south of Mostar, where the river Bregava serves a role comparable to that of the river Neretva (Kolind 2008: 163). This may be because natural features, like rivers and mountains, are perceived to be more stable than built features like houses or bridges. This is especially true within a city recently experiencing such widespread destruction of the physical heritage. Furthermore, animals are on occasion singled out as important in finding continuity. For example, on the question of when normal life started again after the war, one man in his 40s, living in the old city of Mostar, told me: When I heard the bird for the first time after the war. There were no birds during the war. Then we were having coffee and I heard a bird. For me it was like someone giving me ten million Euro. We were so happy! I have never heard it in this way. It was a completely new experience. We all had to cry. Even then we were feeling happy, because everything was behind us and we had survived.

Hearing the bird for the first time after the war was a shared experience causing everyone in the group to cry. Furthermore, it was a “completely new experience”—they had never heard it in that way before. Here, the sound of a bird signalled change and it was in such a way a transformative experience re-affirming a sense of continuity to how life was before the war. However, this should not be interpreted as an argument that the dichotomy between culture as changing and nature as unchanging is possible to make, nor a valid assertion. After all, the culture-nature divide is a Western distinction born through modernity (Latour 1993). However, in contrast to the sometimes perceived unchanging aspects of the river or the mountains, the built environment is often seen as fragile in Mostar, most likely connected to personal memories of ruined buildings from the recent war. Even though people tell me that the reconstruction of Stari Most is very important for the city, especially through the practices occurring on

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it (see also Connor 2015), they are still aware that it is not the same bridge. Instead, aspects like the specific humour of people in Mostar are mentioned as remaining, or certain friends of the interviewees with whom they can still share coffee. As this elderly woman living in the old city told me: GW: Is anything left of the old Mostar? There is a typical Mostarian spirit that is still here: Mostarske Liske. To make jokes and invent stories. It is a traditional irony and people here are always ready to make jokes and laugh. Even people without jobs and without hope, are still ready to make jokes and be somehow happy, in all kind of situations. That is the actual Mostar spirit that still exists and that you can notice.

Note here how this aspect gets tied to the issue of the Spirit of Mostar. Furthermore, one old man connected the question to himself: GW: Do you think anything of old Mostar is left today? Where did you find that question? [Laughter]. I am one of the people who are left. Many people died. Not many things stayed from old Mostar. Very, very few things. And people are also dying. We are losing even these people of old Mostar.

This man sees himself as one of the remaining aspects of old Mostar. These quotes highlight the important insight that perceived “constants” can never be singled out and isolated from the overall social and cultural context. What I mean by this is that the river Neretva is often crucial for re-affirming a sense of place and time for people in Mostar, but only through the possibility of having a coffee next to it together with friends, chit-chatting and joking. In other words, these “constants” become meaningful through incorporated practices which are social, connected to a “way of being”, a particular way of dwelling within a landscape (Ingold 2000). Within this process, these practices belong to the production of locality within Mostar (Appadurai 1996), which means that it is a process that has to be regarded as specific to the spatial framework of the city. Therefore, it would be very difficult to imagine that the river Neretva would serve a function as a “constant”, if there were no people left to share the experience of engaging with the physicality of the river, be it through crossing the river, diving into the river from Stari Most (or more likely:

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watching someone else do it), or simply having a coffee next to it together with friends. In such a way, “constants” are socially produced and maintained, as well as inevitably transformed, through incorporated practices. Indeed, not even “constants” are always perceived to be escaping change, as this woman in her late 20s told me: GW: Are there any sites that makes you feel sad or upset? (…) when you look at Neretva there is always the garbage. My parents live near Neretva, you can actually hear the water very close, and we take out our dog and if he takes a bath in the river he stinks afterwards. It is not clean you know. The river is not clean anymore. GW: Was it better before you think? I think it was better. They say Mostar was one of the cleanest towns in Bosnia. Before the war. GW: Why do you think this is happening then? I don’t know. It is probably because we take too much care of the other stuff. Like having a big cross and it is not important to give money for cleaning the town. It is more important to provoke.

Here, the neglect of maintaining Neretva clean is linked to questions of how the heritage has been misused, and how much more beautiful pre-­ war Mostar was in contrast to post-war Mostar. One could even say that the river in this case, serves as a mirror reflecting the current state of the city. Clearly, also “constants” are limited in their ability to re-affirm a sense of place and time. This is of no surprise since their imagined endurance, stability and permanence, are part of the lived (subjective) space (Lefebvre 1991: 362) and do not form an actual feature of a landscape. After all, no feature of the landscape escapes change. Fittingly, it has been argued that heritage may in fact contribute to increased social resilience by making people embrace and accept the unavoidability of change (Holtorf 2018).

The Partisan Memorial Cemetery When discussing the question of continuity/discontinuity in Mostar, the Partisan Memorial Cemetery (Figs. 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3) seems to be the one site that the citizens of Mostar will most often critically mention. The Partisan Memorial Cemetery was designed by the architect and former mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanović, and finished in 1965. The monument was imagined as the “city of the dead” overlooking “the city of the living” (i.e. Mostar). In line with Bogdanović’s other work, it is a highly

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Fig. 6.1  The Partisan Memorial Cemetery. Photo taken in the spring of 2019, 1 year after its 2018 restoration. (Photo: Jessica Bustamante)

abstract and mystical architectural piece without any clear political symbols or messages. In addition to interviewing people about the monument within this research project, I was also participating in a project focusing solely on the current role of the monument within the city (Barišić et al. 2017). As already mentioned, the Partisan Memorial Cemetery includes burials from WWII (for more information see: Lawler 2013: 42–69; Murtić and Barišić 2019; Cateux 2020). Despite it having the official status as a national monument, the memorial is highly neglected. While socialist monuments in former Yugoslavia are increasingly gaining international attention (see, e.g., the 2018–2019 exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia” at the Museum of Modern Art: MOMA 2018), this has not led to them being cared for by the responsible institutions. The nature is unkempt and wild within the Partisan Memorial Cemetery, and in 2015 and 2016 there was widespread graffiti covering the walls, often displaying fascist messages (Fig. 6.4). The common interpretation among the people I interviewed, is that the current neglect is due to its

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Fig. 6.2  The monument from a distance. Photo taken in the spring of 2019, 1 year after its 2018 restoration. (Photo: GW)

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Fig. 6.3  A man walking in the Partisan Memorial Cemetery. (Photo: GW)

connection to Yugoslavian times in general and socialism in particular. As expressed to me by this woman in her mid-50s: GW: What do you think about the Partisan Memorial Cemetery? Horrible. It was a beautiful historical monument where I liked to spend my time. It is horrible, what is happening. It shows the situation in the town, about the ruling party. GW: A certain neglect, you mean? I can only explain the situation in the way that the political party ruling today want to have a system where they create everything from the beginning, like there is nothing before them. That is the only way I can explain it.

In this interview, the belief that there is a top-down attempt of breaking continuity with the past is clearly expressed. This is representing a largely accepted viewpoint among my interview partners. In many interviews, the Partisan Memorial Cemetery serves as a symbol representing how the current politicians ruling today, especially among the largest Croatian

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Fig. 6.4  A fascist “Ustaše” sign at the entrance to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery. Spring 2015. (Photo: GW)

political party Hrvatska demokratska zajednica (HDZ), aim to erase the links to the recent past, in other words: the Yugoslavian times.3 As one person professionally working with the heritage in the city told me, with a sad voice: No one wants to deal with [the Partisan Memorial Cemetery] because it is not politically attractive. We have two national politics here in Mostar, Croatian and Bosnian [Bosniak] national politics, and they don’t want to deal with the Yugoslavian heritage, the Partisan heritage. Croats, because of 3  I am mentioning specifically Yugoslavian times since there are plenty of attempts of drawing links further back in time, especially to important figures from the Medieval times, for example a statue of the mediaeval queen Catherine of Bosnia, Katarina Kosača, is located outside of the Croatian cultural centre Stjepana Kosače, at the Rondo square. However, this is not isolated to the Bosnian Croats, but all the major ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina are attempting to draw specific links to the medieval times, often with highly political implications (see Kisić 2016).

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how they think of history, and Bosnians [Bosniak] because they want to build some new narratives of their nation which is also not including Partisan. (…) No one wants to deal with it.

However, restoration work was carried out on the monument in the spring of 2018, and it was inaugurated as restored on the Victory Day and the Day of Europe (9 May 2018). The restoration work was initiated by the “Center for Peace and Multiethnic Cooperation”, backed by the former mayor of Mostar, Safet Oručević. Nevertheless, this restoration project is contested especially due to attempts of downplaying its socialist history through the use of European Union symbols a well as through the lack of proper material used in the restoration work (Cateux 2020). Furthermore, this example signifies how taking “care” of the Partisan Memorial Cemetery has to be an on-going and continuous process (Wollentz et al. 2020) and not the result of one initiative. According to one person I interviewed in 2020, who is professionally working with the heritage in Mostar, the monument is now in a worse condition than ever before. It is yet again sprayed with graffiti, littered with waste (Fig. 6.5), and the graves have been vandalized. As expressed to me: “We have a rapid decay of a national monument in the center of the city”. A majority of the people interviewed found the original monument beautiful, and even younger people who did not experience it during Yugoslavian times explained to me how they had seen photos of the beauty of it. In contrast to the pre-war beauty of the monument, the current status of it makes most people saddened, angry or even disgusted, and they sometimes find it a disgrace or a shame to the city. Many people today are afraid of going there, because of the people hanging out there and because of what other people might think of them if they were seen there (Mačkić 2016). Most people wish that it was taken care of properly so that they can take walks in it again and experience its beauty as they believe it is supposed to be experienced. What makes the Partisan Memorial Cemetery especially interesting for this argument, is that it is the monument that has come to most clearly represent the break of continuity with the past for people in Mostar. In such a way, it is often employed to discuss an issue that goes beyond the monument itself, serving as a symbol for a widespread phenomenon. A second important aspect is that the neglect is caused by a disassociation of socialist values present among the current political parties (Lawler 2013: 42–69), and possibly also connected to a lack of attention from Western

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Fig. 6.5  The entrance to the Partisan Memorial Cemetery was used for waste disposal in the spring of 2019. (Photo: GW)

organizations. However, the role and meaning of the monument is fundamentally different today than it was in 1965. For the people I interviewed in Mostar, it often serves as a symbol for a current (nationalist) political agenda. Importantly, people mentioned that it represented a fight against evil or more specifically a fight against fascism, with the implication that the fight is continuing up until today, as illustrated by the neglect of the monument. Furthermore, people were explaining to me the previous beauty of the monument and the fantastic nature within it. Even people who stated that they disliked communism still expressed a love for the monument. As this man in his 70s selling crafts to tourists in the old city told me:

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GW: What do you think about the state of the Partisan Memorial Cemetery today? This is one of these monuments that makes me doubt that fascism is still not dead. The way it is treated. The graffiti that is being put there in symbolism of Nazism. The monument was built to glorify antifascism, it was built for those who gave their lives for antifascism, but now it is being abused again with fascist symbols. Ok, maybe I am not for communism. Maybe it was not that bad it fell as well, but does it have to mean that we have to go back to fascism? We already abandoned fascism. Is there any third alternative?

The break of continuity with the past has physical representations in the city, with the Partisan Memorial Cemetery being the most significant one. Within this role, it serves a function within the spatial frameworks of memory in Mostar, physically locating a break with the past and the lack of continuity that follows such a break. In such a way, the widespread desire to see the monument taken care of also signifies a widespread desire of finding continuity with the socialist past within Mostar. The Partisan Memorial Cemetery ties to the above-mentioned employment of the socialist past as a form of reflective nostalgia (Boym 2001) in which a selective past is used in order to envision a different future. Therefore, it is important to not disconnect the monument from its socialist history since it would then lose its significance as a monument of reflective nostalgia. Furthermore, such an attempt would be regarded as politically motivated in order to create a more safe or neutral past, due to the uncomfortable role of the socialist past within both the nationalist agenda of the political elite and the liberal values of the European Union (see Rexhepi 2018). Therefore, a progressive way forward for the Partisan Memorial Cemetery demands a recognition of its socialist past in order not to silence its inherent dissonance (see Cateux 2020). As argued by Britt Baillie in an excellent analysis of the Dudik Memorial Complex in Vukovar, Croatia, also created by the architect Bogdanović: “Socialist Yugoslavian memorials have become repositories of a kind of collective cultural unconscious comprising all of the surviving products of a society’s past that have become obsolete or marginalised. As a reminder of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, Dudik and other Yugoslav-era memorials offer a counter hegemonic vision of the past and future for those who do not identify with the ethno-­ nationalism that underpins the post-Yugoslav nations” (Baillie 2019: 216).

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Concluding Thoughts The possibility of finding future perspectives within a post-war environment, is also highly connected to questions going beyond the heritage, such as employment possibilities, but the heritage can play a role. If the heritage could be employed in activities envisioning futures where a sense of home and belonging can be found, for example, through opening up a discussion concerning which future people long for and how that future can be realized and actively shaped through present-day activities, there may be increased chances of the construction of narratives moving beyond ethnocentrism and division. After all, my interview data indicate that constant reminders of the war seem to feed narratives of victimization, and perhaps, in order to move beyond such crippling narratives, an alternative future may need to be imagined. Therefore, what is really needed is the presence of spaces in which the future of Mostar can be visualized and debated, in order to be actively realized. Here, the heritage can and should be used as a resource. Accordingly, the anthropologist Giulia Carabelli has called for the necessity to provide spaces in Mostar in which a “discussion about the past, the present and the future of the city could be fostered”, because “what is really missing [in Mostar] is a strategy to enable citizens to critically re-­ think the recent and past history in order to plan the future” (Carabelli 2016: 121). In contrast to this, the permanent unsettlement characterizing the situation of the heritage in Mostar for many of the local population, seems to be leading to a stand-still, a state of passivity and immobility (see also Carabelli 2013). Luckily, as I have tried to illustrate through examples primarily initiated by the youth of Mostar, that is, the overpainting of the electrical substation presented in Chap. 4, and the appropriation of the ruin into a fascist free zone presented in the previous chapter, there is certainly hope for change in Mostar, and such a stand-still is repeatedly challenged for more forward-oriented and inclusive engagements with heritage. These initiatives are serving as incentives for widespread discussions on the possible future of Mostar and for envisioning an alternative future of belonging that goes beyond ethnicity. Furthermore, as mentioned, there are also spaces where young people can meet and interact regardless of their ethnic community, most significantly in the Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević. However, the more forward-oriented initiatives are still those occurring outside of the commitments to heritage initiated by the heritage institutions present in the city.

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It is not desirable for the heritage to be harmless and to neglect questions that challenge the way people think and act. Heritage needs its dissonance to be visible, and not silenced, in order for heritage to serve as an incentive towards social critique and reflection. Currently, it is the tracing of continuity with socialist Mostar that serves the most challenging and forward-oriented feature of the heritage in Mostar, since it is continuity with the recent past that the ruling political parties are actively denying through silencing it within the public space of the city. Perhaps ironically, a movement forward can possibly be found by locating continuity. My interviews indicate that the Partisan Memorial Cemetery is one heritage site in the city with potential to find a role within a process of reclaiming continuity, because it has become a negative space in the city, a “speaking” silence (Trouillot 1995) within the spatial framework of the city. And its voice is loud, angry and connects to the anti-nationalist struggle in present-day Mostar, that is, the monument is not neutral but filled with ideology (see Kirn and Burghardt 2014). The Partisan Memorial Cemetery does not only hold the potential to serve a function in providing much-needed links between the socialist past and the present post-socialist Mostar, but also, possibly, in providing a space through which an alternative future of Mostar can be debated, planned and prepared for.

Bibliography Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ashworth, G.J., B. Graham, and J.E. Tunbridge. 2007. Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies. London: Pluto Press. Baillie, B. 2019. The Dudik Memorial Complex: Commemoration and Changing Regimes in the Contested City of Vukovar. In Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict: From History to Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, ed. M.L.S. Sørensen, D. Viejo-Rose, and P. Filippucci, 183–227. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Barišić, M., A.  Murtić, and A.  Burzić, eds. 2017. Mostarska Hurqualya (Ne) Zaboravljeni grad. Bihać: Grafičar. Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Carabelli, G. 2013. Living (Critically) in the Present: Youth Activism in Mostar (Bosnia Herzegovina). Journal on European Perspectives of the Western Balkans. Special Issue: Young Generation 5 (1 (8)): 48–63. ———. 2016. Rubbers, Pens and Crayons. Rebuilding Mostar Though Art Interventions. In Politics of Identity in Post-Conflict States: The Bosnian and

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Irish Experience, ed. Ó. Ciardha and G.  Vojvoda, 116–127. New  York: Routledge. ———. 2018. The Divided City and the Grassroots. The (un)making of Ethnic Divisions in Mostar. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Cateux, A. 2020. European Union Guidelines to Reconiliation in Mostar: How to Remember? What to Forget? In Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans, ed. A. Milosevic and T. Trost. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Connerton, P. 2009. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, A. 2015. Heritage in an Expanded Field: Reconstructing Bridge-ness in Mostar. In The Blackwell Companion to the New Heritage Studies, ed. W. Logan, M.N. Craith, and U. Kockel, 254–267. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. DeSilvey, C. 2017. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Drakulić, S. 1993. Falling Down: A Mostar Bridge elegy. The New Republic. 13 December 1993, 14–15. Hadžimuhamedović, A. 2008. The Meaning of Homeland: Heritage and Uprootedness. Forum Bosnae 44 (08): 328–346. Halbwachs, M. 1980. The Collective Memory. New  York: Harper & Row. [First Edition Published in 1950]. Heidegger, M. 1996. Being and Time. Albany, State: University of New  York Press. [First Edition Published in 1953]. Holtorf, C. 2015. Averting Loss Aversion in Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (4): 405–421. ———. 2018. Embracing Change: How Cultural Resilience Is Increased Through Cultural Heritage. World Archaeology 50 (4): 639–650. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00438243.2018.1510340. Hromadžić, A. 2015. Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Kirn, G., and R.  Burghardt. 2014. Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials: Between Memorial Genre, Revolutionary Aesthetics and Ideological Recuperation. Manifesta Journal 16. https://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/ regret-and-other-back-pages#page-issuesregretandotherbackpagesyugoslavianpartisanmemorialsbetweenmemorialgenre Kisić, V. 2016. Governing Heritage Dissonance: Promises and Realities of Selected Cultural Policies. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation. Kolind, T. 2008. Post-war Identification: Everyday Muslim Counterdiscourse in Bosnia Herzegovina. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Lawler, A. 2013. The Partisans’ Cemetery in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina: Implications of the Deterioration of a Monument and Site. Unpublished Master Thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. [First Published in 1974]. Macdonald, S. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Abingdon: Routledge. Mačkić, A. 2016. Mortal Cities. Forgotten Monuments. Zürich: Park Books. Murtić, A., and M. Barišić. 2019. Unruly Monument: Subverting the Topography of the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar. Paragrana 28 (1): 80–100. Palmberger, M. 2008. Nostalgia Matters: Nostalgia for Yugoslavia as Potential Vision for a Better Future. SOCIOLOGIJA 50 (4): 355–370. https://doi. org/10.2298/SOC0804355P. Petrović, T. 2007. The Territory of the Former Yugoslavia in the “Mental Maps” of Former Yugoslavs: Nostalgia for Space. Sprawy Narodowościowe 31: 263–273. Pollock, S., and R. Bernbeck. 2015. A Gate to a Darker World: Excavating at the Tempelhof Airport. In Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence, ed. G. Moshenska and A. González-Ruibal, 137–165. New York: Springer. Rexhepi, P. 2018. The Politics of Postcolonial Erasure in Sarajevo. Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1369801X.2018.1487320. (Online First). Smith, L., and G. Campbell. 2017. ‘Nostalgia for the Future’: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (7): 612–627. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1321034. Trouillot, M.R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Wollentz, G., S. May, C. Holtorf, and A. Högberg. 2020. Toxic Heritage: Uncertain and Unsafe. In Heritage Futures. Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices, ed. R. Harrison, J. Morgan, S. Penrose, C. DeSilvey, C. Holtorf, S. Macdonald, N. Bartolini, E. Breithoff, H. Fredheim, A. Lyons, and S. May, 294–312. London: UCL Press. Yates, F. 1966. The Art of Memory. London/New York: Routledge.

Internet Sources MOMA. 2018. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3931. Retrieved 02 Apr 2020.

PART III

Gazimestan Difficult Heritage or Harmless History?: Examining the Temporalities of a Medieval Battle If I go there, I will die. GW: You will die? Only, just when I remember the fear that it causes me, I will die. So I will never dare to go there. Unemployed man in his 40s, living in Obilić/Obiliq. Yes, I don’t know where you come from, but probably where you come from too, there are a few statues and some objects that are built for someone, but you just go by them because they are kind of forgotten. That is the case here [with Gazimestan]. Woman in her mid-30s, working in the Cultural Department of Obilić/ Obiliq municipality.

CHAPTER 7

The Burden of the Past

One of the most prevailing questions surrounding the physical heritage connected to incidents of violence concerns whether it constitutes heritage at all. Therefore, there may be a constant negotiation determining the status of a site as heritage or not, which informs attitudes and everyday activities. Fundamentally, the assumed and sometimes actively produced temporalities of the heritage is being employed in such a process. By studying the narrations constructed around the Gazimestan monument on the field of Kosovo (Figs. 7.1, 7.2), built in memory of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Field between the Serbian Prince Lazar and the Ottoman Sultan Murad I,1 this part will focus on how temporal proximity and distance can be actively produced as well as challenged in order to handle a site of difficult heritage, within a process I coin temporally positioning heritage. By using the active verb “positioning”, I refer to it as an on-going strategy. Thus, focus will be placed upon the agentive power which resides, not in the physical heritage itself, but within the individuals who make the heritage meaningful, or through the very acts of denying its meaning and relevance.

1  Even though the name “Kosovo Polje” is more commonly used to denote the battle (Polje being Serbian for field), I choose to use the English word “field” instead, due to the need of a more neutral name while also acknowledging the Kosovo Albanian name, Fushë Kosova.

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_7

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Fig. 7.1  Map is made by Jessica Bustamante. Photos used are taken by GW. Map service by Google.

In my study of the Gazimestan monument, I will approach the following questions: Which different temporalities are being employed in order to make a medieval battle continuously relevant (or not), and how do they affect the role of the heritage? What kind of strategies are involved in coping with a site of difficult heritage in order to achieve a sense of belonging in a place? How do these strategies operate and in what way do they engage with the physical heritage? In the first chapter a general overview of previous research will be presented, outlining the problematic tendency of essentializing violence as inherent within the landscape and heritage of Kosovo Field, drawing on the influential work of Maria Todorova (1997). Furthermore, my own method and approach will be outlined. Afterwards, the perspective of the

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Fig. 7.2  The Gazimestan monument. (Photo: GW)

heritage professionals interviewed will be presented, where I will outline how they refer to the monument. In the second chapter, I will study how the Gazimestan monument is temporally positioned within the narratives constructed. In the third chapter, I will focus on the practices occurring at the Gazimestan monument today, and what kind of strategies that can be found in dealing, or not dealing, with the site as heritage.

The Burden of the Past Before presenting the results from the interviews, it is necessary to provide a background to how the heritage of Kosovo and the Gazimestan monument in particular, have been approached in previous research. Since it is impossible within this study to cover all research in detail, a focus will be on what kind of role the landscape has been given in previous research when understanding the heritage of the Battle of Kosovo Field. It is important to note that this will not be a historiography of the medieval

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battle, that is, concerning what really occurred (or did not occur) in the actual battle or which historical sources are most reliable. There is plenty of other research focusing on this issue, from various perspectives (Emmert 1990; Vucinich and Emmert 1991; Popović 2007; Rexha 2009; Č olović 2011, 2016a, b). Focus will instead be on the implication of previous research when understanding the present-day role and purpose of the Gazimestan monument as heritage. The vast majority of the population in Kosovo are Kosovo Albanians  (Kosovars), whereas Kosovo Serbians mostly live in Serbian enclaves. It has only been 20 years since the war ended, and the Serbian government is yet to recognize the independence of Kosovo, which was enacted on 17 February 2008. Furthermore, perhaps due to a lack of institutional commitment in addressing the war-crimes (including a lack of adequate punishment for those responsible and finding out what occurred to missing people) within an objective process, there is still a widespread lack of dialogue and understanding between ethnical communities, despite the existence of numerous legal norms and frameworks developed. Unfortunately, these frameworks remain poorly implemented into practice by the responsible institutions (Hetemi 2017: 283). In Kosovo, the memorials are usually statues of men who were fighting in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during the Kosovo War, 1998–1999, built in socialist style (for discussions of the war, see Judah 2000). Instead of looking at the memorials of the recent war (see Di Lellio and Schwandner-­ Sievers 2006; Germizaj 2011; Krasniqi 2011; Ermolin 2014; Maliqi 2014; Sweeney 2015; Baliqi 2017), I will discuss the field of Kosovo, and the Gazimestan monument in particular, located a few kilometres north-west of Pristina (Fig. 7.1), built in remembrance of the famous 1389 Battle of Kosovo Field. The battle supposedly took place on the field of Kosovo, between Ottoman forces and a coalition of Christian forces. Within Serbia, the battle is widely remembered as the event where Serbia lost Kosovo. This received special significance, due to Kosovo being designated as the holy land of Serbia, the Serbian Golgotha. Despite the way the battle is remembered, it took approximately 70  years (in 1459) until Kosovo became part of the Ottoman Empire. It is thus widely recognized that the battle is more important as a myth, than an actual historical event. The Gazimestan monument was built in 1953 on order from the Serbian government, and is located at the place where the battle is thought to have taken place. It is often serving as a locus point for the remembrance activities still occurring every Vidovdan, on 28 June.

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Kosovo2 became one important target within the Western world of the mechanisms of conceptualizing the past and violence as inherent within specific people and/or places, and thus portraying people within these places as “prisoners” of an inherent burden of a continuous violent past, present, and, consequently, future (see Kaplan 2005; Todorova 1997; Ramet 2006). As the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova forcibly acknowledged, The Balkans became the dark “Other” within Europe, in which Europe externalizes its negative, violent and conflicting side. Drawing on the influential work of Edward Said (1979), Todorova writes: (…) the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the “European” and the “West” has been constructed. (…) the Balkans are left in Europe’s thrall, anticivilization, alter ego, the dark side within. (Todorova 1997: 188)

The connection between the Balkans and inherent violence is primarily a post-Balkan-wars (1912–1913) phenomenon, however not exclusively so. Violence is mentioned as all that the British author and journalist Rebecca West knew about the Balkans prior to travelling there, in the famous travelling book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia published in 1943 (West 2007: 21; Todorova 1997: 122). The tendency of “inscribing” violence into the past became especially prevailing within American journalism during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Even though the American journalist Robert Kaplan was far from the first one, he may represent the most infamous case of conceptualizing former Yugoslavia as doomed by “ancient ethnic hatreds”, through writing the bestseller Balkan Ghosts, published in 1993. Reportedly, the book subsequently influenced the attitude of the US President Bill Clinton during the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia (1991–1995). Supposedly, the book delayed an American intervention due to the “inherent” violence within the region, rendering any peace-intervention futile (see also, Sells 1996: 124–128 for an elaboration on how several US Congressman were using arguments of ancient ethnic hatreds in the Balkans as a reason not to intervene). What is of significance within this argument is how an inherent violence manifested through the past, became

2  From 1963 onwards, Kosovo was an autonomous province within the republic of Serbia, until Slobodan Milošević removed its autonomous status in 1990.

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essentialized through the landscape itself. Upon describing Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, before Yugoslavia disintegrated, Kaplan writes: Below spread the skyline of “new Prishtina”: a vomit of geodesic, concrete shapes built by Tito to erase the divisive, “reactionary” past. In response, the past had risen up in Prishtina and laid these buildings low. (Kaplan 2005: 48)

Take notice of how the past is understood as a powerful agent in itself, as if the past has a will and life of its own, with intentions and consequently responsibility. After all, to act with intentionality, that is, the past is here described as responding to actions of Tito, entails a responsibility for the very acts committed. Furthermore, this agency is manifested through the landscape. In a telling passage, Kaplan writes about the landscape of the Balkans: What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate? (Kaplan 2005: li)

Kaplan is here presenting the people of the Balkans as enslaved by the past, doomed to repeat acts of violence, while he connects this violence to inherent values within the very landscape. This is a question of where agency is located and the crucial matter of intentionality and responsibility (Ribeiro and Wollentz 2020). The issue of responsibility is not a minor one, but fundamental within a post-war environment where closure is often achieved through achieving a sense of justice and truth. In other words, those who are responsible for the crimes committed need to be adequately punished. But how would you punish the past itself, or to take it one step further, the landscape itself, and what kind of closure could possibly be gained from such a punishment? As the social anthropologist Liisa Malkki insightfully pinpointed, there is a vast difference between the categorization of places and landscapes, and that of people within these landscapes, because people categorize back. When writing about Hutu refugees in Tanzania, Malkki states: “the Hutu refugees lived at some level within categories that were not of their own making, but they also subverted those categories, to make new ones” (Malkki 1995: 8). Therefore, these chapters on Kosovo Field are not a study of the landscape of a medieval battle labelled as inherently violent, per se, but a study of the relationship to such a landscape among those living there.

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It would be simplistic to see the process of categorizing Kosovo as burdened by the past as a one-way process, but it is a multi-facetted and dialectic process. This is seen through the research produced within the region, where the concept of the burden of the past is sometimes accepted and reproduced. Within an edited volume which was released in 1996 (Duijzings 1996), just a few years before the war in Kosovo erupted, scholars mainly from Kosovo and Serbia are gathered to see possible ways forward. Within the volume, Isuf Berisha, a philosopher and journalist from Kosovo, states: Only upon a project of building a common future can Serbs and Albanians overcome the fatality of history in their relationship. Only on the basis of such a project will they be able to understand that their historical conflict is non-existent. Until that time both Serbs and Albanians, as indeed other Balkan nations, will suffer the syndrome of a surplus of history. (Berisha 1996: 33 my emphasis)

With phrases like a “surplus of history” and the “fatality of history”, this represents one out of several examples showing how the concept of an enslavement by the past itself, is produced and reproduced also within the region, revealing the dialects involved. Within this line of reasoning “agency” is placed upon the past itself and in the landscape in which the past is manifested, while individuals are often presented as lacking agency and thus presented as merely unfortunate victims of the past which surrounds them and enslaves them. In order to exercise agency, it seems as if the past itself has to be overcome. Of all the places in Kosovo where the past has been presented as “manifested”, it is the battlefield of Kosovo Field that has received the most attention and significance. For instance, when Rebecca West visits the site of the battle in her 1943 travelling book, she reflects direly upon the landscape: If the battle of Kossovo was invisible to me it was because it had happened too completely. It was because the field of Kossovo had wholly swallowed up the men who had awaited destiny in their embroidered tents, because it had become sodden with their blood and now was a bog, and when things fell on it they were for ever lost. (West 2007: 905)

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When writing about the myth of the battle, the Serbian medieval historian Sima Ćirković states: (…) of all the historical events, the battle of Kosovo has been the most popular, episode, deeply engraved in the national consciousness. It served as an inspiration for courageous deeds and sacrifices up to the twentieth century, and was widely used in condemning and stigmatizing treason. (Ćirković 2004: 83 my emphasis)

Even though there is a vast amount of historical research discussing the battle (see, e.g., Fine 1987; Emmert 1990; Vucinich and Emmert 1991; Malcolm 1998: 140; Ćirković 2004: 77–119; Rexha 2009), or studying the myth of the battle (Zirojević 2000; Kaser and Halpern 1998; Bieber 2002; Bakic-Hayden 2004; Č olović 2011, 2016a, b; Djokić 2009; Duijzings 2000: 176–202, 2005; Popović 2007), no research has been studying the relationship to the landscape itself, among those living at the site of the battle today. Therefore, 26 in-depth interviews (with 29 people) were carried out to build from the bottom-up an understanding of how it is to live at, or close to, the site of the medieval battle.

Method The fieldwork in Kosovo was carried out during several visits to Kosovo in 2015 and 2016. More precisely, the fieldwork consists of 26 in-depth interviews with 29 people, carried out in November and December 2015, March 2016 as well as in June 2016. The focus was on people who experienced the war from within Kosovo, from both the Kosovo Serbian and Kosovo Albanian population, and who currently live close to or at the site of where the medieval battle is supposed to have taken place. Furthermore, heritage professionals were also interviewed in order to get a perspective from those responsible for the heritage of the region. Additionally, other identities than simply Kosovo Albanian and Kosovo Serbian were deemed significant, and also Bosniaks and Roma were being interviewed, in order to present a more nuanced picture. I also observed the Vidovdan celebration at the Gazimestan monument on 28 June 2016, together with Marko Barišić, in which we documented the activities occurring as well as conducting short and spontaneous interviews with people on the site.

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The interviews were carried out in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Albanian and when possible, English. For the interviews in Bosnian-Croatian-­ Serbian and Albanian, I was working together with the translators Dea Luma (for the interviews in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian) and Edona Rugova (for the interviews in Albanian), with whom I worked closely together. When choosing interview partners, Dea Luma, Edona Rugova and I selected suitable individuals, based on a roughly equal proportion of men and women, Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbians and old and young people. However, several interviews were also conducted through entering a café in an interesting location and interacting with the regulars. More often than not, people were willing to do an interview and give me their valuable time and insights, without prior contact and without scheduling an interview. I also did one interview with a Kosovo Serbian taxi driver, on my way to the Vidovdan celebration in Gračanica/Graçanica on 28 June 2016. Some of the most revealing interviews were conducted without prior arrangements, since the person being interviewed tended to be more open, relaxed and spontaneous in these situations. Focus on the Gazimestan monument was made due to it being built explicitly in remembrance of the Battle of Kosovo Field, and therefore being the one most closely associated to the battle. There are also other monuments which can be associated to the Battle of Kosovo Field, most notably Sultan Murad’s Türbe, built by Murad’s son Bayezid I after the battle, located close to Gazimestan and allegedly including the internal organs of Sultan Murad I  (the rest of the body was buried in Bursa, Turkey) (Database of Cultural Heritage of Kosovo, Sultam Murad’s Türbe (Fig.  7.3): https://dtk.rks-gov.net/tkk_objekti_en.aspx?id=8970), as well as The Shrine of Bajraktar, often called Gazimestan Türbe (Fig. 7.4), allegedly including the flag-bearers of the 1389 Ottoman army, hailed as martyrs (Database of Cultural Heritage of Kosovo, The Shrine of Bajraktar: https://dtk.rks-gov.net/tkk_objekti_en.aspx?id=8817). Additionally, the “martyred heroes” from Lazar’s army are allegedly buried in the Orthodox church of the village Babin Most/Babimoc, located approximately 10 km northwest of Gazimestan. Outside the church, there is an installation to Lazar, which was put up in connection to the 1989 anniversary of the battle (Fig. 7.5). Furthermore, there are statues and monuments associated to the battle spread all over Kosovo and Serbia. Most recently, a huge statue of Lazar was revealed in the divided city of Mitrovica, Northern Kosovo, on Vidovdan 2016. However, in order to provide focus,

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Fig. 7.3  Sultan Murad’s Türbe and museum. (Photo: GW)

Fig. 7.4  The Shrine of Bajraktar. (Photo: GW)

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Fig. 7.5  Installation to Lazar in Babin Most/Babimoc. (Photo: GW)

consistency and to make the material and interviews manageable, the Gazimestan monument will be the case of study. Before I present my results, I will give a general overview of the role of the myth in presentday Kosovo.

The Role of the Myth The Gazimestan monument was constructed by the architect Aleksandar Deroko, on order from the Serbian government in Belgrade in 1953, in remembrance of the medieval 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and built in the shape of a medieval tower. During the battle, both the Serbian prince Lazar as well as the Ottoman Sultan Murad I were killed, and there are highly contrasting accounts of how this happened and which side won (see Emmert 1990). It is often claimed that the sultan was slain by a man named Miloš Obilić (or Kobilić), and this man gained a high importance within the myth. However, his actual existence cannot be historically

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verified. As the historian Anna Di Lellio has documented, Obilić also came to be the most important individual within the Kosovo Albanian version of the myth (Di Lellio 2009). Due to the contagious political situation, the question of the battle and the myth of it, is often tied to nationalism. The myth of the battle has been highly misused by Serbian politicians as well as religious leaders to claim an “eternal” right to the land of Kosovo, opposed to the Kosovo Albanians (Bieber 2002; Djokić 2009), and the myth has had a particularly strong presence within Serbian media, arts and the popular culture in general, including literature and movies (Duijzings 2000: 176–202; Terzić 2005). The Serbian social theorist Ivan Č olović takes account of this into what he coins “the terror of culture” present in the Balkans (Č olović 2011). The myth was rapidly after the battle mythologized by the Serbian Orthodox Church, and after his death, prince Lazar was declared a saint and a martyr. Therefore, the myth plays a central role in the Serbian Orthodox Church, which organizes many of the activities carried out in connection to the myth. It is important to recognize that the myth gained special significance during the nineteenth century in Serbia, in which it was mobilized within the nationalistic movement in order to gain independence from the Ottoman Empire. In fact, church celebrations of Vidovdan and public memorial services in remembrance of the fallen soldiers were forbidden by the Turkish authorities in Kosovo in the nineteenth century (Zirojević 2000: 200). During the Serbian national revival, the myth was thus recognized through the works of Vuk Karadzić (1787–1864), sometimes referred to as the father of Serbian folklore, as well as through the widely spread poem “The Mountain Wreath”, written by Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (1813–1851), which describes a massacre of Muslims. Vuk Karadzić published the first version of the curse of Kosovo, which was later written down in Cyrillic letters on the 1953 Gazimestan monument (Fig. 7.6), which is a curse to whoever is Serb or of Serbian blood, who do not fight at Kosovo (see Sells 1996: 38–39). In more recent years this rhetoric of entitlement to the land of Kosovo was most famously expressed when Slobodan Milošević gave a speech at the site in 1989, for the 600th anniversary of the battle. At every so-called Vidovdan, the anniversary celebration of the battle on 28 June, Serbians gather at the Gazimestan monument, singing nationalistic songs and wearing nationalistic clothes (Fig. 7.7). Because of the outright provocations taking place, these remembrance practices in their present-day form exacerbates tension within the region. The practices have less to do with

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Fig. 7.6  The curse of Kosovo on the Gazimestan monument. (Photo: GW)

history, and more with the reconstruction of the past in the present and using it to make claims on the future. Sadly, the future envisioned through these institutionalized practices is one of a Kosovo divided between Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbians. Today, the monument is guarded 24 hours a day by police, as well as a high fence. However, the Battle of Kosovo is not exclusively used to spread hatred and xenophobia, but also holds varying degrees of significance for many ‘regular’ (i.e. not particular political or nationalistic fundamentalist) Kosovo Serbian families, for whom the monument helps to feel a sense of belonging within Kosovo today, where they are a minority. The role and purpose of Vidovdan as a tradition has changed throughout times and will continue to do so (Emmert 1990: 142; Duijzings 2000: 176–202, 2005; Ćirković 2004: 85; Popović 2007), and as a tradition it is not inherently either positive or negative. This is also valid for how the myth has been described within academia. It can be noted, that the values within the myth as presented and discussed through academia have vastly changed

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Fig. 7.7  Gathering at the Gazimestan monument on Vidovdan 2016. (Photo: GW)

through the 90s, as a result of the wars. In 1990, the core of the myth is designated as “(expressing) a basic attitude towards life itself: democratic, anti-feudal, with a love for justice and social equality” (Emmert 1990: 142) by the American historian named Thomas Emmert, specialized in Medieval Balkan history with a focus on Serbian history. Few international scholars would phrase it in such terms ten years later (e.g. Malcolm 1998; Sells 2001; and see Emmert 1999 and Malcolm 2000 for a revealing scholarly debate on the role of the myth). In 2005, the social anthropologist Ger Duijzings writes, referring to the myth of Kosovo, “I am not arguing here against myth per se, but against particular myths that propagate revenge and exclusivism, sacralize the nation and demonise others” (Duijzings 2005: 267). Duijzings argues that new myths are needed in Serbia. However, within the Serbian academy of science and arts, there are still scholars considering the myth essential and invaluable, as the Serbian mediaeval historian Boško Bojović concluded in 2009:

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Over the centuries, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 has been marked not as the celebration of the defeat, as this event is sometimes wrongly interpreted. On the contrary, it has been an incentive and inspiration for new exploits, creation, the struggle for victory over dishonour, hope over hopelessness, faith over little faith, courage over apathy. (Bojović 2009: 324)

The above-mentioned cases highlight that there has been a large degree of focus on the myth itself through tracing the so-called core values of the myth, for instance, through focusing on issues of heroism, sacrifice and martyrdom, as if the myth somehow can be categorized as an unchanging entity in itself containing invariable values (e.g. see Mihaljčić 1989: 190 and see Vukadinović ed. 1989 for a highly politicized use of the core values of the myth by the Serbian association of writers). The specific details of how these invariable values are being preserved often remain implicit, where focus is regularly placed upon the oral transmission of epic poetry and folk music (see Č olović 2011: 123–156). For instance, upon writing about the myth, described as a chosen trauma, the psychiatrist Vamik Volkan states: Serbs began [prior to the outbreak of the wars in Yugoslavia] to feel as if the defeat at Kosovo Polje had occurred only recently, a development made possible by the fact that the chosen trauma had been kept effectively alive  – although sometimes dormant – for centuries. The communist era was one such dormant period, but even then there were signs that the psychological DNA of Kosovo continued to be passed down from one generation to the next. (Volkan 1997: 68)

While admitting that the myth did not cause the wars in 1991–1995 (the volume was written before the Kosovo War), Volkan states that the myth provided fuel for the wars through the psychological DNA inherited over generations (Volkan 1997: 55). While Paul Connerton has argued for the importance in what he coins “the spirit of mourning” in legitimizing the order of political and social power (Connerton 2011: 30), there is little doubt that the myth did play a role in the wars which should not be diminished. The myth was frequently employed by the infamous war-­ criminal Ratko Mladić (who was often proclaimed as a modern-day Lazar), for example before ordering the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, to legitimize the genocides occurring in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sells 2003: 314–15; Duijzings 2000: 201–202, 2007: 142–143). Furthermore,

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historical myths, in the Balkans as well as elsewhere, often function as a boundary-defining mechanism, meaning that a historical myth is constructed and maintained through dialogue and exchange with an “Other”, establishing a group boundary (Kolstø 2005a). However, it would be simplistic to approach the myth as an unchanging entity in itself. Rather than discussing the myth through any supposed inherent properties, or any core values (see e.g. Anzulović 1999: 181 for a highly questionable distinction between beneficial and harmful myths), it is important to recognize that a myth (religious or non-religious) does not act of its own accord but rather, has to be instrumentalized (Sells 2003: 314; see also Kolstø 2005a, b). It is, therefore, more insightful to focus on the specific activities carried out in connection with the tradition and the specific feelings that these activities evoke in contrast to other activities (Bell 2009), as well as on the various actors exploiting the myth within their own personal and/ or nationalistic agendas. Such cases of nationalistic/politicized use can be very different from how “regular” Kosovo Serbian families experience and partake in the tradition, with varying degrees of commitment and significance. In addition to this, Albanians also fought in the medieval battle and there is an oral tradition about the battle among some Kosovo Albanians, as documented by Anna Di Lellio (2009). This aspect is largely neglected in academia and by the media, and is also absent from the text panels on the monument itself. The latter, moreover, is only in Cyrillic, reinforcing the impression that this was solely a Serbian battle. However, when interviewing Kosovo Albanians, several of them are aware of the possibility that the man within the myth who slayed Sultan Murad I, Miloš Obilić, may have been Kosovo Albanian. Within academia, there is no consensus on the issue, and even his existence is debated. For example, the medieval historian Noel Malcolm claimed that he might have been Hungarian (Malcolm 1998: 72–74), based on variations of his name. Furthermore, it is also important to acknowledge that when a myth is instrumentalized, it is fed into and connected to more recent events, based on personal experiences which are more easily relatable. It is thus continuously updated in accordance with the present-day situation (see also Duijzings 2007: 143). In the case of the Battle of Kosovo, the medieval battle between Ottoman forces and the coalition of Christian forces are often fed into an idea of an on-going war between Muslims and Christians, which has prevailed in Kosovo since the battle, to the present day (Bakić-­ Hayden 2004). This view was also expressed to me through some interviews among the Kosovo Serbian population. As told to me by this woman

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in her early 40s, born in Pristina and currently working as a teacher and living in Novo Brdo: GW: Are there any events that are important for you? For example, is Vidovdan important for you? Do you know Vidovdan? Vidovdan? Of course, I know. It is in the 28th of June. Yes, it is important, for me it is much more important to … you know, Vidovdan is Serbian culture. Vidovdan was the strongest battle in those times. And it was a battle between Serbs and Turks. Better to say, it was a battle between Christians and Muslims. It started until today. GW: What did you say, it started until…? It is continuing until today. I think it is something like, something like … I think it continues because radical Islams [have] done everything that they want, (…) from Vidovdan and from Turkish times, until today, radical Islams (have) done what they want. They bombing France. They bombing maybe Kosovo. They have … you know what radical Islams have done around the earth? GW: ISIS for example? And I think the Christian war has never stopped. GW: The Christian war? Yes. So Vidovdan is important for me.

Another man, working as a taxi driver in Gračanica/Graçanica, in his early 60s, expressed it in the following way: GW: Why do you think the site of Gazimestan is so conflicted today? We still have this conflict between Christianity and Islam. I am not sure how it is in Europe, but here it is like that. But it is all the same (…) it is the same in Europe. Have you seen how they are bombing themselves in metros, making problems everywhere? And it is always Islam, it is never Christianity.

These examples are revealing because they illustrate how the myth is made relevant through its connection to important present-day events, such as terrorism, incidents which are in fact unrelated to the medieval battle. In the quotes above, the myth is even given a global relevance through these links, supporting the common and worn-out interpretation of The Balkans as located on the crossroad between west and east, culture and non-culture, the rational and the wild (Todorova 1997; Port 1998). Within such a dichotomy, Serbians are depicted as the eternal protector of culture (defined through Christianity) from the wild and uncivilized

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Middle East (defined through Islam) (Antić 2005), as a form of Antemurale Christianitatis myth (Kolstø 2005a: 19–20). In such a way, these attempts of instrumentalizing the myth aim towards finding continuity with the past, and it is through this tracing of continuity that the myth is made meaningful in the present and consequently for the future.

The Professional Perspective Before presenting the results from the local population interviewed, I intend to present the professional views from people working with the heritage of Kosovo. While previous studies have suggested that there is a tendency within Governmental institutions of Kosovo to employ heritage exclusively in order to strengthen the building of the nation (Pasamitros 2017), there has so far been no specific focus on studying attitudes towards the Gazimestan monument among heritage professionals. In order to gain a perspective of Gazimestan among heritage professionals of the region, two people working at the cultural department (Department of Culture, Youth and Sports) in the municipality of Obilić/Obiliq3 (also known as Kastriot) were interviewed, one of them being the director. The Gazimestan monument is geographically part of the Obilić/Obiliq municipality and most of what is believed to constitute the medieval battlefield is part of Obilić/Obiliq municipality making it relevant to interview officials within the cultural department of Obilić/Obiliq. In addition, I interviewed three individuals working at the Archaeological Institute of Kosovo in Pristina, including the director who is an expert on the historiography of the myth of the Battle of Kosovo. One of the individuals interviewed had been the director of Pristina’s Institute for the Protection of Monuments, for 14 years, between 1999 and 2013, during which the Gazimestan monument was under his responsibility. Both Pristina’s Institute for the  Protection of Monuments as well as the Archaeological Institute of Kosovo are managed by the Department of Cultural Heritage within the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports. Finally, I interviewed one person working as a coordinator for cultural heritage at Gračanica/Graçanica municipality. The man had been working at the Institute for the Protection of Monuments, and between 1992 and 1996, he was involved with maintaining the Gazimestan monument. Furthermore, he still conducts guided tours to the monument on occasion. 3  Obilić/Obiliq (the more rarely used name of the city is Kastriot) is located at the Field of Kosovo, and the Gazimestan monument is visible from the outskirts of the city. Furthermore, the city is named after the man who, within the Kosovo myth, slayed Sultan Murad I: Miloš Obilić.

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Unfortunately, I was only able to interview one local Kosovo Serbian who had been directly involved with the heritage of the Battle of Kosovo Field, which is the above-mentioned individual working at Gračanica/ Graçanica municipality. This is important to keep in mind while I present the results. In order to contextualize the professional views which will be presented, it is necessary to recognize that the site of Gazimestan constitutes an unusual heritage experience. Since 2008 it has been listed as a “Special Protective Zone” together with 43 other heritage sites mostly connected to the Serbian community and deemed to be in need of special protection, especially due to threats from urban development (Law on Special Protected Zones 2008). First of all, it is guarded 24 hours a day by a high fence and policemen, who search through visitors’ bags before they enter and will keep visitors’ ID while they are inside the area. Second, the dirt road leading to the monument is littered with garbage and the area itself is often full of homeless stray dogs, who tended to follow me around begging for food while I was strolling around the monument (Figs. 7.8, 7.9 and 7.10). Third, the text panels on the actual site is solely in Cyrillic letters written in Serbian, making it a highly exclusive experience (Fig. 7.6). In other words: the experience of visiting the monument does not feel like a heritage-experience, in the sense that cultural heritage attractions functions to facilitate certain engagements in the visitor which marks the attraction as worth visiting and set apart from other places (McIntosh 1999: 43).4 When interviewing one official at the cultural department in Obilić/ Obiliq, I noticed a great degree of reluctance in talking about Gazimestan. One example is this exchange: GW: Do you feel that the site is somewhat conflicted today? No, I don’t have any information about any conflict. Only if it could be like a property problem or something like that. Otherwise, I don’t think there is any debate or something. (…) I don’t think there should be any conflict about it.

Due to media coverage and a common awareness (noted within most of my interviews) of several incidents occurring on Vidovdan, 28 June, involving clashes between Kosovo Albanians and Serbians, it is somewhat 4  Nevertheless, I recognize that these experiences may differ from person to person depending on his or her personal background.

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Fig. 7.8  The guarded entrance to the Gazimestan Monument. (Photo: GW)

unexpected that the woman above only mentions property issues as a potential source for conflict. In another interview with a woman working at the same department, the monument was initially disregarded: I don’t know where you come from, but probably where you come from too, there are a few statues and some objects that are built for someone, but you just go by them because they are kind of forgotten. That is the case here. GW: You feel that the Gazimestan monument is just a forgotten monument? Not really forgotten, because we can see it, but no one uses it.

The monument is being presented as a “forgotten” monument; a monument which people are simply walking by without noticing. The woman admits that people can still see the monument, but implicitly suggests that no one really takes any notice of it, and continues with stating that no one uses it. However, her attitude towards Gazimestan changed drastically after a few more direct questions:

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Fig. 7.9  Litter inside the Gazimestan monument. (Photo: GW) GW: What would you say is the purpose of the monument? I think it is built because … it is built for other generations to see (…) that there was a big war going on (…) to remember the people who were part of it and so on. GW: Are you aware that it was also used for nationalistic purposes, for example Slobodan Miloševic´ held a speech at the battle in 1989? I don’t think we really should go into that topic. I just don’t want to discuss it. I don’t see it reasonable to discuss that part. GW: We shouldn’t talk about it? I don’t want to discuss it.

Later in the interview, it becomes clear that the woman is aware of the use of the site every Vidovdan, but that she deliberately did not bring it up out of a desire not to speak about the issue. In such a way, the attitude at the cultural department in Obilić/Obiliq is one where the monument is being approached as a neglected and forgotten monument, while there is an awareness that in fact, the monument is neither neglected (on Vidovdan

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Fig. 7.10  Road leading to the Gazimestan filled with garbage. (Photo: GW)

large groups of Serbians gather at the monument) nor forgotten (some of these gatherings are met with violent protests from the Kosovo Albanian community). When asked about whether she thought that anything should be done about the monument, she answered in the following way: I don’t think there should be. I don’t think we should change the place or touch anything to it, because if we do, then it is not the same object, and not with the same purpose as it was built for. (…) Then it is not a part of history anymore (…). Then it is (turned into) something else, entirely new.

This can be described as a desire to see the monument as part of history, that is, as part of the past with the hope of it staying past (Wollentz 2014). The purpose of such an endeavour is to reduce its relevance and impact upon the present, to make it past. Another revealing example came forward when I asked whether it was important to preserve objects of heritage like the Gazimestan monument to an individual working at the

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cultural department in Obilić/Obiliq, who responded: “Since I don’t really connect to it … but as an object, as a part of maybe the past.” I interpret this as constituting a way of producing temporal distance to heritage, an argument which I will further develop in the next chapter when discussing the temporalities of heritage. However, before such an undertaking, views among other heritage professionals in the area will be presented. A considerably different approach to the Gazimestan monument was expressed to me at the Archaeological Institute of Kosovo in Pristina. In fact, each person interviewed at the Archaeological Institute saw the monument as a potential source for conflict in present-day Kosovo and acknowledged that something needed to be done about the monument. The general attitude was to call for including more perspectives of the medieval battle, that is, of pluralizing the past, through presenting that not only Serbians were fighting against the Ottoman Empire but also Albanians and others: I have a professional standing, even if not one Albanian took part of the battle, even if that happened, I would still protect that monument. With all the laws that protect it. But the problem stands, that why when there is history, only Serbs take the right to show history, and not other people?

It was also expressed that an initiative of pluralizing perspectives had to be shared with Serbians and that it had to be a slow and gradual process. One archaeologist told me, quite desolately, that the initiative had to come from Serbia first in order to be realized, and that he did not think such an initiative would ever materialize. Another person stated to me that he wished to begin with spreading a more inclusive perspective through pamphlets of information handed out at the site, and then gradually reveal more and more information of the medieval battle during the next 10–15 years. The most radical approach was the idea to transform Gazimestan into a monument of bringing people together, beginning with a large symposium about the medieval battle: It could be a meeting or symposium of the battle of Kosova, in the name of that agreement, decisions should be made, that the monument was used to actually push people away, it should be used (now) to turn into something that will bring people together. (…)

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GW: You think there could be some potential in the monument, in this case? The philosophy of it has potential, but it should be done a symposium, an international meeting of historians, where it should be debated about the battle of Kosova, and be discussed, and the truth will come out, and according to this truth this will be a monument of all the people that participated in the battle. And the nationalism to be removed once and for all.

Nevertheless, there was currently no initiative of realizing such a symposium. Through these interviews, we can note that there is a widespread desire at the Archaeological Institute to present the so-called historical “truth” at the site, and that Serbians have to be part in this initiative. Through such a project, it is argued that the site would be more open for Kosovo Albanians to see it as their heritage as well, and in such a way they would start caring about it as heritage. On a slightly similar note, Pål Kolstø, Professor of Russian and Central European and Balkan Area Studies at the University of Oslo, speculates that the myth of the Battle of Kosovo Field could have transformed into a myth propagating brotherhood and solidarity among all the Balkan countries, instead of an exclusive Serbian identity, considering that Albanians, Bosnians and Romanians joined forces against the Ottoman Empire. Intriguingly, Kolstø continues with stating that such an employment of the role of the medieval battle would also mean including mythical elements (as in fabricating historical events for the sake of inducing a set of specific values) since there were people from the Balkans fighting alongside the Ottoman army as well, thoroughly breaking down clear-cut boundaries between “west” and “east” (Kolstø 2005a: 24). With that being said, the reason why such a myth of brotherhood did not develop has to be explained historically in the context of the subsequent Ottoman occupation, during which the myth gained special significance for Serbians in the resistance towards the Ottoman Empire. Interestingly, the focus within the Archaeological Institute of Kosovo was consistently placed upon pluralizing perspectives of the medieval battle, while the possibility to highlight the more recent misuse of the site, by Milošević and others, through information signs at the site was never mentioned. This may be a counter-reaction to the widespread use of the site in order to make claims on the future by a large number of actors related to the political, religious and cultural sphere in Serbia (Duijzings 2000: 176–202; Č olović 2011). Nevertheless, despite such an approach,

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there are several examples of heritage sites where there have been attempts to present the complete and highly multifaceted life-history of a site of dissonant heritage, in order for it to serve a purpose in reconciliation attempts. It has to be recognized how difficult such approaches are when it comes to recent and sensitive issues (Williams 2012), where there is no consensus concerning what happened and who is responsible for crimes committed (Watson 2017). However, if the more recent usages of Gazimestan are left out while presenting the site, there is a risk that such a focus will be perceived as an open and forced silence, as a way of covering up dissonance. I also interviewed a Kosovo Serbian man who had previously worked at the Institute for the Protection of Monuments in Pristina, and who had been directly involved with maintaining Gazimestan. He did not mention similar ideas when asked whether he thought anything should be done about the monument or not. On the contrary, he wished to move away from the concept of a historical “truth” and keep the Battle of Kosovo Field as a (harmless) legend, similar to the British legend of King Arthur: The truth is only one. But the Kosovo Battle is not about the truth (…) it is a legend. Like in England, Sword in the stone. (…) You know about King Arthur? (…) That is like Kosovo Battle. We must save Kosovo Battle legend, and don’t touch any kind of what’s fact, and not a fact. (…) [Not touch] what is the truth. We must forget every dispute, and stay like one day celebration, celebrate, service, go home. Nothing else. This is in my opinion. We don’t have time, to bring back the past. A lot of past destroyed the future, especially in Kosovo.

In conclusion, there seems to be an awareness among most (but not all) professionals interviewed that the Gazimestan monument is contested at the moment and that a change is required in order to decrease conflict. Furthermore, such a change has to come as an initiative from both Kosovo Albanians and Serbians. However, there is no consensus among the people interviewed as to what constitutes the best way to achieve this. A majority of the professionals interviewed were either (1) uninterested in the monument, (2) did not consider it part of their own heritage in its current form, or (3) were negative about the tradition and the monument, calling Vidovdan a “made up holiday”, and stating that Gazimestan had “nothing to do with the Battle of Kosovo Polje.” Taking these perspectives into consideration, it becomes easier to grasp why the Gazimestan monument

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is not being treated as a traditional site of heritage. In the next chapter, I am going to develop this argument in more detail, by presenting the temporalities of the Gazimestan monument.

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———. 2003. Crosses of Blood: Sacred Space, Religion, and Violence in Bosnia-­ Hercegovina. Sociology of Religion 64 (03): 309–331. Sweeney, J. 2015. Post-war Memorialisation and Dealing with the Past in the Republic of Kosovo. Pristina: Centre for Research, Documentation and Publication (CRDP). Terzić, Z. 2005. Between Destiny and Contingency: Variations on Historical Narratives in the Arts During the Break-up of Yugoslavia. In Myths and Boundaries in South-eastern Europe, ed. P.  Kolstø, 223–261. London: Hurst & Company. Todorova, M. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Volkan, V. 1997. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vucinich, W., and T.  Emmert, eds. 1991. Kosovo: Legacy of a Medieval Battle, Modern Greek Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Vukadinović, A., ed. 1989. Kosovo 1389-1989, Serbian Literary Quarterly 1989, 1-3. Belgrade: The Association of Serbian Writers. Watson, S. 2017. The Legacy of Communism: Difficult Histories, Emotions and Contested Narratives. International Journal of Heritage Studies. [Online First]. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1378913. West, R. 2007. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. New York: Penguin Classics. [First Published in 1943]. Williams, P. 2012. Treading Difficult Ground: The Effort to Establish Russia’s First National Gulag Museum. In National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts. EuNaMus Report No. 8, ed. P.  Poulot, J.M.L.  Guiral, and F. Bodenstein, 111–121. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press. Wollentz, G. 2014. The Cultural Heritage as a Resource in Conflict Resolution: An Overview of the Field. Kalmar County Museum. http://www.bridgingages. com/site/assets/files/1516/cultural_heritage_in_conflict_resolution.pdf. 03 Apr 2020. Zirojević, O. 2000. Kosovo in the Collective Memory. In The Road to War in Serbia, Trauma and Catharsis, ed. N.  Popov, 189–211. Budapest: Central European University Press. [First Edition Published in 1996].

Internet Sources Law on Special Protected Zones. 2008. https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/ local/1235900/1504_1220513623_law-on-special-protective-zones.pdf. 03 Apr 2020.

CHAPTER 8

The Temporalities of Gazimestan

In this chapter I will study how the Gazimestan monument is being, what I coin, “temporally positioned” among the local population. The chapter will be based on the premise that specific values are not to be approached as inherent and/or inscribed within landscapes and the heritage within these landscapes (see Fredheim and Khalaf 2016 for a revealing examination of different heritage values). Instead, building upon the Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD), values will be studied as actively produced and negotiated through embodied engagements with landscapes and their heritage. Within this process, heritage is continuously created and re-­ created. It follows that the tangible heritage is not best understood as a created (and thus static) value in itself, but as something that is creating values through the very physical and embodied engagements surrounding it. As Ian Russel expressed it: “a value can be ascribed to the heritage relationship. This value can be best expressed as a constellation of negotiated and mediated sentiments  – hopes, dreams, desires, and beliefs. (Russel 2010: 30, my emphasis). This does not mean that heritage does not have any intrinsic qualities and that its material properties do not matter (Carman 2009; Jones 2010, 2016). For example, consider a trained woodworker spending weeks on an elegant statue. Such a statue will have specific intrinsic qualities based on hours of practice, unique skills of an expertise and the specific material used. However, the particular values that these qualities are producing are not inherent, that is, it is possible to © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_8

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envision a society where woodworking is not valued and thus, either neglect or destroy such elegant statues. To deem something as heritage is a value judgement; an object is deemed to be set apart from other objects due to, for example, it’s assumed “age”, its “historical significance” or its “beauty” (Avrami et al. 2000: 8). This does not mean that it is self-evident what constitutes heritage and what does not. Rather, heritage is continuously negotiated and the expert may often find his/her views on heritage challenged by other stakeholders in society. Heritage values are not necessarily positive, even though most research on “heritage values” tend to focus on positive values such as identity-­ building, achieving a sense of belonging, economic and social factors, or simply the joy of experiencing and tending to the past. However, human values can only exist in relation to their counter value(s); they are in such a way bipolar, that is, the value “beautiful” would not exist without the presence of the value “ugly”. Values are at its core the presence of a criteria or standards of preference: “Persons are not detached or indifferent to the world; they do not stop with a sheerly factual view of their experience. Explicitly or implicitly, they are continually regarding things as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, beautiful or ugly, appropriate or inappropriate, true or false, virtues or vices” (Williams 2000: 18). The previous chapter demonstrated how “violent” has often been approached as a negative and intrinsic value within the heritage of Kosovo, similar to how the counter-­value “peaceful” has been attributed to other places of heritage usually in order to counter previous so-called violent examples of heritage, for example, in post-Mussolini Italy (Glendinning 2013: 262). This does not mean that a connection between violence and heritage is necessarily of a negative value to the heritage. On the contrary, by critically discussing aspects of violence, positive values can be produced through a certain type of a more emotionally challenging engagement with heritage. However, this has not occurred in the case of the Gazimestan monument. Furthermore, this perceived inherent violence has been given agency in itself, an agency which is pursued and maintained through the past (i.e. through the prevailing significance of previous atrocities), and is physically manifested through the tangible heritage visible in the landscape, serving as representatives of the past. As a consequence of this approach, people are often portrayed as enslaved to continuously repeated acts of violence by the agency of the past and its physical remains, that is, the tangible heritage (see Ramet 2006 for a critical discussion). In this chapter, I will use the Gazimestan monument as a case study to discuss alternative ways to

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approach a site of contested heritage, without attributing agency or inherent values to the heritage itself. Instead, I will advocate an increased focus on intentionality and responsibility, and their close ties to the specific temporalities of the heritage in question. Furthermore, I will address how these temporalities are not inherent within the heritage, and are thus not found in the heritage itself, but actively retrieved through constructed narratives and is, within this process, unavoidably plural. This phenomenon relates to what Sharon Macdonald coined “past presencing”, which constitutes the framework for how the past is made present (Macdonald 2012, 2013). As stated by Macdonald: “Past presencing is concerned with the ways in which people variously draw on, experience, negotiate, reconstruct and perform the past in their on-going lives” (Macdonald 2012: 234). The focus thus emphasizes the active role of individuals themselves in temporally positioning the heritage within their everyday lives, which is an on-going negotiation serving various needs in the present without a demarcated beginning or end. It follows that the temporalities of a site of heritage may be of dissonant character, that is, there is no consensus concerning its temporality.

The Role of Intentionality and Responsibility Building on the work of Friedrich Hegel (2008) and Vincent Descombes (2014) Artur Ribeiro has called for an increased focus on ethical aspects in understanding agency. Ribeiro argues that in order for an action to be intentional there has to be an ethical dimension to it, which means that an actor would have to be able to explain why an action has been carried out and it thus inevitably operates within a moral frame. Furthermore, all intentional acts are also responsibilities, that is, an actor can be held responsible for the acts committed (Ribeiro 2016, 2018; Ribeiro and Wollentz 2020; see also Connerton 2011: 10). Following this line of reasoning, I studied how my interview partners, living close to or at the Battle of Kosovo Field, located responsibility and intentionality in connection to the Gazimestan monument. There was a strong tendency among my interview partners to approach the monuments in terms of the intensions perceived to lie behind them, not within them. These intentions were usually traced by my interview partners by locating the builder and/or initiator of the monument. For example, one Kosovo Albanian man in his early 50s, living in Babin Most/Babimoc (a village some kilometres

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northwest of Gazimestan) talked to me about the unfinished Orthodox Church in Obilić/Obiliq, in the following way: GW: Are there any sites around here (in Obilić/Obiliq) that makes you upset or sad, that gives you bad feelings? No, I am not upset about anything. For example the [Orthodox] church [located in Obilić/Obiliq]. I don’t mind it because everyone has a right to practice their religion. I don’t mind that. What I mind are the reasons why it was built. I am upset about the person that built it. When Milošević built it, he built it for the wrong reasons.

The man expresses clearly that he is actually not upset about the building of the church itself, despite explicitly mentioning the building concerning the question of which sites that make him upset or sad. Instead he is upset about the reasons behind it (its perceived intentions), and more specifically, about the person he believes to be its initiator, Slobodan Milošević. Such viewpoints, repeatedly mentioned to me during the fieldwork, are crucial in understanding the attitude towards difficult heritage on the field of Kosovo. However, they do not suggest that a monument or building can never move beyond the perceived intentions of its creators. In fact, the perception of heritage was usually more complex and nuanced than a simple idea of inscribed intentions. Another man, an archaeologist professionally working with the heritage of the area and living in Pristina, told me: GW: What do you feel about [the Gazimestan monument]? Honestly, I think, I don’t see it as my heritage. Why? Because the history was misused in this case. (…) When they [Serbia] constructed this monument, in 1956 [sic], they Serbisized it, they gave only a Serbian value, or Serbian attributes, to this monument, because they could do that. Because we were not even a province in that time. (…) Personally, I was at the monument, I even brought some foreigners there and I explained [it] to them so it is an interesting tower. As an architectural part, [it] is not bad. But I don’t perceive it as mine, because they [Serbia] restricted me to see it as my heritage.

Here, the Gazmimestan monument is closely connected to the perceived intentions behind it. In this case these intentions have prevented the man from identifying it as his heritage. At the same time, responsibility is solely placed upon the actors (which seem to be loosely defined as Serbia), not the physical heritage, and the man is admitting that the tower of

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Gazimestan is interesting and not bad architecturally, indicating that he wishes to convey that the monument itself is not to blame. Later on in the same interview it became clear that these intentions are not perceived as inscribed within the fabric of the monument and thus unchangeable, instead my interview partner suddenly gets agitated and upset that “we” (the Kosovo Albanians) have not already claimed Gazimestan as “our heritage”, by adding text panels in the Albanian language stating that it was not solely a Serbian battle, that is, by pluralizing the past. These results call for a move towards an increased focus on intentionality and responsibility, in understanding the role of the heritage within Kosovo Field today, and a move away from inherent values and meanings. An increased focus on the concepts of intentionality and responsibility in the context of difficult heritage within a post-war environment is beneficial since it puts focus on individuals and their actions, and subsequently, does not muddy the water concerning crucial issues such as responsibility for gruesome actions and the delivery of justice for war crimes. These aspects need to be completely clear and out in the open during a post-war recovery process, in order for closure to arrive for individuals (Viejo-Rose 2011: 150–195; Watson 2017), which relates to the heritage as well. Andrew Herscher has shown how the physical heritage was widely and deliberately targeted during the Kosovo War (by both Kosovo Albanians and Serbians) in order to mobilize individuals and conjure and enforce ethnic boundaries and ethnic identities (Herscher 2010). Additionally, the heritage was also commonly claimed to be targeted or vandalized, only in order to mobilize ethnic division (Herscher and Riedlmayer 2001). In fact, the Gazimestan monument was, and still is (Pejić 2017: 70), claimed to have been deliberately damaged by cluster bombs, shrapnel or shells during the NATO aerial bombings in 1999. For instance, a deliberate attack on Gazimestan by NATO was argued by Slobodan Milošević at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, on 9 April 2002 in The Hague. Andras Riedlmayer testified against these claims, who inspected the memorial complex together with Andrew Herscher (Herscher and Riedlmayer 2001) after the allegations of an aerial attack, without finding any signs of such a damage: Slobodan Milošević: Do you know that NATO planes directly targeted the memorial complex Gazimestan? Let me remind you. It is a memorial complex of the Kosovo battle from 1389 on the 13th of April, the 22nd, 23rd

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of May, and the 1st of June, and that they damaged the Gazimestan memorial complex? Andras Riedlmayer: The Gazimestan complex, which is north of Pristina, in the municipality of Obilic, was one of the sites we visited precisely because of these allegations, which we were eager to check out. We looked very carefully all around the monument and we observed only one kind of damage. Surrounding the Gazimestan memorial are a number of concrete tubes which hold spotlights. These concrete tubes had cast-iron ornamentation put on it; a Serbian cross with the dates 1389 and 1989, commemorating the 600th anniversary. Somebody had apparently come and ripped off the cast-iron ornamentation. You could still see the dirt shadow where the cast-iron had been affixed to the concrete. The memorial itself looked completely undamaged, but we were told by a UN policeman on the site that the interior staircase had been damaged by an explosive placed inside after the war; however, there was no trace of it from the outside. We were not allowed access to the inside. In short, what damage we saw was not consistent with anything that could have been caused by an aerial attack. (International Criminal Tribunal 2002, written account from the trial, 9th of April 2002)

In such a way, the heritage became increasingly ethnicized during the war, through the tracing of supposed inherent ethnical properties within the fabric of the heritage. Moreover, these were conjured through the very acts of destruction, or alternatively, through unverifiable claims of deliberate destruction. A contribution to challenging such a misuse of heritage, may be to move away from focusing on inherent properties and values in the first place, and instead be very clear with the concepts of intentionality and responsibility surrounding difficult heritage. In the next section I will elaborate on how issues of responsibility and intentionality are tied to the specific temporalities of the heritage in question.

The Temporalities of Gazimestan The chapters on Mostar showed how the heritage plays a role in constructing narratives in order to make sense of the past and give it relevance within the present. I argued that these narratives often combine temporal and spatial relations (shaping chronotopes) and always include silencing parts of history. In this chapter I am going to show how these narratives can serve to temporally locate the heritage itself. The outcome of this process is that each site of heritage is multi-temporal in the sense that there

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are layers of different time periods that all play a role in making it meaningful for people, and that the importance of each time period may vary greatly between different narratives. This is similar to what Paul Basu (2013) called a memoryscape, constituting the multitude of different forms of memory practices (embodied and/or narrated, intentional and non-intentional) that shape the role and meaning of heritage. I will call this a process of temporally positioning the heritage. Cornelius Holtorf has written about three requirement for an object of material culture to possess what he coins “pastness”, defined as a result of a particular perception or experience (Holtorf 2013: 431). These three requirements are as follows: (1) Material clues: there needs to be traces of wear, decay and so on that speak of the object’s age. (2) Correspondence with the expectations of the audience: an audience needs its preconceptions to be matched. (3). A plausible and meaningful narrative relating then and now: there has to be a story that draws the link between past and present. (Holtorf 2013: 433–434) Adding to these perspectives, it is important to highlight the potential multi temporality of specific objects or monuments. Depending on your own life experiences, material culture may hold a large degree of different temporalities which makes it meaningful for the person. In other words, “pastness” cannot be seen as singular, and different “pasts” may hold fundamentally diverse and perhaps even oppositional connotations for the present. Here, I would like to emphasize that the individuals themselves also have an active role in how material culture is, as I call it, temporally positioned. To provide a basis for the argument made, three main temporalities were found through my interviews. The first one is the temporality of the medieval battle, located far away in time but often serving as a source to make claims on the present and future of Kosovo. This temporality was not only employed by Kosovo Serbians, but it was also very common among Kosovo Albanians. However, the narratives of this temporality may often involve different connotations for the present and future, especially concerning the process of locating continuity or discontinuity with the past. Whereas Kosovo Serbians more often (but not always) discussed the battle of Kosovo while linking it to the present and future situation of Kosovo, the opposite was often the case among the Kosovo Albanian population. However, when the medieval battle is linked to present day events through the tracing of continuity, it often enters a so-called “mythical time” (see here Assmann 2008 and Table 3.1), which tends to exist within a temporality served to break down the linear sequence of time. In such a

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way, centuries-old battles can be re-enacted in a ritualized manner (Connerton 1989: 41–71), in order to make them seem as relevant as if they had occurred only yesterday, such as on Vidovdan. Mythical time is thus a-historical (Duijzings 2000: 193). The second temporality is related to the recent Kosovo War, starting with the speech by Slobodan Milošević in 1989, and reaching up until the present-day use of the site on Vidovdan. This temporality is strongly emphasized by Kosovo Albanians and it includes difficult feelings and memories of fear, hatred as well as a general sense of instability and insecurity. However, also Kosovo Serbians sometimes express difficult emotions towards these events, highlighting that the situation is much more nuanced and complex than a clear-cut division between Kosovo Serbians and Kosovo Albanians. The third temporality involves individual memories of visiting the site in the youth, together with lovers to reach privacy or together with family members for a picnic. This temporality is highly personal, often connected to the beauty of the landscape and the love for the specific family members with whom my interview partners shared the experience. This temporality is therefore often tinged with nostalgia for a lost space/time and includes both positive and negative connotations for the interview partners, frequently related to the present-day situation in which they commonly do not feel the same kind of freedom of visiting the monument any longer. This temporality is more common among the Kosovo Serbian population, but can also be found among Kosovo Albanians from the older generation. These temporalities can exist simultaneously (they are often overlapping and are not mutually exclusive) and are commonly directed towards the future. These three temporalities, which are roughly outlined above, lie at the basis for how the site of Gazimestan is temporally positioned within the narratives constructed. I will now present how these processes work in more detail and their implications through specific interviews, which will serve to nuance the rougher picture presented above. The first example I will highlight comes from a male Kosovo Albanian taxi driver in his mid-­30s living in Obilić/Obiliq. When asked about the Gazimestan monument, he answered: GW: Do you have any relationship to the Gazimestan monument? No, no connection at all. GW: Do you know anything about it?

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No. GW: Do you know where it is? Yes. GW: Were you taught about it in schools or? No, for Gazimestan, no. I remember when it was built. GW: When was it built? 89 – 90. GW: No, it was not built then. I am talking about when Milošević came and held the speech. I was ten years back then. And I remember that. GW: What does the site make you feel today? Of course, it is not a good feeling, because that is when the autonomy of Kosova was taken, and every right was taken from us. Back then. And the Serbians began to come here, so that is all that I remember about it, and all the feelings that I have about it.

Even if it would only be caused by a temporary gap in memory, the fact that the man states that the monument was constructed in 1989–90 (instead of 1953) is revealing. It represents a temporal positioning of the heritage. With the last sentence quoted above, he also expresses that he has no other connection to the monument, which indicates that he has no interest to further talk about the site. It may therefore not simply be a case of ignorance of the history of the monument. Rather, it can be interpreted as a deliberate temporal positioning and what may be called a wilful reluctance to learn more. As already argued, all narratives constructed about the past inevitably include silences which may be actively produced (Munn 1996; Connerton 2011: 51–82) and may even form parts of narrating your own life history. This becomes especially relevant for regaining a sense of agency in the aftermath of periods of helplessness and powerlessness (Jackson 2013: 70–74). In the views of the man interviewed, who had to flee Kosovo during the war and coming back to find his home burnt down, the monument came into existence on 28 June 1989 and he has no interest to either discuss or relate it to other temporalities. Even when I mention that he is not correct with the date of construction he does not follow up with a question nor seem to be especially interested to know more. The off-the-cuff argument that only deep engagement is significant when analyzing the different emotional responses to heritage is a common bias within heritage studies. However, Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell (2015) have been arguing that shallow and banal engagement with

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heritage can in certain instances be just as - or even more - meaningful than deep engagement. To not want to feel anything, to reject emotions, is also meaningfully constituted. Acknowledging the agency of individuals also demands acknowledging other forms of engagement with heritage than simply the ones connected to deep commitment and/or emotion. As written by Smith: “Indifference is an emotional state, sometimes involving an active choice of refusing to exercise empathy and compassion, and sometimes denoting blithe, but socially meaningful, lack of awareness” (Smith 2017: 763). Clearly, the man above did not express outright indifference towards the monument, but his lack of awareness and unwillingness to learn more is revealing. I will now present how this specific temporal positioning and lack of awareness affects the way intentionality and responsibility is articulated surrounding the heritage. A few questions later on I wanted to see whether he saw some possibility in turning the monument into something more positive, so I asked if he thought the monument should be left as it is, or if something can or should be done: I mean if … I am talking about the idea to destroy it. Bring it down. But I am not sure if that is a good idea, also. GW: Why would that not be a good idea? Yes, it is a good idea to bring it [down], destroy it. [Laughter]. Because it was of Milošević, and he is a criminal.

It should be noted that this man is only one out of two who openly wished to see the Gazimestan monument destroyed among my interview partners. This case highlights how the temporal positioning of the monument affects views on intentionality and responsibility. The fact that Slobodan Milošević was only 12 years old when the monument was constructed does not stop the interviewee from calling the monument Milošević’s. Following his reasoning, the monument was contracted in 1989, and should be destroyed because it is Milošević’s monument who was acting with criminal intentions, and who should be held responsible for those actions. Interestingly, to interpret the monument as built by Milošević can also sometimes be read in academic literature on the topic, highlighting the great deal of confusion surrounding Gazimestan infusing the varied narratives constructed. For example, the professor in psychiatry Vamik Volkan, writes: “Milošević ordered a huge monument to be built on a hill overlooking the Kosovo battlefield. Made of red stone symbolizing blood, it

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stands one hundred feet over the ‘grieving’ flowers” (Volkan 1997: 68). Even though further construction work was carried out on the area of the monument in connection to the speech held by Milošević in 1989, the monument was constructed in 1953 on orders from the Serbian government. Needless to say, a 12-year-old Milošević was not responsible for the Gazimestan monument. When considering the temporality related to the recent war in Kosovo, it is of significance to address that the Serbian army was allegedly using the field next to the Gazimestan monument as an area for exercise during the war (Judah 2000: 80). However, there was a great divergence present between how my interview partners temporally positioned Gazimestan, which often seem to be connected to individual life experiences. The man interviewed above was young and had grown up and lived most of his life in Obilić/Obiliq, located within an eyes view of the monument, and he lacked memories of the more romanticized period of Yugoslavia, the 70s, when relations between Kosovo Serbians and Kosovo Albanians were more stable. I am now going to present quotes from an interview with the director of a kindergarten in her mid-60s, who is Kosovo Albanian and living in Pristina. As will be presented, she approached the monument in a very different manner. Significantly, her life situation did not look the same as the man quoted above. She was approximately 30 years older, was higher educated and had grown up in a smaller town, near Prizren, and thus far away from the Gazimestan monument. Only in her late teenage years did she move to Pristina. When interviewed about the monument, the discussion went the following way: GW: Do you have any relation to the Gazimestan monument? It is close to Pristina. (…) I know it as this huge monument. I never stopped to read the names or anything. It was really old and it was just there. When you enter Gazimestan to the right, below there are some trees. (…) I went there with my older daughter during the weekends on Sundays, Saturdays [in the 1980s]. Like some sort of picnic. (…) Until Milošević came for his speech, Gazimestan was kind of forgotten. Not even Serbians had any connections to it. (…) which date is it again? GW: 28th of June. It all started there. (…) GW: Does this [the Vidovdan ceremony] give you a bad feeling? Not really, because it is a political thing, it is not like individuals are going there, it is something that is planned collectively. Maybe Gazimestan had some sort of importance for them [Serbians] even before the war, during the

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90s, but it wasn’t as big as it became. Just when you think about it, it is no surprise, because it is an old building, it was built a few hundred years [ago], (…) so the times are changing and the heroes are changing and the events are changing.

The woman repeatedly calls the Gazimestan monument “old”, and at one point says that it is hundreds of years old, which suggests that she does not know the age of it but temporally positions it around the same time as the medieval battle. She is aware of the activities on every Vidovdan, but relates them to the actions of Milošević rather than to the monument itself. When we start discussing the possibilities of changing the monument, the conversation goes like this: GW: Do you think something can or should be done about the monument? I don’t think so. It is not a good idea because it is so old, it has been there for hundreds of years. It would probably lose its originality. GW: If changes were made to it? Yes, still it shows something. It tells a story. It is something that happened hundreds of years ago. Why shouldn’t it be there? It doesn’t matter who won or who lost. It is just a remembrance. GW: Yeah, I am not saying it should be destroyed. (…) Gazimestan [doesn’t bother me], it was there so many years ago. I am not bothered by any churches or any religious buildings from any municipality (…) but I am bothered by [one] object that was built during the war. It was started to be built just before the war started. (…) It is still not finished. It is near the national library. GW: The Orthodox Church you mean? (…) I live very close to that one (…). I heard that that building was used for torture or even killings. That is maybe the only object that would bother me. GW: Do you think something else should be built there instead? Maybe it is a post-traumatic response of mine (…) but in my opinion it shouldn’t stay there. (…) Because it was not built with good intentions, or religious, at least, intentions. But with defined intentions. Bad ones.

What is significant to focus on here is how the specific temporal positioning of the Gazimestan monument as “very old” (the exact age does not really matter in this case), seems to render the question of intentionality and responsibility irrelevant. Compare this to how she temporally

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positions the contested Orthodox Church at the University Campus in Pristina, where the intentions behind the building become crucial. In the case of Gazimestan, I refer to a temporal positioning which is aimed at gaining distance to the past, and thus locating it as part of “history” instead of “heritage”, similar to how the woman working at the cultural department in Obilić/Obiliq (see Chap. 7) approached Gazimestan. As argued by Macdonald (2006: 22) there is a difference between conceptualizing the past as part of history and conceptualizing it as part of heritage. This is because heritage is concerned with finding continuity with the past, constituting a sense of belonging, which is occurring on both an individual as well as collective level, and is in such a way directed towards the future. As expressed by Macdonald: “Heritage presents identity—which literally means sameness—as persisting over time. The cultural equation at work here is that being of the past confers the right—or even creates a demand—to continue into the future” (Macdonald 2006: 10–11). In this interview, the opposite is at play. Through saying that “It doesn’t matter who won or who lost. It is just a remembrance”, the woman cuts away ideas of continuity or relevance. Instead, she has no problem with the monument to be left in the landscape, but positions it within an opened rift into a distant and long-gone past. Throughout my fieldwork, I found that such an attitude towards the Gazimestan monument was highly common among the Kosovo Albanian population, even if it was articulated through different means. As mentioned in Chap. 7, it is through the tracing of continuity with the present (for example through linking it to terrorism occurring in Europe) that the myth is made relevant and significant in the present, primarily by the Kosovo Serbian population. A similar attitude to the one of the woman quoted above was expressed to me by this man living in Babin Most/Babimoc, in his 50s: GW: Do you think something could be done about the Gazimestan monument to make it less nationalistic? No. There is nothing that can be done with it. It is part of the history. Everywhere you have these kind of monuments, and people should visit it and people should come from other places and visit it. It should just be there, it is part of history.

To temporally position a monument as part of “history”, instead of “heritage”, with the aims of dissolving ideas of continuity and relevance, also means rendering questions of intentionality and responsibility

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meaningless, since the very point of such an endeavour is to present the monument as unrelated to the present-day situation, to position it as irrelevant. This has to be understood within the context of Vidovdan, when Serbians annually travel to the monument due to the monument’s perceived significance and relevance for the present, often in order to make future claims on the very soil of Kosovo opposed to the Kosovo Albanians. Seen in that light, the production of irrelevance may be the strongest counter-statement possible.

Conclusions In the previous section, I presented two in-depth examples among my interview partners of temporally locating the heritage while showing how this temporal positioning is vital in order to understand how intentionality and responsibility is articulated surrounding the heritage. In both cases my interview partners were not aware of the actual date that the monument was constructed. We cannot assume that one monument operates within the same temporality for every individual, and we cannot even assume that people want to or care to know the correct date of construction. In some cases, the lack of knowledge of a monument may even be part of an active and conscious strategy of regaining a sense of agency, if, as in the case of Gazimestan, the significance of the monument has been used within activities aimed at depriving the agency of the individual in question. To say “I don’t even care”, is to make the monument and what it stands for, irrelevant and insignificant. For all intents and purposes, it can be interpreted as an active way of denying the monument’s agency. Through the examples presented above, I have not been aiming to present all different temporalities present or specifically show representative examples. Because of the large amount of variation, such an endeavour may hide more than it illuminates. Furthermore, due to my aim of highlighting and making dissonance visible and meaningful, it would have been counter-productive for the overall argument. However, an attitude of indifference and a lack of awareness (including an unwillingness to know more) was a highly common strategy among the Kosovo Albanian population, but it was maintained through different means and temporalities (as presented above) including through habits within the landscape, which I will return to in the next chapter. Additionally, I did not present any in-depth quotes from interviews of the Kosovo Serbian population. These will be presented in more detail in the next chapter.

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Similar to what I showed regarding the heritage of Mostar, concerning how a personal temporal positioning (where the subject is locating him/ herself on a temporal axis) affects the role of the heritage in Mostar, the Gazimestan monument shows how also the heritage itself can be actively temporally positioned by individuals, and that this positioning can serve a role in a strategy to reduce the relevance and ultimately the impact of a site of difficult heritage related to unwanted and sensitive memories of violence and oppression. Similar to how humour can give a liberating sense of distance to sensitive memories (Jackson 2013: 183), temporally distancing heritage can make it easier to deal and cope with, as well as serving a role in regaining a sense of agency. I would like to emphasize the word make here, to underline that this is an active and creative process. With this I do not make a claim based on the valuation of such a practice, that is, to see it as either positive or negative in terms of overcoming ethnocentrism or coming to terms with the past. Instead of attributing agency or inherent values to the landscape, the monument, the past or the myth itself, I emphasized the role of intentionality and responsibility in determining the role and meaning of a site of difficult heritage, and how these aspects are tied to the specific temporalities employed. I also showed that certain temporalities are aimed at rendering questions of intentionality and responsibility irrelevant. I have approached these temporalities as actively produced within the construction of narratives and may thus play a role in reclaiming a sense of agency for individuals in the aftermath of oppression and forced silencing. In the next chapter I will focus on the embodied (incorporated) practices occurring within the landscape of Kosovo Field.

Bibliography Assmann, J. 2008. Communicative and Cultural Memory. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A.  Erll and A. Nüning, 109–118. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Avrami, E., R. Mason, and M. de la Torre. 2000. Values and Heritage Conservation Research Report. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Basu, P. 2013. Memoryscapes and Multi-Sited Methods: Researching Cultural Memory in Sierra Leone. In Research Methods for Memory Studies, ed. E. Keightley and M. Pickering. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Carman, J. 2009. Where the Value Lies: The Importance of Materiality to the Immaterial Aspects of Heritage. In Taking Archaeology out of Heritage, ed.

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L.  Smith and E.  Waterton, 192–208. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descombes, V. 2014. Institutions of Meaning. A Defense of Anthropologicalholism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Duijzings, G. 2000. Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. London: Hurst. Fredheim, H., and M. Khalaf. 2016. The Significance of Values: Heritage Value Typologies Re-Examined. International Journal of Heritage Studies 22 (6): 466–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2016.1171247. Glendinning, M. 2013. The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation: Antiquity to Modernity. Abingdon: Routledge. Hegel, F. 2008. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [First Edition Published in 1820]. Herscher, A. 2010. Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict. California: Stanford University Press. Herscher, A., and A. Riedlmayer. 2001. The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Kosovo, 1998-1999: A Post-war Survey. Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project, Cambridge, MA.  Accessed from the Following Location: http://www.heritage.sense-agency.com/assets/kosovo/sg-6-03-destruction-study-en.pdf. 04 Apr 2020. Holtorf, C. 2013. On Pastness: A Reconsideration of Materiality in Archaeological Object Authenticity. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (2): 427–443. International Criminal Tribunal. 2002. Written Account from the Trial Against Slobodan Milošević in The Hague, 9th April 2002. Accessed from the Following Location: http://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/ trans/en/020409ED.htm. Retrieved 04 Apr 2020. Jackson, M. 2013. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. 2nd ed. Köpenhamn: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jones, S. 2010. Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity. Journal of Material Culture 15 (2): 181–203. ———. 2016. Unlocking Essences and Exploring Networks: Experiencing Authenticity in Heritage Education Settings. In Sensitive Pasts: Questioning Heritage in Education. Making Sense of History 27, ed. C.  Van Boxtel, M. Grever, and S. Klein. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Judah, T. 2000. Kosovo: War and Revenge. New Haven: Yale University Press. Macdonald, S. 2006. Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg. International Journal of Heritage Studies 12 (1): 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527250500384464.

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———. 2012. Presencing Europe's Pasts. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, ed. U. Kockel, M. Nic Craith, and J. Frykman. Chichester. Chapter 14: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118257203. ———. 2013. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. Abingdon: Routledge. Munn, N. 1996. The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape. Critical Inquiry 22 (3): 446–465. Pejić, S. 2017. After the Liberation (1912–1999). In Serbian Artistic Heritage in Kosovo and Metohija. Identity, Significance, Vulnerability, ed. D.  Otašević, 68–70. Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Science and Arts. Ramet, S. 2006. “For a Charm of Pow’rful trouble, Like a Hell-broth Boil and Bubble”: Theories about the Roots of the Yugoslav Troubles. In Conflict in South Eastern Europe at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. T. Emmert and C. Ingrao, 5–37. London/ NewYork: Routledge. Ribeiro, A. 2016. Against Object Agency. A Counterreaction to Sørensen’s ‘Hammers and Nails’. Archaeological Dialogues 23 (2): 229–235. ———. 2018. Archaeology and the Historical Understanding. Bonn: Habelt Verlag. Ribeiro, A., and G. Wollentz. 2020. Ethics in the Practice of Archaeology and the Making of Heritage: Understanding Beyond the Material. In Past Societies. Human Development in Landscapes, ed. J.  Müller and A.  Ricci, 191–202. Leiden: Sidestone. Russel, I. 2010. Heritages, Identities, and Roots: A Critique of Arborescent Models of Heritage and Identity. In Heritage Values in Contemporary Society, ed. G.S. Smith, P.M. Messenger, and H.A. Soderland, 29–41. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Smith, L. 2017. Explorations in Banality: Prison Tourism at the Old Melbourne Gaol. In The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism, ed. J.Z.  Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piche, and K. Walby, 763–786. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, L., and G. Campbell. 2015. The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect and Emotion. In A Companion to Heritage Studies, ed. W.  Logan, M.  Nic Craith, and U. Kockel, 443–460. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Viejo-Rose, D. 2011. Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory After Civil War. Brighton: Sussex Academic. Volkan, V. 1997. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Watson, S. 2017. The Legacy Of Communism: Difficult Histories, Emotions and Contested Narratives. International Journal of Heritage Studies. [Online First]. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1378913. Williams, R.M., Jr. 2000. Change and Stability in Values and Value Systems: A Sociological Perspective. In Understanding Human Values, ed. M.  Rokeach, 15–46. New York: The Free Press. [First Edition Published in 1979].

CHAPTER 9

Negated Spaces and Strategies of Irrelevance

When analyzing the practices occurring on the Kosovo Field today, I am going to approach them from a specific angle, namely one influenced by the importance in seeing not only the activities that occur as meaningfully constituted, but also the activities that do not occur. The argument is based on the premise that a space also constitutes of non-actions, which may be fundamental in understanding its meaning and role in the present. In other words, a place is not necessarily meaningful because of the actions that take place in it, but also because of the actions that do not take place in it (Munn 1996; Fowles 2010). In order to avoid circular argumentation, an elaboration is required. Concerning places of heritage specifically, but certainly not exclusively, a place often has the intended purpose to facilitate certain engagements from the visitor, be it connected to emotions, knowledge or simply having fun (McIntosh 1999: 43; Smith and Campbell 2015). Inherent within these desired engagements are the engagements that are un-desired, excluded, delimited; engagements which are seen as un-proper and thus, are attempted to be ruled out from the experience. One revealing and recent (2017) example regarding difficult heritage, which was also touched upon in Chap. 2, is the project by Shahak Shapira named “Yolocaust”, in which Shapira edited selfies from the Holocaust Memorial (The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) in Berlin so that in the background of the often smiling (or yoga-­practicing) people depicted, real images from the concentration camps including mass graves of Jews were being shown (Yolocaust 2017). Shapira’s project led to a widespread debate, © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_9

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especially conducted through social media, on the perceived lack of respect shown towards the victims of the holocaust, and concerning how the young generation seems to be forgetting history. It highlights how certain heritage places should facilitate specific engagements while ruling others out, and that the engagements that are ruled out may be more revealing for the meaning and role of the site as heritage, than the engagements that are permitted. The architect of the Holocaust Memorial, Peter Eisenman, did not share the outcry of rage. Instead, he expressed the following: “A memorial is an everyday occurrence, it is not sacred ground. (…) My idea was to allow as many people of different generations, in their own ways, to deal or not to deal with being in that place. And if they want to lark around I think that’s fine” (BBC 2017). What we can learn from this example is that despite the aim of the architect to allow for a wide range of engagements at the heritage site, the full spectra of these engagements are neither widely desired nor welcome. Here, there is a taken-for-granted assumption that each and every individual should be aware of the activities which are allowed (and not allowed), and subsequently, that a break of this unwritten rule concerning non-actions is a moral misconduct. However, heritage may not only function to facilitate certain engagements while ruling others out, they may also function to rule out all kinds of engagement, that is, become so-called negative spaces in the landscape. Focusing specifically on material culture, Severin Fowles has written thoroughly on the significance of negative spaces and non-things: [in the] world of relations in which, packed between the multitudes of self-­ evident things, are crowds of non-things, negative spaces, lost or forsaken objects, voids or gaps —absences, in other words, that also stand before us as entity-like presences with which we must contend. (Fowles 2010: 25)

In the following chapter, the concept of “negative spaces” will be expanded upon, a space made meaningful through non-actions. The implications of Fowles’ approach is that also absences have to be understood as a “part of the world of encounter that stands over against us” (Fowles 2010: 39). This often neglected occurrence has been coined “the presence of absence” (Bille et al. 2010b: 18). Paradoxically, these absences constitute part of the material world surrounding us, through their very non-­ existence, through their non-materiality. In the context of “negative

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spaces”, the anthropologist Nancy Munn has examined the phenomena when studying the Warlpiri tribe in Australia: In the act of detouring, actors also carve out a negative space - a locale where they do not go, part of which extends beyond their own spatial field of vision. This act projects a signifier of limitation upon the land or place by forming transient but repeatable boundaries out of the moving body. (Munn 1996: 452)

Through this process an embodied space of deletions and delimitations constraining ones activities within a given locale are produced and sustained (Munn 1996: 448). A spatial form of deletions and delimitations may be actively produced and maintained because it serves a certain function or certain need within any given time. Within this chapter I am going to expand on this issue by studying the activities occurring (or not occurring) at the field of Kosovo, as well as how these activities (or lack of activities) are made meaningful. It was mentioned in Chap. 7 that the Gazimestan monument is not being treated as a traditional heritage site, in the sense that it functions to facilitate certain engagements in the visitor that sets it apart from other places and marks it off as “special” and worth visiting. Considering the state of the road leading to the monument which is littered with garbage, the common presence of stray dogs within the marked area of the monument, and the lack of information signs in other languages than Serbian written in Cyrillic letters, it would be more accurate to say that the site functions as non-heritage, marked off as not worth visiting (while still being officially listed as heritage). As a site of heritage, the Gazimestan monument functions to facilitate non-engagements. This is far from an arbitrary process, but seems partially to be a result of the lack of commitment to what is being designated as Serbian heritage from the institutions responsible (Pasamitros 2017). However, before discussing the lack of activities, we will focus on the activities that do occur.

Activities on Gazimestan: Vidovdan and Beyond The significant exception of non-activities happens annually, every 28 June, on the so-called Vidovdan, when hundreds of people gather at the monument every year (Fig.  9.1), while delegations from the Serbian Orthodox Church are holding speeches. Occasionally, there are also

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Fig. 9.1  The Vidovdan celebration of 2016. (Photo: GW)

important politicians from Serbia present, most recently in 2014 when the then president of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić, attended and held a speech.1 These events are dominated by nationalistic songs and clothing (Figs. 7.6, 9.2 and 9.3), and are sometimes met with hostility from the Kosovo Albanian community including the throwing of stones towards the buses when they drive through Pristina towards Gazimestan. However, also non-violent protests and counter reactions are taking place at the site of the monument, as Kosovo Albanian graffiti celebrating the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) on the road leading to Gazimestan during Vidovdan 2016 demonstrates (Fig. 9.4). On the Vidovdan celebration of 1  However, the speech by Nikolić was not popular among the serb-nationalist groups attending Vidovdan 2014, who chanted and threw things at the politician. The nationalistic groups wanted a more aggressive attitude and political approach towards Kosovo Albanians than the one Nikolić propagated. This connects to Serbia’s application for EU membership and to the 2013 Brussels agreement aimed at normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo.

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Fig. 9.2  People on top of Gazimestan, Vidovdan 2016. (Photo: GW)

2016, which I observed, the most surprising encounter was that of a group of four self-proclaimed witches, conducting rituals next to the monument. While most people in their surroundings were singing nationalistic songs and waving flags they were standing in a circle with closed eyes. The ritual included the waving of hands and the chanting of hymns. The four women explained to us that they attempted to leave the burdens and chains of their ancestors here in Kosovo by performing this ritual on Vidovdan. Despite the apparent fact that this surprise-encounter was not representative of the general nationalistic and aggressive atmosphere present, it highlights the divergence existing in how Vidovdan and the landscape of Kosovo Field are made meaningful. On Vidovdan 2016, the bishop of Raška and Prizren, Teodosije Šibalić, held a speech at the monument, which included political connotations focusing on the necessity of Serbian mothers in Kosovo to give birth to more children, otherwise it was argued that the “earthly kingdom” of Kosovo will be lost and the “cross” [as in Christianity] will disappear from Kosovo. The practice of Vidovdan needs to be approached as a form of ritual, which is further enforced by the presence of patriarchs from the Serbian

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Fig. 9.3  The person working with me at Vidovdan 2016 reacted to the nationalistic atmosphere present at the ceremony by painting a Yugoslavian star on his wrist. (Photo: GW)

Orthodox Church and a preceding gathering at the Gračanica Monastery (Fig. 9.5), before buses take the participants from Gračanica/Graçanica to Gazimestan. Therefore, for many of those who choose to participate, the practice can be understood as a perceived obligation which goes through several ritualized and repeated steps. As Paul Connerton states concerning rituals: (…) rites are felt by those who observe them to be obligatory, even if not unconditionally so and the interference with acts that are endowed with ritual value is always felt to be an intolerable injury inflicted by one person or group upon another. (Connerton 1989: 44)

Such a ritualized impression was also enforced through the interviews conducted with people. As expressed to me by this man in his mid-40s, living and working in Gračanica/Graçanica: It is kind of a moral obligation. (…) It is just like the graves that people have a moral obligation to go and visit.

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Fig. 9.4  Graffiti on the road to Gazimestan, Vidovdan 2016, displaying “Kosova UÇK”, celebrating the Kosovo Liberation Army. An act of resistance. (Photo: GW)

When approaching the ritual of Vidovdan, instead of focusing on the myth or the belief itself, there is potential to look at it through the actions of the ritual, and especially on the feelings that these actions evoke which sets them apart from other actions. I am here building upon the seminal work of Catherine Bell concerning rituals and the “ritualized body” (2009). Bell attaches great importance to the very actions and experiences that these actions entail in order to legitimize rituals. She calls it the “ritualized body” and describes it in the following way: “The natural logic of ritual, a logic embodied in the physical movements of the body and thereby lodged beyond the grasp of consciousness and articulation” (Bell 2009: 99). It is through the body’s experiences certain actions are ritualized, which is achieved through contrasting these actions with others and in such a way they receive a special position amongst them. In other words, the key lies in the contrast and the body’s experience of this contrast and not in repeated actions (for routines are also repeated) nor in the degree of formality (for everyday activities can also be ritualized). As argued by Bell: “Ritualization does not only involve setting up oppositions, (…) it

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Fig. 9.5  Gathering at Gračanica Monastery, Vidovdan 2016. (Photo: GW)

generates hierarchical schemes to produce a loose sense of totality and systematicity” (Bell 2009: 104). The ritual provides a sense of order and a context for those who perform it, a scheme which is bound to its internal logic and can thus only be experienced by those who perform it, by the “ritualized body”, which reproduces a hierarchical system as well as, through the inherent freedom allowed in the ritual, transformed. Rituals are therefore not static: “Ritualization as any form of social control (…) will be effective only when this control can afford to be rather loose” (Bell 2009: 222; see also Barth 1987). The perceived feeling of obligation that I noted amongst my interview partners towards the ritual itself often includes references towards a duty to the ancestors or to history itself. Some people interviewed even mentioned that they did not know “why” they felt that they needed to go to the Gazimestan monument every Vidovdan, but that it was simply a tradition inherited over generations which was continued out of a perceived duty to the ancestors. This realization goes hand in hand with the above-­ mentioned framework outlined by Bell, in which the “ritualized body” is often beyond consciousness or articulation. It is one defining

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characteristic of rituals to facilitate a perceived sense of obligation towards the act itself, and a sense of continuity between past, present and future, and in such a way give the past a sense of “presentness” and immediacy again, causing what has disappeared to reappear (Connerton 1989: 63). I emphasize the word “give” to focus on the active and current aspects of how actors instrumentalize the myth through rituals, where the myth is serving as a master narrative, enacted through the “ritualized body” on each Vidovdan. In this case, the Serbian Orthodox Church, as well as political institutions in Serbia, have functioned to employ and direct the ritual of Vidovdan. Nevertheless, at least since the end of WWII, annual large scale gatherings at Gazimestan on every Vidovdan seem to have started from Milošević’s speech in 1989 and onwards. Vidovdan has been marked as an official national and religious holiday in the Serbian state calendar since 1892 with some fluctuation; it’s status was removed in the early twentieth century, and it’s red-letter status was not returned until the calendar of 1914, after the decisive Serbian victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Kumanovo during the First Balkan War (Zirojević 2000: 200–201; Popović 2007: 159). Furthermore, there were gatherings at the Kosovo Field on Vidovdan during the period between the WWI and WWII, especially on the 550th anniversary of the battle on 28 June 1939 (Marković 1989). Additionally, an obelisk with a cross on the top was erected to mark the place in 1924 (see here Marković 1989; West 2007: 903–904). However, considering the anti-Albanian impetus driving the current Vidovdan movement, the present-day form and role of Vidovdan bears resemblance to what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Osborn Ranger coined an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that a distinction between invented and “genuine” traditions (see Hobsbawm 1983: 8) is neither especially clear from a theoretical point of view, (after all, each and every tradition include certain elements being recently “invented”) nor relevant when trying to understand the meaning of these traditions among the local population, who would not relate to such concepts. It was mentioned earlier that Serbians participate on Vidovdan for a wide variety of reasons, which may be detached from any political employment of this myth. In fact, a large amount of people interviewed expressed a wish to distance themselves from the nationalistic usage of the Gazimestan monument, which, while often recognizing and being aware of, were

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repeatedly blamed on extreme groups travelling to Kosovo from Serbia. As explained to me by this man, working at Gračanica/Graçanica municipality: We have a lot of people. Lots of groups from Serbia. Nationalistic groups. And ultra-nationalistic groups. They come to Gračanica, they pray a few minutes, and after that they go to Kosovo Battle monument, because they think … they still think that Kosovo is part of Serbian State, part of Serbian history, like … actually yes! But again, I repeat, we are back on political situation. GW: But you think that the monument has been misused a bit? Absolutely. But not for 100%. This is a smaller group.

In my interviews with the Kosovo Serbian community, the importance of the Battle of Kosovo Field for not only Serbians, but also for other communities, is occasionally mentioned. In such a way, there is a wish to underline its multi-ethnic dimensions and downplay its political and nationalistic usage, a usage which several Kosovo Serbians interviewed seem to be ashamed of. Often, the multi-ethnic role of Sultan Murad’s Türbe is mentioned in this context. People of Turkish descent as well as Kosovo Albanian and Roma ̵ people go to the Sultan Murad’s Türbe2 on Đurdevdan (Serbian name for the holiday), Dita e Shëngjergjit (Albanian name) and Herdelezi (Roma and Turkish name), which is also known as Saint George’s Day, and celebrate the coming of spring on May the sixth (Gregorian Calendar). Further research focusing on the role and significance of Sultan Murad’s Türbe on the sixth of May could be an interesting departure for future studies.

Gazimestan as a Place of (Be)Longing No matter which ethnic community interviewed about the Gazimestan monument, a vast majority mention that they never go to the monument (except on Vidovdan). Among the Kosovo Serbian population, this is sometimes tinged with a sense of longing and nostalgia connected to previous memories of going to the place. Earlier, I argued that Gazimestan is 2  Sultan Murad’s Türbe is managed and maintained by a society named “Meşhed-i Hüdavendigâr”, which is supported by the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA). On the location of the Mausoleum for Sultan Murad, there is also a museum focusing on the Ottoman history of Kosovo in general and the life of Sultan Murad I in particular. The battle itself plays only a minor role in the exhibition.

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currently a negative space, a heritage place primarily functioning to facilitate non-engagements. This is also emphasized by the lack of people visiting the monument except on Vidovdan, and the visits that do occur on Vidovdan are highly ritualized and are perceived as a form of obligation. Regular everyday visits hardly occur, even though several people, among both the Kosovo Serbian and Kosovo Albanian population, mention that they visited the monument for picnics and other leisurely activities before the war. These forms of childhood recollections form what I in the previous chapter designated as a way of temporally positioning the heritage, related to a specific set of values and implications for the present and the future. Let us now focus more concretely on these values and implications, as well as what sustains them, and it is here where it becomes beneficial to also take non-activities into consideration. In fact, my interview data suggests that this temporality is largely sustained and maintained through the activities which are not occurring today. In other words, the lack of mundane, everyday and non-ritualized activities at the monument is part of what makes Gazimestan meaningful, informing the narratives constructed. More specifically, many Kosovo Serbians mention to me that they do not dare go to the monument out of a perceived fear. Moreover, several parents are telling me that they are not allowing their children to go there out of a similar fear. Many Kosovo Serbians are not certain  that anything would actually happen if they were seen at the site since it concerns a general feeling of being unsafe. One Kosovo Serbian man living in Gračanica/ Graçanica says to me that he does not go to the Gazimestan monument because, as expressed in his own words: My position is I am in between, I am too far with the Serbian part and the Albanian part. I have a lot of friends on the Albanian side, and I try to be … right way. Only conservation. Only. My job. Not involved in politics. Not involved in nationalism. (…) I have a family, house, and my job, and I will not lose it for any kind of political stupidity.

Despite the reluctance of people to visit the monument, the lack of everyday visits to Gazimestan is meaningful for several Kosovo Serbians interviewed. Previous memories of visiting the landscape form a chronotope infusing the narratives with a sense of direction and a meaning for the present, and consequently, for the future. As this highly nostalgic group interview with four Kosovo Serbians (A, B, C and D) living in the village

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Babin Most/Babimoc, a village of historical significance in the myth, revealed: A: [When] two people were in love, and they are hiding, they usually went to Gazimestan because no one would see them there. If they go and have fun with each other! [Laughter] Everyone: There are huge leaves so no one can see them! [Laughter] But that was in his (A) time. Back in time. Not anymore. B: A lot of people went there, [who wanted] hiding from family members, went there to Gazimestan, with their lovers. A: Also in the times of [these] girls it happened, but these didn’t go! (…) A: It was beautiful. It was beautiful, and whoever wanted to go, he went. It was fresh air. It was beautiful. We went there and just enjoyed. B: [There are] memories … histories from when we were young. You know, coming back from Gazimestan. Meeting each other in the streets.

These seemingly romanticized recollections presented here can be interpreted as a specific chronotope, which is of a highly nostalgic character, and which is sustained through the lack of everyday mundane activities at the site at present. In such a way, this chronotope fundamentally relates to the issue of belonging within Kosovo today. This does not mean that the myth of the medieval battle does not play any role in these narratives, rather the two temporalities involved (i.e. the temporality of the medieval battle and the temporality of childhood recollections) get intertwined, and it is through the landscape itself such mixing is perceived to be manifested. One highly revealing example concerns a specific red flower which is a form of peonies, growing on the field of Kosovo. According to the myth, the flower is red because of the blood flowing from the fallen soldiers on the field or alternatively, the flower is red from the tears fallen from the eyes of the soldiers while mourning their lost kingdom (Zirojević 2000: 199). Additionally, the rivers on the field (Sitnica, Binačka Morava and Drin) are said to have turned red from the blood of the soldiers, and would according to the myth told during the nineteenth century, still turn red every Vidovdan until the area was “liberated” from Ottoman rule (Zirojević 2000: 200). The prevalence of the myth surrounding the red flowers is still very much present among the Kosovo Serbian population today. However, two women (A and B) working in the office for returning people, in Obilić/Obiliq, told me the following concerning the flower:

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A: Until before the war there was a flower which was growing there, which was called bozur [peonies]. After the war there are no such flower anymore there. GW: Why is the flower not growing any longer then? A: I believe that there are no flowers anymore because less people remember those times, nowadays. (…) Just because people forgot to remember. B: Because there are not many Serbs anymore. So that is why it doesn’t grow up anymore.

This illustrates how two different temporalities of the heritage get intertwined and how such an intertwinement is perceived to have direct impact upon the landscape itself, that is, of making a certain flower to stop growing there. This can also be related to other examples of how the vegetation, such as flowers and trees, of a landscape where people have met a violent and brutal death, is attained a heightened symbolic value. This is partially due to how the bodies of the dead become integrated within the landscape and the soil of the land, not only metaphorically, but also in a very concrete and physical way through natural processes (Filippucci 2020). In the case of the exchange of dialogue above, what grows and what does not grow in the landscape is actively employed (instrumentalized) in a political statement about the current situation in Kosovo. Fundamentally, the political statement draws upon the lack of everyday activities at the monument, as was revealed in the preceding and proceeding discussions with the two women. In the process of making Gazimestan meaningful, it is not only the temporality of the medieval battle that plays a role. Rather, among the local population who grew up near the medieval battle field, this temporality gets intertwined with personal memories of visiting the landscape in the youth. Moreover, it is the lack of mundane and non-ritualized activities in the present that infuses this temporality with meaning and direction for the present and the future, in which it gets related to the issue of belonging in Kosovo today and tomorrow. This needs to be taken into consideration when understanding the current role and meaning of the Gazimestan monument for the local Kosovo Serbian population.

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Strategies of Coping with Gazimestan Despite the above-mentioned call for a realization that Vidovdan as a tradition, and Gazimestan as a monument, hold a varying degree of meaning and significance for the Kosovo Serbians, it is equally true that the tradition of Vidovdan is attended by highly nationalistic groups who use it as a means to provoke the Kosovo Albanian population and make an exclusive claim on the land of Kosovo. Furthermore, Serbian politicians and religious leaders are still employing the myth within anti-Albanian propaganda. Interviews conducted with people who live at or near the site of the battle, who are primarily Kosovo Albanians, reveal strategies of coping with a site of heritage which is politically used against them. The primary strategy is to transform it into a place of avoidance that is, defined as an embodied carved out negative space in the landscape (Munn 1996). For example, people who before the war used to visit the area for picnics (or other leisurely activities) because of the beauty of the landscape, no longer visit it. Several of those interviewed expressed reluctance against visiting or going near the place, without any apparent or explicit reason. Those among the Kosovo Albanian population who said that they still go to the place were almost exclusively people who professionally work with the heritage of the area, who sometimes take visitors there to show them the site. The sustainment of an embodied practice of avoidance is supported through the construction of narratives meant to diminish the significance of the place as heritage. People often told me that they were not visiting the site because it had no meaning to them, neither positive nor negative. As previously mentioned, the lack of emotional engagement towards heritage is also meaningfully constituted (Smith and Campbell 2015). However, many people interviewed were uncomfortable speaking about the way some Serbians use the monument and would rather not discuss the topic with me. One unemployed man in his early 40s, living in Obilić/ Obiliq, who was fighting in the KLA and who was still traumatized by his experiences from the war, called the monument “ours”, as in Kosovo Albanian. This does not mean that he deemed the heritage of the site important. He wanted to explain that if Kosovo Albanians had been bothered with the monument they would have destroyed it. However, it is not destroyed because it means, using his own words “nothing for us”. In this way, he is emphasizing the agency that the Kosovo Albanians themselves have in the face of this allegedly meaningless piece of architecture (which

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is thus devoid of agency). It soon became apparent that the man had previous experience of damaging monuments connected to the Battle of Kosovo Field, because the same man played a role in putting down a statue of Miloš Obilić (Fig. 9.6) formerly located in the centre of Obilić/Obiliq, as revealed during this exchange: GW: Does the [Gazimestan] monument give you bad feelings? No, that is ours and we can destroy it every time we want. GW: You can destroy it? It is ours, if we want we can destroy it. Just a bit of detonation, and we can put it to the ground and make a stadium and children would play there. GW: Would you prefer that? The Serbs built it there because they think that they lost a war, but we Albanians actually won the battle. GW: Which war are we talking about?

Fig. 9.6  Statue of Miloš Obilić, now standing in Gračanica/Graçanica. (Photo: GW)

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It is nothing. It is nothing for us! I myself brought down the statue of Miloš Obilić. I put it down. I removed it with a tractor. I put it down. [puts his hands together]. They sent it to Gračanica/Graçanica.

It seems as if the man is mixing the temporality of the medieval battle with the temporality of the recent war. In saying that “we Albanians won the battle” he makes a difficult-to-follow connection between the recent war in Kosovo and the loss against the Ottoman Empire during the medieval battle. As for the statue the man is referring to, in 1999 the statue of Miloš Obilić was removed from Obilić/Obiliq by KFOR (Kosovo Force, the NATO-led international peace-keeping force in Kosovo) due to vandalism from the Kosovo Albanian population. It was transported to Gračanica/Graçanica and kept inside the property of Gračanica Monastery, covered up and stored away, until Vidovdan 2014 when it was revealed again in the center of Gračanica/Graçanica (Ermolin 2014: 171; B. Todorović 2015 personal communication). A second, related strategy of coping with the site is to produce trivializing narratives. As one man in his 40s working as an archaeologist and living in Pristina explained to me: But Serbs they celebrate it, they call it Vidovdan. They celebrate it everywhere, and they are very … actually they are very proud of this feast [humour in his voice]. But to tell the truth, for me it is a very, I would even say tragic-­ comical situation because you [they] are celebrating a loss!

This process can be understood through Sharon Macdonald’s work on undesirable heritage, in which she argues for a process of banalization as part of disputing the very status of a place of heritage (Macdonald 2009). If heritage is regarded as a legitimizing discourse sacral and undisputable in nature, acts of trivializing it are attempts at “profanation” which make the place “non-sacral”, and thus not part of the heritage even if it is part of the past (Macdonald 2009: 80–101). The significance in humour for the creation of emotional detachment and the regaining of a sense of agency has been expressed by Michael Jackson: “The comedic is the ultimate expression of (…) distancing and release, and entails three critical transformations in our experience. First, the comedic restores a sense of agency. Second, it fosters a sense of emotional detachment. Third, it entails shared laughter, and thus returns us to a community of others” (Jackson 2013: 183).

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The disputed nature of Gazimestan as heritage can be illustrated through the following quote from the same man: Now, to tell the truth, I have never talked about this before in the context that I have no good feelings towards that monument. Now I realize it. GW: Now you realize it? Now, during this interview, I realize that I am a little bit agitated. Why we, the Kosovo Albanians, didn’t do any resistance to say: “no, this is not only your monument, this is also our monument!” (…) We didn’t do our part.

It seems that a new realization struck this man during the interview, which also shows how any kind of fieldwork is part of a creative and active process which may create new narratives and meanings about heritage. This interview also suggests that these strategies of attachment or non-­ attachment are often operating on a level which may not be completely conceptualized; they are embodied, incorporated, and often routinized, remaining subconscious (cf. Connerton 1989). They can serve as strategies to cope with places which act as spatial reminders of unwanted memories. However, such strategies do not always work, as this unemployed man in his 40s, living in Obilić/Obiliq, told me: I would destroy it [Gazimestan monument] completely and also ten meters beneath it. To remove it with its roots. So that we could never remember it again. Like, for example, if I go with my children, he [the child] wants to know what it is about, [and] when I decide to talk about it: that every year I had a traumatized day when they came. So I would remove it and not talk about it at all. GW: Not talk about it with your children even? No, no. I don’t want them to know about it. GW: Do you think it can be important to remember some things? At least it should be removed physically. From the mind it can never be removed. Just not to be seen, because it is always in the mind. (…) I don’t want to explain this to my child, and tomorrow, [that he has] bad feeling to Serbs (…). So I want it to be deleted and my children in the future to have good relationships with everyone. (…) If I go there, I will die. GW: You will die? Only, just when I remember my fear that it causes me, I will die. So I will never dare to go there.

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These words suggest that strategies of avoidance and trivializing are not always successful in making the place less sensitive or politically loaded. The wish for the absence of a particular memory can result in the wish for certain spatial features to be removed, even though no such correlation can be drawn in practice. As was argued previously, destruction is a generative act, and there is no certainty that it will lead to a decrease in remembering practices. Taking other cases of destruction into consideration, it is even likely that it may increase these forms of practices (see Bille et al. 2010a, b; González-Ruibal and Ortiz 2015). Since it is the institutionalized practices, rather than the monument itself, which exacerbate tension in the region, such an act of destruction would most likely increase rather than decrease ethnocentrism. It is significant to highlight that the vast majority of those interviewed among the Kosovo Albanian population had no desire to see the monument destroyed, but were coping with it through the above-mentioned strategies, making the monument insignificant and trivial, temporally positioned as part of the past which should still be present in the landscape, but which is best left forgotten and unvisited. These strategies thus serve to actively produce temporal (and emotional) distance to the site as heritage. Potentially, what could be done about the Gazimestan monument is not to destroy it but to add new values to it, through including more perspectives at the site, that is, pluralizing the past. By adding text panels in the Albanian language stating that Albanians were also fighting in the battle and that there is an oral tradition about the battle in certain areas among the Kosovo Albanian population, the singular narrative presented at the moment would be challenged. This might make the monument less exclusive and more open for a discussion and negotiation concerning the current status and role of the place as heritage (or not heritage). As already mentioned, this perspective was shared among several of the Kosovo Albanians I interviewed who professionally worked with the heritage of the region. However, such an initiative would have to be shared between Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbians. The Gazimestan monument raises the question whether the monument, in its current state and role, is best left trivialized and avoided by the Kosovo Albanian population, and that it may be precisely through the acts of carving out an embodied negative space and of producing trivializing narratives that the monument is being given a future. In other words, perhaps by denying the monument significance and relevance, an alternative future may be assembled, other than the one of ethnocentric division

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which is being presented through the one-sided text panels at the site and manifested through the practices of commemoration on Vidovdan. Through these strategies, the monument can still be left within the landscape. Even though this does not specifically serve to create any hopeful narratives of mourning and forgiving, it may be more positive and progressive than the narratives of ethnocentrism that could otherwise easily be generated within the current situation.

Heritage of Non-Engagements The Gazimestan monument can be understood as a carved out negative space among the local population, an occurrence centred in the situated body of the individual and maintained through everyday habits, and the lack thereof (see also Munn 1996; Fowles 2010). I have tried to emphasize the agentive power that resides in such embodied habits. Among the Kosovo Serbian population, the current lack of every day and non-­ ritualized activities at the Gazimestan monument serves a function in constructing a narrative concerning the right to belong in Kosovo today and tomorrow, largely built upon previous personal recollections of visiting the site before the war. Among the Kosovo Albanian population, the lack of engagements at the monument is creating a place of avoidance and banalization in the landscape, which can be interpreted as forming strategies meant to reduce the relevance and impact of the site upon the present and future of Kosovo. As argued in the previous chapter, the act of rendering Gazimestan a meaningless part of the past (and thus not part of heritage), may be seen as an act inducing a sense of agency in the individual, while in the meantime, denying agency to the past or the monument itself. In sum, these results highlight the importance in not only studying the engagements at a site of difficult heritage as meaningful, but also the non-­ engagements, and how these may play a role in making the site of heritage meaningful. In this case, strategies of avoidance and trivialization from the Kosovo Albanian population may serve to deny the enforced narratives of ethnocentric relevance, which may, ironically, be the most forward-oriented engagement in the present-day situation. It gives the monument the potential of a more inclusive future; in that it opens up a future-space for the monument to exist within a rift to an irrelevant and long-gone past. After all, to have agency means to have the possibility to deny significance; in other words, to resist and reject in which the material culture is

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commonly employed (Silliman 2001; González-Ruibal 2014). The agency inherent in the capability of rejecting significance is precisely why “non-­ activities” become such a crucial form of engagement related to a site of difficult heritage which still play a role in an on-going and continuous discourse of oppression. In other words, the resistance of significance and the making of irrelevance are highly meaningful in a post-war environment where many people have to recover from being in a situation where they have been denied a sense of agency. Hopefully, within the future which is currently being assembled for the monument, there will eventually be a time for inclusive perspectives, opening up a space for more challenging and stimulating engagements.

Bibliography Barth, F. 1987. Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, C.M. 2009. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New  York: Oxford University Press. [First Edition Published in 1992]. Bille, M., F. Hastrup, and T.F. Sørensen, eds. 2010a. An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer. ———. 2010b. Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence. In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. M. Bille, F. Hastrup, and T.F. Sørensen, 3–22. New York: Springer. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ermolin, D.S. 2014. When Skanderbeg Meets Clinton: Cultural Landscape and Commemorative Strategies in Postwar Kosovo. Croatian Political Science Review 51 (5): 157–173. Filippucci, P. 2020. ‘These Battered Hills’: Landscape and Memory at Verdun (France). In Places of Memory. Spatialized Practices of Remembrance from Prehistory to Today, ed. C. Horn, G. Wollentz, G. Di Maida, and A. Haug, 82–96. Oxford: Archaeopress. Fowles, S. 2010. People Without Things. In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. M.  Bille, F.  Hastrup, and T.F. Sørensen, 23–41. New York: Springer. González-Ruibal, A. 2014. An Archaeology of Resistance: Materiality and Time in an African Borderland. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. González-Ruibal, A., and C.  Ortiz. 2015. The Prison of Carabanchel (Madrid, Spain): A Life Story. In War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place, ed. M.L.S.  Sørensen and D.  Viejo-Rose, 128–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hobsbawm, E. 1983. Introduction: Inventing Traditions. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. E.  Hobsbawm and T.  Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, M. 2013. The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt. 2nd ed. Köpenhamn: Museum Tusculanum Press. Macdonald, S. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Abingdon: Routledge. Marković, D. 1989. Svečanosti na Gazimestanu o Vidovdanu izmedu̵ dva svetska rata. Etnološke sveske 10: 127–134. McIntosh, I. 1999. Into the Tourist’s Mind: Understanding the Value of the Heritage Experience. Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 8 (1): 41–64. Munn, N. 1996. The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape. Critical Inquiry 22 (3): 446–465. Pasamitros, N. 2017. Cultural Heritage: Contested Perspectives and Strategies in Kosovo. In State-building in post-independence Kosovo: Policy Challenges and Societal Considerations, ed. I.  Armakolas, A.  Demjaha, A.  Elbasani, S. Schwandner-Sievers, E. Skendaj, and N. Tzifakis, 291–310. Pristina: Kosovo Foundation for Open Society. Popović, M. 2007. Vidovdan i casni krst. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX Vek. [First Edition Published in 1976]. Silliman, S. 2001. Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact. Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (2): 190–209. Smith, L., and G. Campbell. 2015. The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect and Emotion. In A Companion to Heritage Studies, ed. W.  Logan, M.  Nic Craith, and U. Kockel, 443–460. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. West, R. 2007. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia. New York: Penguin Classics. [First Published in 1943]. Zirojević, O. 2000. Kosovo in the Collective Memory. The Road to War in Serbia, Trauma and Catharsis, N. Popov. Hungary Central European University Press. 189–211. [First Edition Published in 1996].

Internet Sources BBC. 2017. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38675835. Retrieved 04 Apr 2020. Yolocaust. 2017. https://yolocaust.de/. Retrieved 31 Mar 2020.

Personal Communication Todorović, B. 2015. Conversation at Gračanica/Graçanica monastery.

PART IV

Sandby borg Prehistoric Violence as Difficult Heritage: Examining the Temporalities of the Distant Past

GW: Do you think there is something unpleasant in the discovery as well, or is it more exciting? No, I didn’t find it unpleasant. But I found it so fantastic that these bodies have been lying there for all these years. It was not far below the surface! I found that amazing. [Showing me photos of skeletons that she took] Elderly woman living in Gårdby. GW: But how do you think that the site should be conveyed? I would just like to quit it. That nobody goes down there anymore and... GW: You would like that? Yes. A man in his late 60s, currently living on northern Öland.

CHAPTER 10

Prehistoric Violence as Difficult Heritage

The main aim which has been running through this book is to examine the connections between temporalities and difficult heritage. So far we have been studying one example of recent violence (Mostar) and one example of medieval violence (Gazimestan). Within these two cases of heritage, we have studied how heritage has been temporally positioned through strategies of coping with a site of difficult heritage (Gazimestan), as well as how such a site has served a role for individuals to position themselves on the nexus space/time in order to achieve a sense of belonging within a given place (Mostar). Here, I would like to expand the issue of temporality further, by looking at a case of prehistoric violence. Usually, prehistoric cases are avoided as a study of interest within the field of difficult heritage, a phenomenon which will be elaborated upon within the subsequent chapters. However, it became necessary to study Sandby borg, an Iron Age ring fort on the island of Öland, SE Sweden (Fig. 10.1), from the perspective of difficult heritage. In the fort, a brutal massacre occurred during the migration period, around the end of the fifth century AD. Soon after the excavation of the massacre started in 2011, a story circulated through media that the fort had formed an avoided place in the landscape within the local community, a carved out negative space, from the massacre up until present times. This part will focus on answering three main questions. The first one concerns why prehistoric violence has not been studied as a form of difficult heritage, in which comparisons to other cases will be made. The © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_10

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Fig. 10.1  Map is made by Jessica Bustamante. Photo used is taken by Sebastian Jacobsson. Map service by Google.

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second one concerns the alleged practice of avoidance, which will be examined through conducted interviews and thereafter theorized in connection to existing literature on memory and folklore. The third one concerns the site as difficult heritage. It will be examined in which ways Sandby borg, as a site of prehistoric violence, is experienced as difficult, when such a difficulty is being expressed, and how it may be used as a resource for developing and managing the site as heritage. The first chapter will provide a general background to Sandby borg, as well as my own theoretical and methodological approach to the above-­ mentioned questions. Thereafter, Sandby borg will be contextualized in comparison to other examples where incidents of violence can be traced to the distant past, in order to position the argument within a broader frame. In the second chapter, the results from the interviews carried out will be presented, in which focus will be placed upon the alleged practice of avoidance as well as on the site as a form of difficult heritage (or not). Furthermore, it will be discussed which kind of identities that the heritage of the massacre is negotiating within the local community, and their implications and potential for developing the site as a form of difficult heritage.

A Neglected Field of Study Despite an increased focus on the heritage connected to violence within recent archaeological research projects (see e.g. Schofield et  al. 2006; Saunders 2012; Kobiałka 2018; Seitsonen 2018), there has so far been no proper focus on the re-discovery of prehistoric massacres, from the perspective of difficult heritage. Considering the growing body of literature focusing on prehistoric violence (see e.g. Otto et al. 2006; Schulting and Fibiger 2012; Ralph 2013; Horn and Kristiansen 2018), studying these sites from the perspective of difficult heritage appears all the more relevant. The lack of such research is most likely because of an assumed temporality of such a heritage. The proverb that “time heals all wounds” may have been supporting a general assumption that research about difficult heritage in the distant past is superfluous. Therefore, the field has limited itself to sites of modern or contemporary sites of conflict, or merely reserved it for spectacular exceptions, such as the famous battle of Teutoburg forest, 9 AD, between Roman legions and Germanic tribes (see e.g. Baltrusch et al. 2012; Derks 2017), which will be examined in more detail later in this chapter. However, the excavation of the Iron Age ring

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fort Sandby borg (Fig. 10.2), located on Öland, south eastern Sweden, challenges the validity of such an a priori assumption of heritage. In 2011, a horrible massacre most likely consisting of several hundreds of individuals, including children, was discovered inside the ring fort of Sandby borg, which was in use during the fifth century AD. The massacre is currently being unearthed through excavations conducted by Kalmar County Museum starting from 2011 (Victor and Dutra Leivas 2011; Victor 2012, 2014, 2015; Victor et  al. 2013; Papmehl-Dufay and Alfsdotter 2014; Gunnarsson et al. 2015; Alfsdotter 2018; Alfsdotter et al. 2018). The individuals who were the unfortunate victims of this massacre are found on the streets or lying inside the houses, without any proper burials or treatment of the dead (Fig. 10.3). As of April 2020, approximately 30 individuals have been found, within an excavated area of 491 m2 out of 5000  m2, constituting only 9.8% of the whole fort (Fig.  10.4). Furthermore, the discovery of seven relief brooches of gilded silver (Fig. 10.5), most of them deliberately deposited in specific spots inside the

Fig. 10.2  Sandby borg. Photo: Sebastian Jacobsson. Courtesy of Kalmar County Museum.

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Fig. 10.3  Skeleton from Sandby borg. (Photo: Daniel Lindskog)

houses (Blohmé et  al. 2011; Victor 2015: 101–102; Fallgren and Ljungkvist 2016), as well as numerous other prestige objects including two Roman solidus and an elaborate gilded sword fitting, poses the question why the fort was never used again nor carefully plundered of its riches. Adding to these enigmas is a story which has been circulating through media and among the local population since the start of the site’s intervention, stating that the fort has been a place of avoidance in the landscape ever since the massacre, up until present times. These issues lead to poignant questions concerning violence, memory and landscapes. Consequently, this chapter will not focus on the specific details surrounding the Iron Age massacre (see instead Victor and Dutra Leivas 2011; Victor 2012, 2014, 2015; Victor et  al. 2013; Papmehl-Dufay and Alfsdotter 2014; Viberg et al. 2014; Gunnarsson et al. 2015; Alfsdotter 2018; Alfsdotter et  al. 2018). Instead, primary attention will be placed upon the implications for the site as present-day heritage, and on the intricate connection between violence, memory and landscapes.

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Fig. 10.4  Outlay of Sandby borg with areas excavated so far marked in red, as of March 2018. (Illustration: Helena Victor/Kalmar County Museum)

Violence, Memory and Landscapes A decision to focus on these connections are made, because massacres, such as the one discovered in Sandby borg, may fundamentally alter the relationship to a landscape. The research conducted in Mostar and Gazimestan shows how war and violence can affect the perceived stability and temporality of a particular place influencing the everyday life and the habits carried out. Even though there are only a few studies focusing more specifically on the memory of violence during prehistory (Goldhahn 2012), there is no reason to believe that this only relates to modern cases. Furthermore, these aspects are closely tied to the spatial and embodied dimensions of memory (Halbwachs 1980: 66; Connerton 1989). Violence may lead to a wave of memorials being built in a landscape, which causes an increase in activities and engagements (see, e.g., Duijzings 2007).

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Fig. 10.5  One of the relief brooches. Photo: Daniel Lindskog. Courtesy of Kalmar County Museum.

These practices often serve to regain a sense of closure and stability which enforce certain views of the past, while silencing those views which are regarded as unwanted. However, as was illustrated by the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo, violence may also lead to narratives of silence; to the neglect and avoidance of a particular landscape, forming what can be coined “places of avoidance” in the landscape or so-called “negative spaces”. Here, the memory of violence is maintained through incorporated (embodied) habits in the landscape. Such incorporated practices of avoidance may be actively chosen or they may be enforced. If we approach the excavation process as a transformative practice which alters the meaning we give to material culture (Lucas 2001), we have to ask ourselves what kind of role the rediscovery of a massacre may have for the local community. Certainly, for every excavation, new values and meanings are being created, leading to new engagements with the past. As Gavin Lucas phrased it: “The moment we put a pick in the ground, we are

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potentially bringing something new into the world, something that has never been seen before. Of course the objects we dig up were once part of another cultural system, but as soon we dig them up, they become something different because they enter a new cultural system” (Lucas 2001: 42). This is not a trivial statement, on the contrary, understanding and evaluating these newly created meanings and values are crucial when presenting and developing the site as heritage. Therefore, it becomes important to study what kind of meanings which have been created through the re-discovery of the massacre in Sandby borg. Following the theoretical framework outlined earlier, a particular focus will be placed upon the relationship to the landscape itself among the local population who grew up close to the ring fort.

Background The focus on Sandby borg from the perspective of difficult heritage became increasingly relevant, due to several visitors of the local populations from the nearby villages informing the excavating archaeologists that they had been told by their parents to avoid the fort as they grew up. These stories started to be narrated to archaeologists from the instance that the massacre was discovered in 2011 and has been prevailing up until today. It is mainly the older generation who has expressed these views (Gunnarsson et al. 2016: 9; however see Papmehl-Dufay and Söderström 2017). Even though the archaeologists excavating have been intrigued and fascinated by these stories, they have also been hesitant to accept them at face value without more thorough research carried out on the issue. Perhaps to no surprise, a more outspoken approach has often been taken by the different media outlets reporting the site (e.g. Von Reis 2014). In the Archaeology Magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America in February 2016, the following can be read: Whatever happened at Sandby borg seems to have left a lasting scar on the island. Villagers in nearby Gårdby remember being told by their parents not to play near the fort’s ruins, and, according to local legend, the town’s churchyard is haunted by ghosts from Sandby borg. (Curry 2016)

Despite the frequency of people telling archaeologists that they were avoiding the ring fort as kids, and the presence of this myth spread through media, there are no written records of such a practice within previous

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accounts. The first written descriptions of the ring fort (Rhezelius 1634; Hilfeling 1796; Sjöborg 1822; Ahlquist 1827) focus on the physical aspects of the fort, that is, especially on the amount of entrances and the visibility of house grounds. The immediate proximity to the sea has caused Sandby borg to be interpreted differently than other ring forts on Öland which are located inland and in many cases, even used up until medieval times with certain gaps in activity (for general information on the ring forts on Öland see Stenberger 1933: 213–252, 1966; Näsman 1984; Fallgren 2009). In 1972, the archaeologist Margareta Beskow writes the following about Sandby borg: These conditions [referring to the defence constructions directed inland] and the proximity just next to the sea give the impression that the defence has been directed towards an enemy coming from the inland, rather than a coastal intruder. Maybe it was not people from Öland that kept Sandby borg, but a foreign colony that had settled there? (Beskow 1972: 36, my translation)

The prevalence of seeing Sandby borg as an alien element in the Iron Age of Öland, possibly inhabited by foreigners, was also common among my interview partners, as will be presented later. The massacre seems to have occurred towards the end of the fifth century AD, a period characterized by the fall of Western Rome which decreased the influx of Roman solidus entering the island and leading to large-scale movements of people (Victor 2015: 115). Furthermore, the period after the massacre signified a considerable decrease in activity on the island of Öland (and other parts of Scandinavia), as well as what has been interpreted as a widespread and severe climate crisis, possibly starting at 536  AD (Gräslund and Price 2012). In terms of folklore surrounding Sandby borg, John Larsson, born in Södra Sandby in 1895, has produced our most reliable documentation. Larsson represented the Swedish National Heritage Board in the region, and in 1960, he wrote down his memories and knowledge about the Gårdby-Sandby community (Larsson 1960). Within this document, he elaborates on the stories he has collected surrounding Sandby borg, involving strange lights above the fort and the presence of trolls and small people. The most prevailing one is that of a wagon with gold that can be found inside the fort. In one interview carried out, I was told that the treasure can only be discovered if specific conditions are met, involving two white oxen, midnight and complete silence. Interestingly, the

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antiquarian Carl Gustav Gottfried Hilfeling writes in his journal in 1796, that a pot of “penningar” (coins) had been found in the fort a long time ago, which was still in the possession of a farmer in Fröslunda, Öland (Hilfeling 1796). Either the story of a wagon of gold within the fort could be based on this very discovery or the myth of a treasure may have been present already in 1796. Folklore about the possibility of finding treasure within archaeological remains or the presence of strange lights above them seem to be commonplace all over the world and may often be originating from medieval times (see, e.g., Burström 1993: 17–21; Gazin-Schwartz and Holtorf 1999a, b). Furthermore, it is fairly common that people who dig up archaeological remains searching for treasure are warned with stories, and these include threats of brutal punishments as consequence of their acts. This type of story seems to be especially common concerning prehistoric graves, and it may be based on a fear of ghosts coming back to haunt the living if disturbed (Zachrisson 1996: 100–102). In 2014, the archaeologist Sophie Vallulv went through all known written documents on Sandby borg prior to the start of excavating the site in 2011 and concludes that there are remarkably few stories written down about Sandby borg considering the huge impact the massacre must have had for the local community (Vallulv Forthcoming). We know that many of the approximately 20 forts on the island of Öland were used until medieval time. For instance, the only fully excavated ring fort on Öland, Eketorp, which is now reconstructed (Näsman 1984), as well as the largest ring fort on Öland, Gråborg (Stenberger 1933: 228–234) were both in use during early medieval times. The second phase (400–700 AD) of Eketorp, which is contemporary with the use of Sandby borg, bears close resemblance to Sandby borg in structure and outlay. The two forts have approximately the same number of houses and the same positioning of the houses within the fort (Näsman 1984: 38). This suggests an awareness of local traditions, as well as a willingness to follow them, in the construction of Sandby borg. Nevertheless, during the excavation in 2017, a surprising discovery of graves beneath Sandby borg was made, which adds complexity to the discussion of respecting or not respecting local traditions. As is presented in Ann-Mari Hållans Stenholm’s dissertation on the role of the past during the Iron Age in Mälardalen, Sweden, the construction of houses on top of older burials is uncommon during the Iron Age. One suggested reason for the lack of such a practice is that burials served a special role in the social memory, which was more important than the construction of new houses (Hållans-Stenholm 2012:

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204–205). The fact that the social memory of the underlying burials was not respected when building Sandby borg is certainly intriguing when discussing the adherence to local traditions, but further analysis of the burials needs to be carried out in order to achieve a clearer picture. The lack of activities in the fort after the massacre makes it relevant to question the kind of memory practices in the landscape that may have resulted in the avoidance of the fort. To bury individuals according to custom (the proper treatment of the body seems to have involved cremations during the migration period on Öland) must be regarded as exceptionally important (see also Hertz 1960; Bloch and Parry 1982; Oestigaard and Goldhahn 2006), leading the excavation leader Helena Victor to suggest that those who wished to bury the dead as per the customs may have been prevented from entering the fort by a physical presence on site. The interpretation is that it was the inhabitants in another ring fort on Öland who carried out the attack, perhaps as an act of vendetta, and that those responsible for the attack subsequently forbid individuals from entering the fort and bury the dead, as a form of manifestation within a terror balance (Victor 2015: 115). However, such a physical presence on site can only function to deter people from entering the fort for a limited time, and if we consider that the fort was never used again, it poses the question to what extent incorporated (embodied) practices in the landscape may have played a role in making people avoid Sandby borg.

Method As a member of the Sandby borg project (Sandby borg: http://www. sandbyborg.se/), I investigated the links between memory, violence and landscapes by conducting interviews with people who grew up close to the ring fort. Other aspects of developing Sandby borg as heritage have been studied through target groups by Bodil Petersson and Carolina Jonsson Malm at Linnaeus University and Kalmar County Museum. Furthermore, Fredrik Gunnarsson at the Kalmar County Museum is working on the digital communication of Sandby borg (Gunnarsson et  al. 2016; Gunnarsson 2018). In preparing the fieldwork, I worked closely with the excavation leader Helena Victor who initially suggested people to interview. The interviews were all carried out in the summer of 2016. Every person interviewed usually had further recommendations of people, making it possible to move from one person to the next one, a so-called snowball method. The area

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around Sandby borg is not densely populated, and my general focus was on the people who were born there and who had spent a long life living around the fort, that is, the older generation. This selection was based on two reasons: (1) it was primarily the older generation who had expressed to archaeologists that they were told to avoid the fort as kids, and (2) the older generation often conveyed a larger degree of interest in the local history and heritage. However, in particular cases, younger people were also interviewed. The interview data consists of 21 individuals interviewed in 14 sessions. I choose to stop interviewing people when individuals started to repeatedly suggest the same people to interview. Each interview lasted in general between one and two hours and they were all carried out in Swedish. The transcripts presented are translated into English by myself. Furthermore, every interview included additional questions depending on the specific dynamic of each interview. It was also of interest to me, to allow everyone to discuss Sandby borg from the point of their own interests as well, without unnecessarily directing the conversation. In such a way, I was given insights into which aspects they valued (or did not value) about Sandby borg, and which perspectives they had on the site as heritage more generally.

Working with Sandby borg As part of the Sandby borg team, I choose not to conduct formal interviews with the other team members. Instead, I noted from regular conversations and observations during fieldwork how the other team members as well as myself are dealing with Sandby borg as a site of difficult heritage, and in which cases we find Sandy borg difficult to present, excavate or work with. The fact that I am part of the team, highlights that the team finds the ethical aspect concerning this site important and that its members are interested in exploring ways to develop it. During excavations, the team members are often reminding each other that the place of excavation is in fact a “crime scene” and that a large degree of respect has to be shown towards the dead. Despite this, it is very easy to get carried away while excavating by the sheer abundance of extra-ordinary finds, and the spectacular circumstances surrounding the massacre. In such cases, it is easy to forget that it is a massacre of most likely hundreds of individuals that we are unearthing, and the atmosphere is often easy-going and lighthearted despite the gruesome finds. However, it becomes especially uncomfortable when skeletons of children are found, representing reminders of the

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fact that these people were brutally murdered. I, for one, remember the feeling of nausea that hit me when I found the tooth of a child for the first time, a feeling which arose suddenly and unexpectedly. I also know that other team members expressed similar feelings and concerns. It is, in many ways, a difficult site to excavate, and one of the difficulties may lie precisely in the way the feelings of excitement and joy collide with horror and nausea. Excavating Sandby borg is an experience of contradictory feelings, where excitement co-mingle with horror. During excavations, there are at least two guided tours each week. These are all very well attended showcasing the large degree of interest in Sandby borg. When guiding the site, the general attitude among the team is to present things “as they are” without sugar coating them, and it is often noted that visitors react in an uncomfortable way towards the discoveries, especially when the death of children is brought up. In addition, there has been numerous presentations all over Sweden and Europe, as well as TV reports in Swedish television, for example in Vetenskapens Värld 2014 (SVT 2014) and in Vikingarnas Tid 2017 (SVT 2017), both aired on SVT (the Swedish public service television company). Furthermore, a program about the discovery was aired on the American Smithsonian Channel in 2019 (Smithsonian Channel 2019). Projects targeted specifically towards the local community have been initiated, one of them being aimed at school children in the nearby school Gårdby, funded by the Swedish Arts Council, within the national program Culture for Children. Here, ways of linking Sandby borg to the everyday reality of the children in Gårdby became essential. Also, ethical questions were especially sensitive when working with young people. The team members chose to adopt different approaches depending on the age of the children, with the youngest group (6–8  years) focusing on issues of time and on objects one would hide if one had to quickly run away from home. The focus of the second youngest group (9–10  years)  was on long-distance trade and contacts across cultures and languages. This discussion was subsequently related to the relevant issue of migration in the present. It was only within the oldest group (11–12 years) where issues specifically dealing with violence and values were being brought up: During the classroom visit, discussions focused on questions around values and violence: what sort of conflicts have we experienced? What can be done to prevent them from escalating and what conflicts could possibly result in such a violent sequence of events as the one documented at Sandby borg. This ­discussion

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led to a follow-up debate on how to be a good friend and how to be respectful to others. As a final task the students were asked to continue the storytelling of Sandby borg, exploring what actually happened during and after the massacre. (Papmehl-Dufay and Söderström 2017)

Here, we can note how a horrible massacre may be presented to school children in order to serve as an incentive for a discussion of values, friendships and violence, and in this way breaking down any clear-cut temporal borders between the distant past and the present time. It can be argued that it was through breaking down these temporal borders that the site became meaningful for the children. A similar attempt of breaking down temporal borders has been adopted when exhibiting the finds from the excavation. The exhibition at Kalmar County Museum has been aiming to link Sandby borg with more recent cases of violence in the world. Accordingly, the first information sign of the exhibition, as it was presented in 2018, states the following: Massacres have followed human beings throughout history up until modern times. One recent example: in 1989 students in Beijing demonstrated for democracy. The demonstration was peaceful, but the Chinese army killed and wounded 3000 of the participants. The leaders in China showed what happens to those who do not keep silent and do not follow orders! Each massacre has its causes. We archaeologists are now excavating a 1500 year old massacre in Sandby borg on Öland. Who were the victims? Why did they have to die? (My own translation from Swedish)

In addition, the floor of the exhibited area has the same positioning of some of the bodies found outlined as when they were discovered during excavations (Fig. 10.6). This resembles crime scenes that many visitors are most likely familiar with from police movies seen on television. These aspects of the exhibition are there to make Sandby borg more immediately relatable as a horrible incident to the visitors, in which they can relate it to experiences which occurred during their own life-time as well as to movies they have seen on television. Furthermore, there is a discussion within the team as to whether the skeletons of the victims should be exhibited or not, and if there may be an ethical dilemma involved in displaying the skeletons of the victims in the museum. Currently, the skeletons are not displayed, but this may change with future exhibitions (see Nilsson Stutz 2016 for a discussion on the ethics involved in the exhibition of human remains). All

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Fig. 10.6  Body outlined on the floor of the Sandby borg exhibition, January 2018. (Photo: GW)

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these perspectives affirm that Sandby borg can be regarded as a difficult heritage site to manage and present, involving several ethical questions which are neither self-evident nor unproblematic. Furthermore, many of these questions are directly or indirectly related to the produced temporalities of the distant past. Therefore, in the next section I will discuss how archaeology provides a sense of temporal distance.

Archaeology as a Provider of Temporal Distance I find it relevant to study a site of difficult heritage, such as Sandby borg, from the different spatial/temporal relations that can be traced within the narratives constructed. As was highlighted through the chapters on the Gazimestan monument, the mechanisms of producing temporal distance or proximity are crucial when analysing the engagements people have towards difficult heritage. However, the process of producing temporal distance has implications for how the heritage is negotiated. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian has shown that the practice of temporally dislocating people into a time other than now, has served a role in a process of “Othering”, within the discipline of anthropology. As Fabian states it: “When popular opinion identifies all anthropologists as handlers of bones and stones it is not in error; it grasps the essential role of anthropology as a provider of temporal distance” (Fabian 2014: 30). It would be safe to say that Fabian here includes archaeology as a sub-field to anthropology within the four-field approach common in the United States. Providing temporal distance may be particularly convenient in the context of massacres including uncomfortable emotions and engagements with the past. Whether it be convenient or not, such a temporal distance carries implications with it. As stated by Fabian, anthropology is burdened by the inheritance of theories based on a dichotomy between the West and the Rest: The distance between the West and the Rest on which all classical anthropological theories have been predicated is by now being disputed in regard to almost every conceivable aspect (…). There remains “only” the all-­pervading denial of coevalness which ultimately is expressive of a cosmological myth of frightening magnitude and persistency. It takes imagination and courage to picture what would happen to the West (and to anthropology) if its temporal fortress were suddenly invaded by the Time of its Other. (Fabian 2014: 35)

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So, following Fabian, if the “Other” is denied coevalness, that is, the time of the “Now”, what then, is the past and its “inhabitants” denied? Predominantly, present-day hunter gatherer societies have been studied as living fossils from the past, and within the sub-field of ethnoarchaeology they have repeatedly been used in order to analyse and understand past hunter/gatherer societies, through the use of analogies (see Gosselain 2016: 219; Hamilakis 2016). In other words: the way the past has been studied in anthropology, suggests that the past is not necessarily confined to the past as such, but may also exist in specific present spaces, and consequently in specific future spaces as well. Past, present and future becomes a matter of an assumed stage of “development”. This highly linear and seemingly determined stages of development, that is, from hunter/gatherer to farmers, from chiefdoms to civilizations and so on, is so ingrained in the way the “Other” is defined and sustained, both in time and space, that it demands a large degree of effort and critical thinking in deconstructing these boundaries. Perhaps David Lowenthal explained it most clearly, in stating that the past is made into a foreign country, similar to how the “Other” is always somewhere and someone else. However, Lowenthal continues with stating that, even though the past is a foreign country in which people did things differently, the relics from the past should not be confined to such a space. As elegantly expressed by Lowenthal: “The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place, as I have argued. But their past is not simply back there, in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present” (Lowenthal 1985: 412). Lowenthal states that the past permeates and saturates our every action and perception. An individual can neither act nor feel without the influence of previous actions and previous feelings (Lowenthal 1985: 185). Violence creates feelings and engagements with heritage where temporal distance may be beneficial in that emotional attachment can be kept at a minimum level, making the experience less emotionally “challenging” to digest. Archaeology as a provider of temporal distance has been regarded as a beneficial for disarming the politically loaded history of sites, as put forward by Burström et al., when conducting archaeology at former missile sites in Cuba: Since archaeology is generally associated with deep time, it can be used to transform a recent and problematic history into a seemingly distant past.

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This transformation makes it possible to look at the crisis with new eyes. (Burström et al. 2009: 300)

However, there are two sides to the coin, and there may also be cases when providing temporal distance is not desirable. Instead, it may be insightful to focus on social and cultural processes that are shared across space and time in order to make heritage inclusive rather than exclusive (Holtorf 2017a, b). Ultimately, concerning heritage connected to violence specifically, the question posed here is whether there is a potential to use such sites to challenge both temporal and spatial boundaries to induce emotional attachment that transcends “Us” and “the Other”, without falling into the trap of projecting contemporary values and norms upon past people (Tringham 2019).

Folklore and Archaeology The approach to temporality and difficult heritage seems to be different when studying indigenous heritage, in which the distinction between the distant and the recent past appears to be of less relevance specifically concerning the emotional impact of the site (see, e.g., McMillin 2006; Scarre and Scarre 2006). This may be based on the common notion that “indigenous” people have a different way of relating to the past, and thus to temporality, than that of the “Western”, which also has to be respected within heritage management (Gazin-Schwartz and Holtorf 1999a: 17). This may be a valid assertion, but it is also crucial to recognize that a distinction between “Western” and “indigenous” may neither be a clear-cut nor self-evident dichotomy as regards to, for example, temporality. Instead there may be benefits in approaching the processes of making heritage meaningful as a form ontological pluralism in order “to acknowledge the heterogeneity between and across these various domains of practice which undermines and complicates such simple dichotomies (…)” (Harrison 2015: 28). In other words, it is not self-evident why temporality should be seen as gradually decreasing the difficulty concerning European heritage but not concerning heritage in other parts of the world. After all, also within Europe there exists a wide array of different attitudes towards the past, of which the so-called “enlightened academic way” only represents one out of many others (Gazin-Schwartz and Holtorf 1999a: 17). Such an assertion can be directly related to the Sandby borg case study. Folklore is an attitude towards the past which is often regarded as

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unscientific and thus as an alternative to academic approaches. In fact, folklore and archaeology got separated with the birth of archaeology as a distinct academic discipline during the nineteenth century. Subsequently, archaeology and folklore came to be developed with often contradictory attitudes towards time. As argued by Mats Burström: “While dating and chronology are essential in archaeology, they are of minor importance in folklore tradition” (Burström 1999: 33). This has led many archaeologists to be either disdainful or negligent towards folk traditions. Nevertheless, the stories told around the past and its archaeological remains are part of the processes which make the heritage meaningful for people. It is around 1500 years since the gruesome massacre in Sandby borg occurred. If the alleged long-term avoidance of the place is as old as the massacre, it poses significant questions surrounding the transmission of memories. There has been a considerable amount of debate surrounding how long a memory, for instance, concerning a specific turbulent incident such as a massacre, can be held “intact” through generations without the use of written means (Vansina 1985; Nunn and Reid 2015). The historian Roger Echo-Hawk states that it has to vary between contexts, and continues with the mind boggling assertion that information surrounding specific events cannot go further back than 40,000 years (Echo-Hawk 2000: 274). On a similar note, Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid (2015) have argued that stories surrounding the rising sea level among the Aboriginals in Australia, can possibly be referring to approximately 7000 years back in time, when the sea level reached its current stage. However, there are also anthropological studies pinpointing how oral traditions are always in transformation and are therefore never fixed or static; they inevitably change since they are part of a living tradition (Barth 1987). Based on the need to scientifically approach folk traditions, different methods of evaluating the longevity of such traditions have been developed (Vansina 1985), but these seldom focus on incorporating practices, such as a practice of avoidance, but instead on the transmission of oral stories. When post-processual archaeology became increasingly influential in the 80s and 90s, folk traditions were yet again considered of scientific value. However, the focus had radically shifted. Instead of studying folk traditions in order to find out information about the past, and thus proving or disproving the accuracy within the oral traditions, there was a desire to recognize other ways of making archaeology meaningful than the academic way, and in such a way create a dialogue about the past and move towards a more inclusive archaeology (Layton 1999: 31). As Amy

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Gazin-Schwartz and Cornelius Holtorf expressed it: “(…) when meaning is taken as the most significant aspect of folklore, the question of its authenticity becomes moot: if it has become part of the folk tradition about the past, it is part of that tradition whether or not its origins are in literature or commercial invention” (Gazin-Schwartz and Holtorf 1999a: 12). This approach went hand in hand with a general criticism in archaeological theory towards only considering the construction of monuments and their initial phases as meaningful, while neglecting subsequent uses and meanings, that is, to disregard the full life-history of archaeological remains (Holtorf 2000–2008; Bradley 2002). Thus, in order to paint a more fair and complete picture of the meaning behind heritage, also folk traditions, no matter their possible historical accuracy, should be taken into consideration.

A Notable Exception Before we undertake an engagement with the results from the interviews, it is necessary to discuss why difficult heritage has been restricted to modern times, and by so doing contextualize Sandby borg. As previously mentioned, there are notable exceptions and the most prominent case is that of the battle of Teutoburg forest, east of the city of Bielefeld, Germany. In order to disentangle the processes leading this case to be studied as difficult heritage, it may be worthwhile to examine it in more detail. The battle occurred in 9 AD, between Germanic and Roman legions, in which the Roman legions led by Varus lost against the Germanic tribes led by Arminius. The battle has been mythologized as a decisive loss for the Roman Empire and hindering their occupation of the more northern Germanic territories, even though the actual extent of its historical importance is debated (Baltrusch et al. 2012). The battle is mentioned in ancient Roman sources, and in terms of possible memory-practices after the battle, the account written by Publius Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 55–120 AD) in his Annales (Tacitus 2012: section 1:60–62) is particularly relevant. Intriguingly, Tacitus mentions accounts of the Roman general Germanicus visiting the battle site and how the head of Roman soldiers had been nailed to trees, as well as the presence of an altar where tribunes and first-rank centurions had been immolated (Tacitus 2012: section 1:61). Of course, we cannot accept these words uncritically since Tacitus was born approximately 50 years after the battle, but they may suggest that the place of the battle served a function afterwards for rituals as well as for other purposes,

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and thus, that incorporating practices within the landscape of the battle were playing a role in memory practices. Excavations at the site have been able to shed some more light into post-war activities at the battlefield, signalling a widespread looting of the dead or dying Roman soldiers (Wilbers-Rost and Rost 2009; see also Meyer 2018). However, arguably, the process which has caused the battle of Teutoburg forest to be discussed as difficult heritage is not because of what actually occurred in or immediately following the battle, but due to it being increasingly politicized and mythologized during the nineteenth century building of the German nation up until the fall of Nazi Germany. This included the building of a monument for Arminius (also known by the “German” name Hermann), completed in 1875, four years after the official proclamation of a unified Germany. Furthermore, the battle was also mythologized in Nazi Germany in which it was used for propaganda purposes with Hitler visiting it (Baltrusch et al. 2012; Derks 2017). Based on these observations, it becomes safe to say that it is the usage of the battle for nationalistic purposes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that has caused it to be researched as a form of difficult heritage, similar to how the previously addressed myth of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Field became mythologized in Serbia during the nineteenth century by Serbian folklorists such as Vuk Karadzić and used for nationalistic purposes up until today, primarily during Vidovdan. However, contrary to the Battle of Kosovo Field, the battle of Teutoburg forest largely lost its political significance after WWII (Derks 2017: 172). Both these cases can be understood in the light of the concept of invented traditions, mentioned earlier, a concept introduced by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Osborn Ranger (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), in which they argue that within the birth of nationalism during the nineteenth century, there were widespread attempts of “inventing traditions” through political institutions claiming an ancient and self-given origin of the novel construction of the nation. As Hobsbawm phrases it in the introduction to the volume: “modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so “natural” as to require no definition other than self-assertion” (Hobsbawm 1983a: 14). Within the process of inventing traditions, Hobsbawm recognizes three major ones: the development of a secular equivalent of the church, the invention of public ceremonies and the mass production of public monuments (Hobsbawm 1983b: 271). It is within the third

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category Hobsbawm places the construction of the monument to the battle of Teutoburg forest, alongside three other monuments in Germany: Buildings and monuments were the most visible form of establishing a new interpretation of German history or rather a fusion between the older romantic ‘invented tradition’ of pre-1848 German nationalism and the new regime: the most powerful symbols being those where the fusion was achieved. Thus, the mass movement (…) took to its heart three monuments whose inspiration was basically not official: the monument to Arminius the Cheruscan in the Teutoburg Forest (much of it constructed as early as 1838-46, and inaugurated in 1875); the Niederwald monument above the Rhine, commemorating the unification of Germany in 1871 (1877-83); and the centenary memorial of the battle of Leipzig, initiated in 1894 (…) and inaugurated in 1913. (Hobsbawm 1983b: 274–275)

It is certainly no coincidence that all these three memorials—the monument to Arminius, the Niederwald monument and the memorial of the battle of Leipzig—are commemorating battles. After all, it is the imagined battle for the German nation itself that is being manifested metaphorically through these monuments. Ingeniously, these three memorials implicitly link the 9  AD battle of Teutoburg forest with two nineteenth-century battles, in such a way creating a linear narrative of a German struggle for a nation that has been prevailing for 1900 years. These are examples of how temporal proximity to heritage can be actively produced within the strengthening of the idea of the nation as a self-given and natural community (Anderson 1983). In other words, the invention of traditions during the nineteenth and twentieth century serves to explain why there has been a focus on it as difficult heritage despite the temporal distance to the battle.

Sandby borg as an “Open” Site In the case of Sandby borg we lack written sources, and there are very few studies focusing on memory-practices after prehistoric violence to use as references. Perhaps the lack of focus can be explained due to the difficulty in discussing memory practices with only material culture as a source (however see Jantzen et al. 2011; Goldhahn 2012; Lidke et al. 2015 for interesting examples). Prehistoric violence is often focused from the perspective of the possible processes which lead up to the violence, and on the

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event of violence itself, but on the other hand, the aftermath and memory of violence is being largely neglected within previous research. This is surprising, considering the amount of ceremonial activities that evidently follow many prehistoric battles, especially during the Iron Age as is illustrated through such sites as Alken Enge in Denmark (Mollerup et al. 2016) and Ribemont-sur-Ancre in France (Brunaux et  al. 1999; Brunaux 2018; Pérez Rubio 2018). Furthermore, the impact that a rediscovery of a prehistoric massacre is having on the local community has not been subject of a thorough examination. What makes Sandby borg stand out in comparison to many other discovered prehistoric massacres in Europe1 is the lack of post-mortem treatment of the bodies except for some possible acts of dehumanizing the individuals (see also Alfsdotter 2019)—not even a mass grave was prepared—and the subsequent avoidance of the fort in the landscape despite its potential future usefulness for defence purpose. Therefore, it is beneficial to examine closer how the lack of burials and treatment of the dead have affected Sandby borg as a form of difficult heritage. In fact, when understanding the impact of Sandby borg in the local community, the social significance of burials is still relevant. This realization became evident through the interviews carried out with the local population. Indeed, the lack of post-mortem treatment of the bodies, including the possibility of the fort forming an embodied spatial taboo within the local landscape, was one of the aspects of Sandby borg that was both intriguing and disturbing the local population the most. As this pensioner in his mid-60s informed me: It’s exactly that period [the years after the attack] that interests me the most. In the past they used to take care of … I mean, they used to bury people. There must be someone there who should have buried them or taken them away, and not simply let them stay there. Take the first ten to twenty years afterwards. It must have been horrendous [the sight and the stench].

In order to understand the significance in the lack of burials of the victims in Sandby borg, it may be worthwhile to analyse it from the perspective of anthropological research concerning the social significance of burials in society, as was recently put forward in an article by the 1  It is beyond the scope of this book to present the many other cases of prehistoric massacres in detail, but several excellent edited volumes have been published recently dealing with prehistoric warfare and violence: Otto et al. (2006), Schulting and Fibiger (2012), Ralph (2013), Horn and Kristiansen (2018).

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osteologist Clara Alfsdotter (2019), particularly drawing on the classical research of Robert Hertz (1960), Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1982). According to Hertz’s anthropological work, burial rituals often function to recover peace for society, in order for society to triumph over death (Hertz 1960: 86). Death is thus irrevocably linked to life and resurrection (Hertz 1960: 79), both for the society as a whole, as well as for the deceased individual, and his/her possible afterlife. However, all deaths are not equal. The death of a chief and the death of a slave will be met with different reactions and ritualized practices (Hertz 1960: 76). Furthermore, the stage after the death of the individual and before the finalization of the ritual, constitutes a form of intermediate stage: “Thus, if a certain period is necessary to banish the deceased from the land of the living, it is because society, disturbed by the shock, must gradually regain its balance” (Hertz 1960: 82). In the context of Sandby borg, the crucial aspect lies in the pronounced difference between a “good” or a “bad” death, determining the type of burial rituals carried out (Alfsdotter 2019; see also Bloch and Parry 1982: 15–18). According to the study of Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1982: 15–18), a “good” death is the kind of death where a degree of mastery over the arbitrariness of death can be maintained, thus leading to the regeneration of the society and for the individual. In contrast, bad deaths are those which demonstrate a lack of control and do not lead to the regeneration of the deceased in the afterlife, and is regarded to represent “the loss of regenerative potential” (Bloch and Parry 1982: 16). A violent, brutal and sudden death may be an example of a so-called “bad” death, demanding specific forms of rites and care for the dead. Hertz states the gloomy realization that “death has no end” (Hertz 1960: 85) for the deceased, if the balance pursued through the practice of rituals is not attained. For example, among the Merina in Madagascar, a “bad” death includes those where the body cannot be found and thus not buried properly. In such cases, death is terminal (Bloch and Parry 1982: 15). The massacre in Sandby borg represents the “bad” death of most likely hundreds of people. Furthermore, there were no attempts of burials or “caring” for the dead, so vital in regaining the balance shook by such violent deaths. The bodies were simply left to lay where they fell; to be eaten by animals, to gradually rot and ultimately be covered by soil and the collapsing houses. In many ways, such a lack of post-mortem treatments, not even a mass grave was prepared, marks the ultimate denial of regeneration.

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This constitutes an act of terror not only directed towards those killed, but also towards the possible regeneration of their society as a whole. The gruesome scene in Sandby borg immediately after the massacre is often mentioned to me during interviews, and people tend to envision pictures of animals gnawing on human bones, and mentions the horrible stench that must have been prevailing inside the fort for a considerable amount of time. One man in his late 60s, apparently very affected by the scenes he is imagining, said the following after expressing that he would rather prefer if the archaeologists would stop excavating the site, prompting my following remark: GW: But at the same time this is no grave, they have been murdered. Yes, it’s open. But I think about the beginning, right? I think about when it happened and the years that passed. The winter is coming and the snow is covering [the fort]. Spring comes and the birds come and chop out their eyes and whatever they may find. There were foxes and badges back then as well. Hedgehogs. They take what remains. But the bones … it’s possible that there were some foxes. I know, dogs were running loose. They ran around. You may find an arm somewhere further out into the nature. Yes…

The initial response “Yes, it’s open” is a highly revealing line of reasoning. After all, open suggests that the site is not “closed”, and is therefore, in such a way, still present and relevant. Such a response has to be seen within the context of the social significance of burials in society, outlined above. If the individuals had been buried, no matter how hastily, the situation would most likely have been perceived to be different, and the site would not have been regarded as “open”. Indeed, burials aim to achieve a sense of “closure” in order for both the deceased to move on into an afterlife, as well as for those mourning to proceed from an “intermediate” stage to the next one (Hertz 1960; Gennep 1960). Consequently, “open” connects to the so-called “intermediate” stage as discussed by Hertz (1960: 82), suggesting that the massacred individuals in Sandby borg are still approached by the man interviewed above as being in the stage between biological death and the closure achieved through burial rituals. It is certainly interesting that despite the fact that 1500 years have passed, a distinction between “open” and “closed” deaths are maintained. Seen in this light, temporal passing has made little difference. It is within the context of a lack of post-mortem treatment of the bodies in Sandby borg, strongly indicating a subsequent avoidance of the fort

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in the landscape, where Sandby borg contrasts to many other cases of discovered prehistoric massacres in Europe, and it is one reason for the necessity to study it as a form of difficult heritage in the first place. However, as we will see in the next chapter, there are also other reasons for such an engagement to the heritage of Sandby borg. In conclusion, the fact that the fort was never used again after the incident and the bodies never buried, is a phenomenon which does not only interest and perplexes archaeologists, but also intrigues, and sometimes disturbs, the local population to a large degree. This leads us to present the perspective of the local population in more detail, and in the next chapter, the results from the interviews conducted within the project will be presented and analysed.

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CHAPTER 11

A Place of Avoidance and Belonging

In this chapter, analysis from the interviews carried out will be presented. I will look at what kind of responses and values that a prehistoric massacre is negotiating to the local community. I will also discuss general attitudes to the alleged practice of avoidance and what they might signify. Furthermore, I will focus on whether the site is being perceived as difficult or not, and if so, when such a difficulty is being expressed. By so doing, I aim to discuss the way different temporalities function to stimulate diverse engagements with a site of difficult heritage. Finally, I will analyse which forms of identities that a site of a prehistoric massacre, such as Sandby borg, is drawing upon and contributing to within the local community. What initially drew me to carry out the interviews was the alleged practice of avoidance, and the possibility of a so-called “scar” in the landscape (see Storm 2014: 3–8 for a theoretical discussion of the scar metaphor within landscapes) prevailing for more than 1500 years. Such a phenomena would emphasize that the incorporating practices of memory are at least as significant as the inscribing practices, if not more so. Currently, we do not know if there were any forms of deliberate physical reminders of the massacre left in the landscape after the massacre (Victor 2015: 115), which may also have served a role to remind people for a certain amount of time. When I interviewed people, I chose not to pose a direct question about avoidance, but instead asked more general questions concerning how it was to grow up near the fort and what kind of stories they may or may not have heard. Nevertheless, I soon came to realize that the issue of © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_11

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avoidance was often one of the first aspects people mentioned whether any questions relating to it or not were being asked. In some cases, it was even brought up during the phone call in which I asked if the person wanted to be interviewed or not. Consequently, the alleged practice of a long-term avoidance is very well-known among the local population. In fact, not a single person interviewed was not aware of it, but, as we will see, another question is whether they already knew about it before the Sandby borg project was widely reported on in the media. Furthermore, it was an issue that clearly intrigued and fascinated the people who grew up near the fort. Despite the myth of avoidance being known among every individual interviewed, it was highly disputed. Indeed, a majority of those interviewed actively contested that such a practice of avoidance had ever existed. As this man in his mid-60s, living in Skarpa Alby, told me: GW: Did you ever go to Sandby borg? (…) I was over there [as a kid]. And we were down at the fort as well. But I don’t remember anything about any stories. About ghosts or anything else. (…) Those stories seem to have been invented in the present … I was about to say. GW: In the present? Yes, you hear a lot more now. Once the fort became hotter. But what is … I don’t know. [sounding sceptical] GW: In which circumstances do you hear this? Yes, now people say that it was one of those places that no one dared go to, and all kind of things. But there was nothing like that when we grew up.

This can be understood as a counter-reaction to the widespread myth of avoidance. In most cases, the interview partner continues with mentioning his/her own nostalgia-tinged memories of visiting the place as a kid, which often involves playing in the fort, swimming in the water outside the fort, and spending precious time with family and friends. For several people living nearby, it seems to have been a favourite location, not necessarily for the sake of the ring fort itself, but for the beautiful nature, the sea and the possibility of finding some privacy in contrast to the more frequently visited swimming and sunbathing destinations further north. These memories are mentioned to me, as if they are threatened and have to be defended. This may not be surprising considering how these memories contrast with the picture often presented in media (e.g. Von Reis 2014; Curry 2016), in which pictures of a scarred and avoided landscape

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are singled out. This has even led some people to conduct their own research on the question, including calling other friends who also grew up close to the fort. As this male pensioner, who has been highly engaged in the local community during his life, explained to me: Yes, as I told you, as a small kid I lived over there, and stayed there. But this … that you were supposed to keep away from the fort, I never heard anything about that. And I have asked older people as well, who have lived nearby, and they haven’t heard it [either]. (…) GW: Where have you heard this? Yes, it is a myth that has come forward, right. That this massacre existed in oral tradition, throughout all these centuries. But that is simply impossible. I don’t believe in it.

There were even individuals who suggested that the archaeologists themselves had invented the “myth” of long-term avoidance in order to gain publicity for their research. Henning West, who was the local priest in the 50s and early 60s, allegedly staged religious sermons in the fort on several occasions, such as on Ascension Day. Furthermore, in August 1959 he staged a theatre play in the fort named “Hemkomsten” (Homecoming), taking place during the Viking Age and including Christian messages (West 1959; Nilsson 2009). The theatre play was very well attended and most people I interviewed remember it or have heard of it, and in some cases even played a role in it. Additionally, several people interviewed mention that the church in Sandby, completed in 1863, was built using stones from Sandby borg. Adding to these religious connotations, I also interviewed one woman, now in her mid-40s, who got married in the fort in 2005. The woman grew up south of Gårdby, and her parents were also from the region. She expressed it in the following way: I wanted to be there because I didn’t want to be as everyone else, and my husband is an archaeologist (…) and to convince an archaeologist you have to pick a fort. And then we decided to find a beautiful spot on Öland (…) and Sandby borg is super-super beautiful. But now, in hindsight, I am super happy that we stand on top of the wall, towards the water. So we haven’t been standing on any dead person.

These examples do not rule out that there might have been a long-term practice of avoidance occurring as well. After all, I did interview people

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who had been told to avoid the fort as kids, but it is worth mentioning in this context that the fort is known for having a large number of snakes and the water outside of the fort gets deep very fast. It would therefore be reasonable for parents to tell their kids not to play in the fort. Furthermore, those with most knowledge about the local history were also the ones most sceptical about a practice of long-term avoidance.

The Birth of Narratives It is impossible to either rule out or prove that such an embodied practice of avoidance has been present up until today. Yet, it is clear that a myth of long-term avoidance is much more known now than before the start of excavation in 2011. When asked about their memories from Sandby borg, most people described the place using the terms “the memory is the same no matter my age, it simply existed there” or “it is a place that has always been there”. For most people, it was a taken-for-granted place that was “simply there” and connected to beautiful nature and personal memories from friends, siblings, parents or grandparents. If we analyse this through the concept of chronotopes outlined previously, this is a chronotope that exists in a continuous and never-changing present, a chonotope which is located close at home, within a beautiful landscape, connected to friends and family, happy memories, a time which is moving at a very slow pace of peaceful tranquility. To analyse it further, this chronotope represents a time and a place which is connected to the feeling of belonging for my individual partners. However, with the start of excavation and the birth of a widespread circulation of a story about long-term avoidance, people suddenly seem to feel a need to defend this chronotope to me, as if to give legitimacy and value to their own happy recollections of visiting the site. The narrative of long-term avoidance can be seen in the light of violence being an act with the potential to disrupt narratives and feelings of continuity. This aspect was also evident through the results from Mostar, in which violence did not only disrupt a sense of place but also a sense of time. Evidently, violence is an act which is especially emotionally disruptive, with the capability to “produce long-term ontological changes in the subject” (González-Ruibal and Hall 2015: 152). However, there are several different forms of violence (ŽiŽek 2007: 8–13) involving different emotional responses, with the potential to both sunder narratives and create new ones in the process. This needs to be taken into consideration when analysing the narratives surrounding Sandby borg, while keeping in

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mind that even the re-discovery of a massacre creates new narratives and engagements with the past. For instance, while conducting excavations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Alfredo González-­ Ruibal came to the realization that “people grant bones an extraordinary agency: bones can derail history, at least history of the pacified kind” (González-Ruibal 2017: 284). Based on my interview data, one possible explanation may be that the re-discovery of such a gruesome massacre led some people to give new meanings to previous memories of visiting the site, that is, of re-interpreting the meaning of previous memories. These new meanings were spread through media and led to a widespread narrative of a long-term avoidance, which in turn is challenged by a majority of those interviewed, who do not feel it corresponds to their own childhood memories. It certainly shows that the discovery of the massacre in Sandby borg has created new myths as well as new relationships to the past and to the landscape, and these have not been accepted freely but there are areas of contestation.

Difficult Heritage This leads us to the poignant question of how the local population related to the discovery of the heritage of the recently unearthed massacre. Did they perceive it as difficult, and if so, how and when was this difficulty expressed? The bride, for one, did seem to worry about where she had been standing during her wedding ceremony, retrospectively. When asked how they reacted when they got to know about the discovery, the most common response was “fantastic”, “exciting” or “very fun”. Later on in the interview, when I asked whether people found the discovery of the massacre somehow uncomfortable, difficult or unpleasant, the most common response was of surprise. Many people even told me that they had never thought about the site as difficult at all, and often people responded as if the sheer question was asked in the wrong way. For example, this elderly man currently living in Färjestaden, seemed to be perplexed by the idea: GW: Did the discovery of the massacre ever feel unpleasant? No, I have never reflected on that … No, I have not. GW: Because it was a long time ago, maybe? Well, it is normal that you discover dead bodies. Not that many in the same place, perhaps, but I was on the excavation and I was looking at the

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skeletons there, and I took a good photo … but I have never made any kind of special reflection upon it. No. Partly because it was a long time ago, and also, as the girl [the guide] said, we didn’t know them. [laughter] So no, I can’t say I have.

Contrary to feelings of difficulty, I noted a great deal of engagement and excitement, especially when trying to interpret the event, but also related to the bodies themselves, as this elderly woman living in Gårdby, expressed to me: GW: Do you think there is something unpleasant in the discovery as well, or is it more exciting? No, I didn’t find it unpleasant. But I found it so fantastic that these bodies have been lying there for all these years. It was not far below the surface! I found that amazing. [Showing me photos of skeletons that she took]

Cornelius Holtorf has been studying how the archaeologist is commonly portrayed in popular culture as detectives (Holtorf 2007: 75–84), and I noted that people could carry on for a long time trying to come up with theories, in some ways taking the role as archaeological detectives themselves. Of course, sometimes the theories were unfeasible, but it was amazing to see this great deal of engagement and participation in interpreting the past among the people interviewed. Despite the initial response of my interview partners, it would be simplistic to claim that Sandby borg is never emotionally “difficult” for people. It is when the deaths of possibly hundreds of people are suddenly made more tangible and when individuals come forward from the collective that a feeling of unpleasantness or even horror may strike people. In other words: when death is reduced from numbers to individuals. When I elaborated in more detail about the people who were killed, my interview partners often responded with a sigh of horror, as if suddenly feeling slightly ashamed of the previous excitement they expressed. It is also clear that it is easier to get touched when physically visiting the ring fort, especially when excavations are taking place (Fig. 11.1), possibly related to the “power in place”, as Edward González-Tennant phrased it: “we dwell in places and places dwell in us” (see González-Tennant 2016: 237). In such a way, the temporality of prehistoric violence has a way to seep into the present.

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Fig. 11.1  Clara Alfsdotter unearthing a skeleton. (Photo: Daniel Lindskog)

Emotions of sadness or horror may trigger a different kind of reflection through the heritage that puzzle-solving does not. One example is when one of my interview partners went from talking about what happened in Sandby borg, to a reflection concerning the horror of war in general and how it changes people. This is not about morally claiming that one way of engagement with heritage is superior to another, rather, both detective work and deeper reflections are important aspects of making Sandby borg meaningful, and there is great potential here to develop both these aspects in connection to each other without ruling one of them out.

The Spectrum of Dark Heritage: A Source for Conflict? In Chap. 2 we discussed different types of difficult heritage sites, of which many serve a role within a boom of so-called dark tourism (see Foley and Lennon 1996; Stone 2006; Hartmann 2014). In fact, heritage of atrocity is one of the most marketable of heritages (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996: 94). However, in some cases it is simply a fascination over murder

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and murder mysteries that is driving the impetus behind visiting a site of dark heritage (Holtorf 2015: 5–6). Therefore, it has also been argued that there may be a conflict arising from on the one hand those who are visiting purely out of fascination and those who visit out of respect to those who are dead (Logan and Reeves 2009: 4). Within this process, heritage can serve to trigger different sets of engagement, and it is possible to combine an educational imperative with an entertaining one within one and the same site of heritage. Education and entertainment are therefore not to be regarded as mutually exclusive. However, there have been claims by González-Ruibal that a moral imperative should be driving archaeological management, and this morale lies in guarding against the trivialization of heritage (González-Ruibal 2008: 258). Arguably, such a trivialization would occur if a site of a brutal massacre, no matter how distant in the past, would be turned into a site reserved to negotiate values of sheer entertainment, a commodified heritage experience, without any ethical commitments or responsibilities towards those who were murdered in the massacre. In developing a spectrum for dark heritage sites, Philip R. Stone (2006) argued that some sites of heritage are darker on a scale than others, and in the context of Sandby borg, it is interesting to note that within this scale there is the common assumption that time is regarded as a factor gradually decreasing the “darkness” in heritage. Furthermore, there is a distinction between “sites of death and suffering”, and “sites associated with death and suffering” (Miles 2002; Stone 2006: 176), in which sites where the actual atrocities occurred are darker on a scale than those which are simply associated to them. In this case, Sandby borg is a site of death and suffering, while on the other side of the spectrum, it is temporally distant. This made it relevant to study the attitudes among my interview partners when visiting the site as heritage, and whether any kind of conflict seemed to arise between different engagements and expectations of the site as difficult heritage, and if so, in which circumstances these conflicts arose. As mentioned above, most people interviewed did not associate Sandby borg to negative or difficult feelings at first hand, but rather to feelings of “excitement” or to something “very fun”. In such a way, difficulty was only expressed when triggered through specific aspects such as when the death of individuals were emphasized and when the past was made more immediately tangible; here a deeper reflection could be induced through the heritage. Furthermore, I did not note any conflict between these seemingly contradictory engagements. On the contrary, they seemed to

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complement each other and not be mutually exclusive. However, there was one notable exception, which may be worth examining in more detail. One man in his late-60s was upset about the way Sandby borg was managed as a site of heritage, and it was precisely due to a conflict between different engagements: GW: How did you respond when you found out what happened on the site? Yes, that was no surprise to me. GW: But what did you feel? Damn, I felt sad, right. Somehow. GW: Sad? Yes. It hit me so hard later [when I read] the newspaper that I was going to call … they had brought down children who played with wooden swords and were hitting each other there. No, I did not like that. (…) No, not at that place! Anywhere, but not there! GW: You thought it was disrespectful or insensitive? Yes, I thought it was. Morally insensitive. (…) GW: But how do you think that the site should be conveyed? I would just like to quit it. That nobody goes down there anymore and… GW: You would like that? Yes. GW: To not dig anymore? No, absolutely not … I would not like it, I would not want to go down there and dig. And pick up … but I understand the science [behind it], they want to find out, and I will find out what happened. Then [let] the others do the crap job [of excavating]. Then it is okay. GW: You are also interested in what happened? Yes, I am. Extremely, right? So I want to find out more than what we’re talking about [now]. GW: It is a bit contradictory actually. Yes it is. Two people.

This is the only man interviewed who found the site difficult without any need of specific triggers of engagements. It is therefore no coincidence that this man is also the only person interviewed upset at the way the site is being managed, and finds a moral conflict between different forms of engagements at the site. Even though he is certainly a minority and does not represent the general attitude, it may be worthwhile to take into consideration that these kinds of responses do exist. Appreciating and recognizing the diversity of engagements and attitudes towards a site of difficult

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heritage does not imply a heritage management which aims to please each and every perspective, and in such a way level out and decrease conflict. On the contrary, recognizing the diversity opens up the possibility to use dissonance as a resource in initiating a debate and discussion concerning ethics and moral responsibility, which may be beneficial for the Sandby borg team when finding new ways of developing and presenting the site as heritage. This leads us to the question of which specific values and identities a prehistoric massacre, such as Sandby borg, is negotiating to the local community.

Local Pride and the Question of Belonging A significant question to address is in which way the re-discovery of the massacre in Sandby borg influences different forms of identity. This is a highly pertinent question, as elaborated upon by Laurajane Smith: (…) audiences at heritage sites are not simple and may be more adequately described as ‘diffused’  – as inevitably interactions with heritage sites and museum objects and exhibitions do ‘leak out’ into everyday lives, where they influence and inform personal and community identity. (Smith 2006: 69–70)

However, in what way does the sudden and unexpected discovery of a gruesome massacre from the distant past “leak out” into the everyday life of the local community? There are specific instances when questions of continuity with the past are made relevant. The people interviewed often expressed pride over the discovery of the massacre in Sandby borg and how such a huge and important discovery can occur in such a small and unimportant community. In such a way, it is pride in the regional identity that is being expressed. In general, questions of local or non-local identities are most likely the singular issue that intrigues the people interviewed the most, especially whether those who were killed are from Öland or not. The question was often raised in the interviews whether those who lived in the fort were locals, or if they were from Denmark, Germany, the Baltic countries or from the Roman Empire, which is also, in a more nuanced way, an issue which interests archaeologists (e.g. Beskow 1972; Wallén-­ Widung 2016). Recent strontium analysis carried out point to the inhabitants being mostly of local origin (Calleberg 2019). However, a few people interviewed are not only interested in discussing whether locals or non-locals were being killed, but also whether their own

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DNA can be tested to see if linkages can be made to those dead. As this woman expressed to me, who was born in Norra Näsby, just a few kilometers north of Sandby borg: But what I would want, and now I am going to propose it, is that if you do a DNA test on these bones, then I want to give my DNA. I would find it so very interesting! Because my relatives on the father’s side are from here, from the area, so far I can trace at least to 17th century. Further back you cannot trace through the church books. But I would be very interested to leave my DNA!

It thus becomes a regional identity very much tied to ethnicity, or a perceived ethnicity of being from Öland or not, that can possible be traced very far back. Unfortunately, such ideas of ancient linkages are usually quite static, exclusive with an essentialist view of ethnicity (Brubaker 2004: 11; see also Högberg 2016), while heritage rather benefits from being developed as dynamic and inclusive. One revealing exchange of dialogue was with the woman who got married in the fort: GW: What’s the most fascinating thing about Sandby borg? Oh. What a difficult question. I do not really know. GW: Is there any specific question you want answer to? [Silence] Well, what I find interesting is the location. Who were these people? Were they intruders and got pushed away? Or what … things like that. About the actual ones who built the fort and those who … because it’s a bit interesting to spend all this time, because it must have taken some time to build a fort and they build it so damn near the water where they are so very exposed. Is it because they do not dare go further inland, or is it because they want to protect the coastline there? It is a bit interesting. And were they killed because they did not really belong here? That, those who were native from Öland, pushed those who came here away?

In this exchange I would like to highlight that it turns into a question of “belonging” on the island of Öland, in which those who are native from Öland are a priori assumed to be the ones who belong on the island. It thus reproduces a common tendency of essentialism, in which belonging is based on where people were born, their inherent roots, which is static, rather than seeing belonging as a dynamic and fluid process, something that is in movement and continuously produced. I found the dialogue presented above illustrative, since it shows how a prehistoric massacre does

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not avoid questions of belonging/disassociation in relation to essential identities which are given meaning within the present-day context, especially concerning local and non-local identities. This also relates to Smith’s argument that “material culture as heritage is assumed to provide a physical representation and reality to the ephemeral and slippery concept of ‘identity’” (Smith 2006: 48). Within the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), these identities are often tied to the nation-state, but there are many other forms of identities building upon heritage, with a more local form of identity being one of them. This led me to look closer at what kind of identities that people were drawing upon when discussing the massacre in Sandby borg. The most common one was whether the people who were living in the fort were “Ölänningar” (people from Öland) or not; the second most common one was whether they were from Sweden or not, with one person suggesting that they were from Denmark, perhaps inspired by the multiple wars between Denmark and Sweden during medieval times. However, for many it boiled down to whether they were “local” or not, for example by using the word “native” to describe this. I also noted that the expression if they were from the “inside” or from the “outside” was occasionally used to denote whether they were local or not. Even though I could not determine any tendency as to why some people preferred to use the nationality “Swedish” and some preferred to focus on the more local identity of “Ölänningar”, it is clear that the question of local and non-local identities was of less relevance to those who did not grow up near the fort. It is certainly no coincidence that some people expressed interest to test whether their own DNA could be analysed to see if linkages could be made to those dead. Sandby borg thus gets tied to present-day identities in the local community. As illustrated through Sandby borg, also the rediscovery of a prehistoric massacre may lead to poignant questions of identity, ethnicity and belonging within the local community. Of course, this is true for all sites of heritage and it is certainly not exclusive to heritage associated to violence. However, questions of ethnicity and belonging may be particularly pertinent and sensitive concerning heritage of violence, due to the disruptive and creative effects of violence, as well as how violence often gets entangled and understood within strict and uniform categories of “Us” and “the Other”. Temporality certainly alters attitudes towards the past especially concerning the sensitivity of the heritage in question, but questions of belonging and ethnicity may still be produced and negotiated

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surrounding prehistoric massacres, as is evident through Sandby borg. This is, however, not a negative aspect of this type of heritage, on the contrary, it can and should be used as a resource when developing the site as heritage. After all, discussions of identity and ethnicity are part of what makes Sandby borg meaningful in the local community. In such a way the site holds potential for problematizing and critically discussing such socially relevant issues. However, the follow-up question needs to be how this can be achieved without enforcing an outdated essentialism?

Difficult Heritage Beyond Essentialism Cornelius Holtorf (2017a) has called for a heritage practice which goes beyond “culturalism”, as defined by Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt: Culturalism is the idea that individuals are determined by their culture, that these cultures form closed, organic wholes, and that the individual is unable to leave his or her own culture but rather can only realise him or herself within it. (Eriksen and Stjernfelt 2009)

As argued by Holtorf (2017a) as well as Anders Högberg (2016), cultural heritage practice is still very much functioning within the frame of the nation-state, masked behind the use of new words such as “pluralism” while people are still defined based on where they were born, who they are supposed to “be” and what they are supposed to “do”, rather than fully embracing a dynamic and inclusive approach to heritage. Heritage management is therefore still essentially functioning within the premise of the AHD. In order to challenge this and move towards an Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD), the heritage sector needs to move away from its focus on ethnicity and origin when determining people and heritage, towards focusing on “what everyone actually does and wants to be (based on shared values and present and future opportunities and obligations)” (Högberg 2016: 47). This has led Holtorf (2017a, b) to suggest five alternatives to cultural heritage as we know it, in order to challenge a traditional heritage management. These alternatives go hand in hand with an IHD. The first alternative is to see hybrid heritage as a standard rather than as an exceptional form of heritage. After all, if culture is not a closed organic whole, as outlined above, then the same has to be valid for heritage. This would

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involve profound implications for heritage management, including how Sandby borg is negotiated in terms of concepts such as “inside”, “outside”, national identities and questions of belonging. The fact that the fort of Sandby borg has an outline and house plan very similar to other forts on the island of Öland, such as Eketorp, showcasing an acute awareness of a local practice, as well as a willingness to follow it, is very intriguing in connection with the presence of Roman Solidi (Fig. 11.2), and the 2016 discovery of the remains from glass bead production within the fort (Sandby borg 2016, årets fynd: http://www.sandbyborg.se/arets-fynd/). This makes it the earliest known site of glass bead production within present-day Sweden (Fig.  11.3). Both the technique and the knowledge as well as the raw material itself are likely to have come from the south. In such a way, Sandby borg constitutes a form of hybrid heritage which does not easily fit within strict categories of “local”, “non-local”, and in extension, of “Us” and “the Other”. The second alternative is to focus on ironic heritage in order to induce a shared and unifying laughter about the past. This point may be of less

Fig. 11.2  A Roman solidus discovered at Sandby borg. (Photo: Daniel Lindskog)

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Fig. 11.3  Waste from glass bead production was found during the excavation of 2016. Photo: Daniel Lindskog. Courtesy of Kalmar County Museum.

relevance for Sandby borg due to there being an especially strong ethical dimension to the discovery of a massacre (see, e.g., Moshenska and González-Ruibal 2015). Arguably, this makes Sandby borg a specific form of difficult heritage. After all, shared laughter can be regarded as disrespectful to those dead and may prompt a form of distancing to the sensitivity of the past which may induce a form of trivialization of the site as heritage (González-Ruibal 2008: 258). The third alternative is to focus on individuals’ heritage in order to follow specific life-histories and the struggles of certain individuals. This would serve to promote empathy with other human beings, possibly crossing any ethnical and cultural characteristics of these life stories. As argued above, this approach has a large degree of potential in the case of Sandby borg, since it is when the death of individuals are being focused upon, rather than collective numbers, that deeper reflection, for example, concerning the values of human life, can be triggered among my interview partners. The fourth alternative is to focus on heritage as a process rather than on any particular meanings or identities that the heritage may be connected

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to. In fact, the very act of caring for and being involved in the heritage in an active and inclusive manner is meaningful for people, no matter what the heritage may or may not signify in terms of, for example, specific ethnical identities. This can clearly be noted in the engagement for Sandby borg. In 2014, the Sandby borg team was in need of additional funding in order to finance the excavation of a house during the summer of 2015. In order to finance the excavation and the publication of the findings, a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter was initiated. The goal was set to reach 400,000 Swedish Kronor SEK (approximately 40,600 euro). Luckily, the campaign managed to reach and exceed the goal, with 465,000 SEK donated. A total of 230 of the 321 backers were from Sweden, and the majority of the non-Swedish backers came from USA with 41 donations. Within the campaign, different forms of rewards were given depending on the amount donated, including the possibility to participate in the excavation for those donating 50,000 SEK or more (Papmehl-Dufay and Söderström 2017). In 2015, the team received 5.1 million SEK from “Riksbankens Jubileumsfond” and has since then not been in need of a crowdfunding campaign. However, the initiative highlights the large degree of willingness to participate and be an active part of the Sandby borg project, not only within the local community, but also internationally, and how this may be one way to make the heritage meaningful for people. Since then, an ideal association named “Sandby borgs vänner” (Sandby borg’s friends) has been set up “aimed at making available, nurturing and immersing in Sandby borg” (Sandby borgs vänner: http://vanner.sandbyborg.se/en/). This exemplifies the potential in approaching heritage as a process of care and support rather than as a finished product with inherent values and meanings. The fifth alternative is a focus on the future through heritage, as expressed by Holtorf: “Future Heritage is the heritage we construct to achieve shared ambitions for the future rather than preserve memories of the past” (Holtorf 2017a). Clearly, all these alternatives have implications on how heritage in general is managed and understood. Adding to these five points I would like to mention a sixth one, which has been continuously emphasized throughout this book: the necessity to see heritage as inherently dissonant, and for the dissonance of heritage to be used as a resource rather than a hindrance when developing heritage. As already highlighted, there is certainly a dissonance in Sandby borg as a site of heritage, related to specific contradicting memories of the site, the birth of new narratives and the prevalence within acts of violence to contribute to

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various negotiations concerning ethnicity and belonging. Let us now look closer at the way temporality is produced within the narratives constructed surrounding Sandby borg.

The Production of Spatiotemporal Distance The fact that local pride and the tracing of ethnical identities were significant among some of my interview partners, does not mean that the past was conceptualized as close-at-hand. On the contrary, and perhaps surprisingly, when first confronted with the event, it seems as if the past is very much made into a foreign country, a past which is highly detached and unconnected to the present. When people were speaking about the massacre at first, it was often as if they were trying to solve a detective mystery seen on television. Furthermore, if we look at the chronotope within this narrative, it seems as if the incident is not only located far away in time, but also far away in space. When trying to solve the detective mystery, people often made parallels to the war in Syria, which from one angle is highly logical since the war in Syria was happening at that very moment in the world, and within a globalized world with a large degree of movement of people, these events in Syria may feel very close at hand. However, following the seminal work of Johannes Fabian (2014), there is no coincidence in how place and time is employed. Certain places can be employed in order to make an “Other” out of the past (and the people living within that “past”), just as a certain pasts can be employed in order to make an “Other” out of a place (and the people living in that place). One example is this woman in her early 70s, who grew up in Södra Näsby: (…) because some people think that it was evil people from the Baltic [who carried out the attack]. But that is not the angle the researchers are taking now. But it is [about] the power between the chiefs on Öland. And then I use to say: look, it is like in Syria today!

It can be important when discussing the site to also use examples from Europe, for example, from Germany, Finland and Sweden, in order to challenge the boundaries constructed between the past and the present, the close and the distant, and between “Us” and the “Other”, that we so often construct around certain events. Sometimes, this happens unconsciously in order for us to keep them on an emotionally safe distance. Previous research has shown how temporal distance can be actively

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produced but temporal distance can also be challenged. With the Gazimestan case study, we looked closer at the mechanisms behind what I coined “temporally positioning” heritage, which played an active role in locating a site of difficult heritage within either a harmless and distant past, or as part of living heritage, implying continuity and relevance. The temporalities produced surrounding a site of difficult heritage may thus serve a role within various strategies of coping with it. However, in specific cases, there may be benefits arising from challenging temporal distance. After all, heritage needs to have its rough edges visible, and it needs its inherent dissonance to be out in the open in order for it to be socially relevant and ultimately emotionally engaging. In other words, there lies a great potential in attempting to tear down these boundaries in the case of prehistoric massacres. For one, it is arguably more ethical in regards to those who have been murdered in the massacre. However, by attempting to tear down these boundaries, a greater value can be given to the site in the present as well. This is not about stating that the past is the same as the present, but about trying to deconstruct some of the “Otherness” of the past. By focusing on individuals and trying to make the past alive and tangible, as near and close at hand as possible, certain ideas and reflections can be triggered, for instance concerning memory, time, violence and the values of human lives. In such a way, this may promote empathy with other human beings based on a sense of a shared human experience, possibly transcending any specific ethnical or cultural identities.

Conclusions The heritage of Sandby borg illustrates that prehistoric massacres might also be understood as a form of difficult heritage, meaning that the “subfield” cannot solely be restricted to examples of modern conflict. Yet, the larger temporal distance involved leads to a different range of engagements with the heritage, which demands other forms of responses when developing the site as heritage. There are a multitude of relationships to Sandby borg among the local population that lead to diverse narratives of interpreting the past. There are also areas of contestation and contradictions between these narratives. An alleged practice of long-term avoidance has been widely reported since the discovery of the massacre. Yet, such a long-term practice is contested by most of the older generation, who feel that it contradicts their own childhood memories. This highlights how the

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discovery of prehistoric massacres can lead to new narratives and engagements with the recent past, too. If we unravel the narratives into two main ones, there is initially a narrative of visiting the landscape throughout the years. This is a narrative of peaceful tranquility and beautiful nature, connected to home, friends and family; the feeling of belonging in a specific place and time. As a chronotope, this narrative exists in a continuous and slow-moving present, which has always existed and is taken for granted. However, this narrative is simultaneously challenged by a new widespread myth of avoidance of a wounded and scarred landscape and therefore in need of defense. Second, there is the narrative born through the excavations in 2011 and as a chronotope it is often located far away in time and in place, at a safe distance detached from the present. Within this chronotope, both temporal and spatial distance is produced. It leads to a great degree of engagement and a desire for puzzle-solving. However, the distance is challenged when the past is suddenly made tangible, individualized and close at hand, where senses of horror, sadness, empathy and deeper reflections can be triggered. Both these narratives exist simultaneously for people. They work in a dynamic relationship with each other and with the landscape itself. They are sometimes tied to questions of pride and identity, and often lead to strong emotions and commitment in the heritage. They can be used as a resource when further developing the site as heritage. Discussing negative heritage and its connection to temporal relations, Lynn Meskell suggested that: (…) only time transforms negative or dissonant heritage into the romantic monuments and theme parks of collective nostalgia. Ancient sites are purified through the march of time and the cultural amnesia that accompanies temporal passing. How can we define or apprehend an arbitrary moment in time that transforms the product of the past into an object of heritage? (Meskell 2002: 571, my emphasis)

Meskell suggests that the passing of time works to purify dissonant heritage, and thus transforms products of the past into objects of heritage. But what makes the case of Sandby borg thought-provoking is that it illustrates how temporal progression can, and arguably should, be challenged. It calls for us to move away from a linear and chronological understanding of difficult heritage, in which time is approached as gradually “purifying” difficult heritage, towards understanding “dissonance” as inherent in each

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site of heritage. Furthermore, this very dissonance can be used as a resource for triggering different sets of engagements and responses. Ultimately, it may be the so-called purified sites of heritage that should worry us the most, rather than the difficult ones, because purity may not mean harmless innocence, it can also mean the silencing of the uncomfortable and the unwanted out of a fear of the more socially and emotionally challenging encounters with heritage.

Bibliography Beskow, M. 1972. Glimtar ur Sandbys och Gårdbys forntid. En bok om Sandby-­ Gårdby. Sandby-Gårdby Hembygdsförening. Brubaker, R. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Calleberg, K. 2019. The Victims at Sandby Borg  - Tracing mobility and diet using strontium analyses. Master thesis at the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/ diva2:1337745/FULLTEXT02. Retrieved 18 Oct 2020. Curry, A. 2016. Öland, Sweden. Spring, A.D. 480: A Hastily Built Refuge—A Grisly Massacre—A Turbulent Period in European History. Archaeology: A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America. Issue: March/April 2016. https://www.archaeology.org/issues/207-1603/features/4158-sweden-sandbyborg-massacre. 05 Apr 2020. Eriksen, J.-M., and F. Stjernfelt. 2009. Culturalism: Culture as Political Ideology. Eurozine, January 9. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009–01–09–eriksenstjernfelt-en.html. Fabian, J. 2014. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. [First Edition Published in 1983]. Foley, M., and J.J.  Lennon. 1996. JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination. International Journal of Heritage Studies 2 (4): 198–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527259608722175. González-Ruibal, A. 2008. Time to Destroy. An Archaeology of Supermodernity. Current Anthropology 49 (2): 247–279. ———. 2017. Excavating Memory, Burying History. Lessons from the Spanish Civil War. In Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks New Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, ed. R. Bernbeck, K.P. Hofmann, and U. Sommer, vol. 45, 279–302. Berlin, Reihe: Berlin Studies of the Ancient World. González-Ruibal, A., and M.  Hall. 2015. Heritage and Violence. In Global Heritage: A Reader, ed. L. Meskell, 150–170. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. González-Tennant, E. 2016. Hate Sits in Places: Folk Knowledge and the Power of Place in Rosewood, Florida. In Excavating Memory, ed. M.T. Starzmann and J.R. Roby, 218–241. Florida: University Press of Florida.

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Hartmann, R. 2014. Dark Tourism, Thanatourism, and Dissonance in Heritage Tourism Management: New Directions in Contemporary Tourism Research. Journal of Heritage Tourism 9 (2): 166–182. Högberg, A. 2016. To Renegotiate Heritage and Citizenship Beyond Essentialism. Archaeological Dialogues 23 (1): 39–48. Holtorf, C. 2007. Archaeology Is a Brand: The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. ———. 2015. Averting Loss Aversion in Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (4): 405–421. ———. 2017a. Cultural Heritage Beyond Culturalism. Published online at “Heritage for transformation”: https://heritagefortransformation.wordpress. com/2017/11/29/cultural-heritage-beyond-culturalism/. 05 Apr 2020. ———. 2017b. What’s Wrong with Cultural Diversity in World Archaeology? Claroscuro 16: 1–14. Logan, W.S., and K. Reeves. 2009. Introduction: Remembering Places of Pain and Shame. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with “Difficult Heritage”, ed. W.S. Logan and K. Reeves, 1–14. Abingdon: Routledge. Meskell, L. 2002. Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (03): 557–574. Miles, W. 2002. Auschwitz: Museum Interpretation and Darker Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 29: 1175–1178. Moshenska, G., and A. González-Ruibal, eds. 2015. Ethics and the Archaeology of Violence. New York: Springer. Nilsson, M. 2009. Livet i Sandby prästgård. In Sandby och Gårdby: två socknar på Öland. Skarpa Alby: Gård förlag. Papmehl-Dufay, L., and U.  Söderström. 2017. Creating Ambassadors Through Digital Media: Reflections from the Sandby borg Project. Internet Archaeology 46. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.46.3. Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Stone, P. 2006. A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions. Tourism 52 (2006): 145–160. Storm, A. 2014. Post-Industrial Landscape Scars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. Tunbridge, J.E., and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Victor, H. 2015. Sandby borg – ett fruset ögonblick under folkvandringstid. In Grävda minnen: från Skedemosse till Sandby borg, ed. K.-H.  Arnell and L. Papmehl-Dufay, 96–115. Kalmar: Länsstyrelsen Kalmar län. Von Reis, J. 2014. Massakern i Sandby borg. Ölandsmagazinet, Sommar. Wallén-Widung, M. 2016. Hemligheten: “Det var en terrorattack”. Expressen, June 30. West, H. 1959. Hemkomsten. Unpublished manuscript. Žižek, S. 2007. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile.

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Internet Sources Sandby borg. 2016, årets fynd: http://www.sandbyborg.se/arets-fynd/. Retrieved 05 Apr 2020. Sandby borgs vänner. http://vanner.sandbyborg.se/en/. Retrieved 05 Apr 2020.

PART V

Concluding Discussion

Even if it’s poisoned with radiation, it’s still my home. There’s no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest…      —Quote from Svetlana Alexievich 1997, Unidentified resident, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

CHAPTER 12

Concluding Discussion

In this final part I will try to summarize the main arguments. The section will be divided into four parts, the temporalities of belonging, the temporalities of heritage and the temporalities of the distant past. Thereafter, I will provide some final reflections.

The Temporalities of Belonging The first point to address is the importance in recognizing both temporal and spatial dimensions in the enterprise of making a home after war, and how the heritage plays a role in this process through what was coined the temporalities of belonging. Finding a sense of belonging within a place in the aftermath of war fundamentally relates to the possibilities of finding future perspectives within a place. Therefore, heritage professionals working in a post-war city need to consider not only reconstructing tangible buildings, but also work with the elusive feelings of being at home in both space and time. By so doing, it is argued that a movement towards a future can be more clearly perceived and traversed. Additionally, this calls for the need of places that are not simply oriented towards the past (even though I would not deny the necessity of such places as well), but also of places that may be oriented towards the future, through initiating discussions, activities and/or reflections concerning the future and how to actively realize it through present-day activities. Consider the following questions. What kind of futures are currently being assembled through © The Author(s) 2020 G. Wollentz, Landscapes of Difficult Heritage, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57125-2_12

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the heritage? What kind of futures do people wish to assemble and move towards through the heritage? Is the future currently assembled through the heritage a future where people feel that they belong? In Mostar, what seems to be needed the most, are spaces in which the past, present and future can be debated in order to be actively realized. Here, the heritage can and should serve a central role. In academia, there is a widespread argument that reminders of violence and war are needed, which is not wrong, but often the line of reasoning stop with that simple statement, whereas follow-up questions are needed (but not often asked). How, where and why should specific memories of violence and war be “materialized”? Which kind of memories are important to try to materially manifest and in which way? Heritage professionals cannot assume that memories are inherently positive while forgetting is inherently negative, since both forgetting and remembering are dependent and constitute each other. Instead, a more dynamic and context-­ dependent focus is called for. It is argued that ideas of “reclaiming memories” also need to acknowledge other ways of making the past meaningful than through recognizing its importance. In other words, a bottom-­up approach must allow strategies of denying the past meaning as potentially significant. The discussion of attitudes towards the ruins in Mostar and of the avoidance of the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo suggests that in our understanding of memorials we need to consider not only how they refer to the past, but also whether and how they can act as places for looking forward, and/or places of continuity. These aspects need not be mutually exclusive. In Mostar, for many older people the ruins are ugly reminders of unpleasant memories, a hindrance to achieving a state of belonging, while for many young people they can serve as future-oriented zones of activism, where narratives of “suffering” and “victimhood” are challenged for more progressive values and meanings. Consequently, I advocate a more nuanced approach to memories, which does not view remembering or forgetting as inherently either positive or negative, and which could propose multiple ways of transforming places of heritage in terms of future aspirations beyond divided and conflicted communities. Importantly, this is not about seeing a value in forgetting as opposed to remembering, or an encouragement of ignoring the past, but about recognizing the value and potential of heritage as an empowering tool to envision different futures. The results from Mostar highlights that heritage connected to war and trauma may be associated to different memory-practices depending on

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which generation the person belongs to. Furthermore, these practices may involve various negotiations in how specific pasts and futures are made meaningful, or denied relevance, in the present. This calls for the need of recognizing variation between different forms of, as Sharon Macdonald coined it, “past-presencing” (Macdonald 2012), and how these different forms manifest themselves cross-generationally. It was also argued that a constant focus on the division of the city, may in fact further serve to reinforce the division, rather than overcoming it, and that it may hide other issues of equal or even higher importance for understanding the role of the heritage in the city. In particular, a tension between the old inhabitants and the newcomers to Mostar was noted, which is an issue largely neglected or overlooked within the heritage management of the city. Furthermore, it is argued that reclaiming continuity to the socialist past may be the most challenging and forward-oriented approach to the heritage of Mostar. This was highlighted through examples of youth activism in the city, such as the overpainting of an electrical substation. It is precisely continuity that the ruling political parties are denying through a practice of silencing it within the spatial framework of the city, strongly associated to the current neglect of the Partisan Memorial Cemetery. This, in turn, is hindering the process of finding a sense of belonging in present-­ day Mostar for many of my interviewees, which leads to a temporal displacement where a sense of home and belonging is located to pre-war Mostar rather than present-day Mostar. It was argued that a focus on tracing continuity to the socialist past through the heritage may lead to increased chances of the construction of narratives which move beyond ethnocentrism and division, and will in such a way contribute to invest Mostar with hope for the future.

The Temporalities of Heritage There is a great benefit arising in considering ways to pluralize perspectives through the heritage, following the principle of the Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD) challenging the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), present in more recent heritage conventions such as in the Faro Convention, developed by Council of Europe in 2005. Therefore, there is a necessity in asking which voices are being heard and which voices are being silenced through the heritage. In aiming to pluralize perspectives to also include the silenced ones, sites of difficult heritage can promote reflections and constant negotiations concerning its present-day role and meaning.

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Through focusing on dialogue, rather than presenting facts to a passive audience, heritage will be addressing a moving target and thereby be more on-par with meeting the demands of an ever-changing society. However, equally important is to recognize that there may be cases where the incident is so sensitive/raw that efforts of pluralizing perspectives might not be the most beneficial, and may instead lead to counteractions. This is especially relevant when the site is part of an on-going and continuous discourse of oppression. Here, a sensitivity to the local situation is essential. The way difficult heritage is “temporally positioned” serves a crucial role in understanding its meaning and significance within the local community. By use of the verb “positioning” I refer to it as an on-going and continuous strategy, to highlight that people are not simply passive recipients of heritage and its various temporalities but also play an active role in their production. Undoubtedly, other factors play a role as well, within the production of “pastness” surrounding material culture, based on aspects such as the expectations of the audience, material clues (such as use-wear), and a plausible and meaningful narrative linking past and present (Holtorf 2013: 433–434). Nevertheless, individuals can also play an active role in positioning heritage within various temporalities, through an on-going strategy of coping with a site of difficult heritage associated to a painful past. Therefore, temporal positioning fundamentally varies and changes depending on the specific life-histories of the individuals, demanding an approach acknowledging variation. This does not necessarily occur on a conscious level, but may occur sub-consciously through incorporating practices, that is, through the activities, of lack thereof, within a landscape. Looking at the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo, it was argued that specific temporalities were serving to deny the monument significance, that is, serving within a strategy of denying the monument as heritage, implying continuity and relevance, through positioning it into an irrelevant and long-gone past. To only consider deep and emotional engagements to heritage as meaningful is a common bias in heritage studies, and there is a need in recognizing also indifference as meaningful and potentially empowering. In the aftermath of war, where many individuals may have been actively denied a sense of agency, the agency inherent in denying a certain past and its heritage relevance, may serve an empowering role if the heritage is still being used for the purpose of oppressive, exclusive and xenophobic activities, such as in the case with the Gazimestan monument. In the field of Kosovo, the Gazimestan monument may be given a future precisely through strategies that serve to deny it relevance. More precisely,

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by locating the monument as an insignificant part of the past, strategies of trivialization and avoidance may serve to deny significance to the narratives of ethnocentrism that the monument would otherwise help to create in its present-day form and through the present-day activities at the site. Furthermore, a focus on temporal positioning challenges notions of inherent meanings (including various temporalities) and values residing within the physicality of heritage, towards seeing them as actively produced through meaning-making engagements. Thus, heritage is continuously produced and never finalized, that is, entangled in continuous stage of being born, of carrying on and its (assumed) temporalities cannot be taken for granted.

The Temporalities of the Distant Past Temporality, in regards to difficult heritage, cannot be approached as a distinct force in itself gradually decreasing the supposed “difficulty” in heritage. Through such theorizing, temporalities are conceptualized as outside of human control and influence, but as the argument above highlighted, individuals may also play a role in temporally positioning heritage. In fact, a linear and chronological notion of time in regards to difficult heritage, risks hiding the way time itself is employed within processes of “Othering”. This was very much brought into relevance with the seminal volume Time and the Other, first published in 1983, written by the social anthropologist Johannes Fabian (2014). Undeniably, the question of time is still a persistent issue in anthropology more broadly. A “Western” linear and chronological notion of time is highly spatialized, in that “Now” is restricted to certain spaces (and the people living within those spaces) and denied other spaces (and the people living within those spaces). However, “here” and “there”, and “now” and “then”, do not carry essential qualities in themselves. On the contrary, they are positions (Trouillot 1995: 15). “There” is only “there” from the vantage point of “here”, just as an incident in the past is only “past” from the vantage point of the present. It thus makes little sense in seeing them as fixed and static categories. Since the present is always in movement, inevitable, the same must be held true for the past. Research on difficult heritage has largely limited itself to contemporary or modern sites of conflict. While, it can be noted that the approach seems to be different in regards to the heritage of indigenous people, this is most likely based on the common idea that “indigenous” people have a

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different way of relating to time and to the past, than that of “Western”. Nevertheless, it is argued that such a dichotomies distinction between the assumed “Western” and “indigenous” temporalities cannot be maintained, if we consider that also within the so-called Western world there are a multitude of different relationships to the past. It would be simplistic to assume that a “Western”, enlightenment-born, linear temporality is all-­ pervading. Undeniably, we are here shaped and influenced by the academic environment, in which we operate. For instance, folk traditions, still present in the “Western” world, which were separated from archaeology when the latter became a distinct academic discipline in the nineteenth century (Burström 1999), are operating within a different form of temporality than that of the linear one. It becomes clear that restricting the study of difficult heritage to the recent past or to indigenous heritage, is based on an a priori assumption concerning the passage of time. In the case study of Sandby borg, Sweden, I called for the necessity in challenging temporal and spatial distance when developing a site of difficult heritage. It was argued that such a challenge would not only be more ethical in regards to the people murdered in the massacre, but would also serve to induce a different set of engagements and responses to heritage. It was noted through the interviews conducted, that the site could invoke deeper reflections concerning important issues such as the values of human lives and the horror of war. By so doing, it would give the site a greater value as heritage in the present. Challenging temporal and spatial distance would involve trying to bring out the individual (through a focus on shared human values), as well discussing the case using not only temporally and/or spatially far-away cases (such as Syria). Challenging temporal and spatial distance does not suggest that everywhere and everytime is the same. It concerns deconstructing the idea that distance by itself, be it temporal or spatial, implies change. It is argued that such a clear-cut correlation only supports a process of “Othering” due to its underlying assumptions. Sandby borg highlights how the excavation process has to be regarded as a creative practice which can potentially bring something new into the world. Through the excavation process, new values to the landscape and its heritage, as well as new relationships to the past, may be created. In case of the discovery of the brutal massacre in Sandby borg, it was argued that new narratives and relationships to the landscape itself were created, among the local population. This concerns especially a story of long-term avoidance, well-known and well-spread since the start of excavations,

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which was disputed by a majority of the local population who did not relate it to their own childhood memories of growing up near the fort and spending time in the surrounding landscape with friends and family. Furthermore, it was noted that the discovery of a prehistoric massacre still got entangled in essential ideas of ethnic identities, where the belonging of people was determined based on where they were born rather than on what they were doing. Most likely, heritage of violence has increased probabilities of getting entangled in discussions of ethnicity and belonging, due to violence being a performative act, often tied to notions of “perpetrator” and “victim”, building upon the categories of “Us” and “the Other”. In the case of Sandby borg, temporal passing does not seem to have levelled out the tendency of tracing essential ethnicities through the heritage associated to incidents of violence.

Final Reflections Crucially, the dissonance that was found within the different values, identities and attitudes negotiated and produced, surrounding Sandby borg, Gazimestan or towards the heritage in Mostar, is best not approached as a disturbance or as a problem in need of being fixed or levelled out. On the contrary, following the IHD, this dissonance may be regarded as a resource for developing a site of difficult heritage. Dissonance potentially opens up a large array of possibilities for the heritage to get involved in tackling significant and stimulating issues of fundamental social and not least, emotional relevance. Accordingly, it is rather so-called purified and harmonious sites of heritage that may cause us a larger reason for concern, since within the levelling out of dissonance, silences may be actively produced. I hope that the volume highlighted the benefit in thinking outside of the box in selecting case studies, by challenging our a priori assumptions concerning how temporality relates to difficult heritage. Certainly, many of the ideas that were brought up and studied have theoretical ramifications way beyond a specific time and place. I also hope that this research can serve as an incentive for further studies carried out along similar lines. I will always remember many of the incredible stories I was told and the fantastic people that I met. Therefore, I am thankful for being given the opportunity and trust to allow these voices to be heard, as well as grateful to those who did give me their time and valuable insights. In many ways, the experience of carrying out this research shaped me as much as I shaped it. It is now time to let it go, and allow for future readers to shape their

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own meanings from it. Hopefully, some of these readers will be the ones who helped me shape it in the first place. To those people I can only say: thank you for the memories, without you it would never have been possible.

Bibliography Burström, M. 1999. Focusing on Time: Disciplining Archaeology in Sweden. In Archaeology and Folklore, ed. A.  Gazin-Schwartz and C.  Holtorf, 33–45. London: Routledge. Fabian, J. 2014. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. [First Edition Published in 1983]. Holtorf, C. 2013. On Pastness: A Reconsideration of Materiality in Archaeological Object Authenticity. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (2): 427–443. Macdonald, S. 2012. Chapter 14: Presencing Europe’s Pasts. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, ed. U.  Kockel, M.  Nic Craith, and J.  Frykman. Chichester: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118257203. Trouillot, M.R. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

Index1

A Abrašević, 102 Activism, 121–127, 286, 287 Agency, 70, 85, 91, 94, 162, 163, 188, 189, 195, 196, 200, 201, 218–220, 223, 224, 265, 288 Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), 86, 113 Assmann, Jan, 51, 60, 61, 68, 193 Auschwitz, 36, 38 Austro-Hungarian, 124 Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), 9, 17–25, 27, 128, 138, 272, 273, 287 Avoidance place of, 218, 223, 233, 261–280 practice of, 218, 231, 247, 261–264 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 51, 69, 71, 72, 104 Belonging, 2, 5, 7, 10, 21, 22, 29, 31, 33, 43, 81–105, 109, 127, 133,

135, 136, 150, 158, 169, 188, 199, 216, 217, 229, 261–280 temporalities of, 79, 285–287 Bogdanović, Bogdan, 119, 142, 149 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 10, 110, 117, 120, 121, 126, 134, 134n1, 138, 146n3, 161, 171, 28, 33, 4, 51, 55, 56, 6, 83, 85, 86, 89, 89n3, 91, 98 Bosnian war, 83, 83n1, 86, 89n3 C Catholic, 55, 88, 118 Church, 89 Change, 4, 18–20, 27, 28, 52–55, 61, 70, 92, 101, 111, 112, 121, 124, 125, 136, 137, 140, 142, 150, 178, 181, 198, 242, 247, 264, 267, 288, 290 Chronotope, 69, 71–73, 104, 105, 192, 215, 216, 264, 277, 279

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Commemoration, 21, 60, 89, 112, 118–121, 127, 135, 223 Conflict resolution, 22, 29 Connerton, Paul, 189, 194, 195, 210, 213, 221, 234 Conservation, 18, 21, 27, 124, 215 Croatia, 20, 38, 149, 161 Croatian Defence Council (HVO), 55, 56, 86, 102, 113, 114, 116, 120, 121

Faro Convention, 8, 20, 22–23, 25, 26, 287 Folklore, 168, 231, 237, 238, 246–248 Forgetting, 1, 2, 6, 10, 11, 25, 37, 54, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 81, 83, 109–128, 136, 137, 206, 286 Forgiving, 111, 112, 114, 223 Franciscan Church of Saints Peter and Paul, 115

D Distance, 2, 5, 10, 38, 39, 41–43, 53, 72, 105, 117, 144, 157, 199, 201, 213, 222, 277–279, 290 temporal, 179, 244–246, 250, 277, 278 Distant past, the, 227, 231, 242, 244, 245, 270, 278, 285, 289–291 Division, 19, 60, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 94, 98–102, 104, 105, 113, 114, 117, 127, 135, 150, 191, 194, 222, 287 DNA, 171, 271, 272

G Gazimestan, 4, 5, 10, 11, 27, 28, 34, 155, 157–160, 164, 165, 167, 168, 173–176, 174n3, 178, 179, 181, 187–201, 207–223, 229, 234, 235, 244, 278, 286, 288, 291 Gračanica Monastery, 210, 212, 220

E Essentialism, 28, 271, 273–277 Ethnicity, 27, 85, 92, 103, 110, 150, 271–273, 277, 291 Ethnocentrism, 111, 121, 150, 201, 222, 223, 287, 289 Excavation, 5, 9, 43, 229, 231, 232, 235, 238–242, 249, 264–266, 276, 279, 290 F Fabian, Johannes, 40, 41, 244, 245, 277, 289

H Halbwachs, Maurice, 51–54, 52n1, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 67, 136, 234 Heritage dark, 35, 267–270 destruction of, 4, 33, 34, 55, 56, 133, 137, 138, 140 difficult, 2–6, 8–11, 17, 18, 28, 30, 34–40, 42–44, 134, 155, 157, 158, 190–192, 201, 205, 223, 224, 227, 229–254, 261, 265–269, 273–279, 287–291 dissonant, 22, 133, 181, 279 futures, 31, 276 identities, 7, 28, 104, 110, 133, 231, 272, 275, 276, 279 negative, 35, 279 Hum Hill Cross on, 88, 114, 116, 117

 INDEX 

I Identity, 7, 21–23, 27, 28, 31, 34, 52, 59, 81, 87, 93, 104, 110, 117, 125, 133, 164, 180, 191, 199, 231, 261, 270–279, 291 Inclusive Heritage Discourse (IHD), 8, 18, 25–29, 32, 128, 138, 187, 273, 287, 291 Incorporating practices, 10, 67, 68, 70, 247, 249, 261, 288 Inscribing practices, 67, 68, 138, 261 Intentionality, 162, 189–192, 196, 198–201 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the, 86n2, 191 Iron Age, 5, 229, 231, 233, 237, 238, 251 Irrelevance, 200, 205–224 Islam, 173, 174 J Jasenovac, 38, 39 K Kosovo Battle of, 4, 157, 159, 160, 163, 164, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174, 179–181, 189, 193, 214, 249 field of, 157, 160, 163, 190, 207, 216, 288 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 160, 208, 211 War, 160, 171, 191, 194 L Landscape, 1, 28, 51, 81, 111, 133, 158, 187, 206, 229, 261, 288

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Lazar, Prince, 157, 165, 167, 168, 171 Lee, Bruce, 95, 96 statue of, 94–96 Lefebvre, Henri, 137, 142 M Macdonald, Sharon, 2, 35, 39, 112, 117, 134, 189, 199, 220, 287 Massacre, 5, 34, 42, 43, 62, 168, 171, 229, 231–240, 242, 244, 247, 251–254, 251n1, 261, 263, 265, 268, 270–273, 275, 277–279, 290, 291 Memory, 1, 22, 51, 81, 109, 135, 157, 193, 222, 231, 261 Milošević, Slobodan, 161n2, 168, 177, 180, 190, 191, 194–198, 213 Mosque, 55, 56, 88, 101 Mostar, 4, 28, 51, 56, 81, 109, 133, 192, 229, 264, 286 Mourning, 36, 38, 62, 111, 112, 118, 119, 171, 216, 223, 253 Murad, Sultan, 157, 165, 167, 172, 214n2 Muslim, 56, 88, 118, 168, 172, 173 Myth, 5, 160, 164, 167–174, 174n3, 180, 199, 201, 211, 213, 216, 218, 236, 238, 244, 249, 262–264, 279 N Narrative, 10, 18, 51, 84, 109, 133, 159, 189, 213, 235, 264, 286 Nationalism, 25, 70, 168, 180, 215, 249, 250 Negative heritage, 35, 279 Neretva, 56, 90, 119, 139–142

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INDEX

Nostalgia, 104, 104n5, 114, 127, 135, 194, 214, 279 Nürnberg, 39, 134 O Obilić, Miloš, 167, 172, 174n3, 219, 220 Obilić/Obiliq, 155, 168, 174, 174n3, 175, 177, 179, 190, 192, 194, 197, 199, 216, 218–221 Öland, 229, 232, 237–239, 242, 263, 270–272, 274, 277 Ottoman, 56, 86, 88, 121, 139, 160, 165, 172, 180, 214n2, 216 P Partisan Memorial Cemetery, 119, 120, 142–149, 151, 287 Prehistory, 42, 234 Pristina, 160, 162, 173, 174, 179, 181, 190, 192, 197, 199, 208, 220 R Reconciliation, 20, 23, 26, 29, 39, 91–94, 134, 181 Reflective nostalgia, 104, 104n5, 149 Remembering, 1, 2, 6, 10, 11, 61, 63, 66, 81, 83, 109–128, 136, 222, 286 Responsibility, 25, 31, 86n2, 118, 162, 174, 189–192, 196, 198–201, 268, 270 Ring fort, 5, 229, 231, 232, 236–239, 262, 266 Ritual, 2, 42, 209–213, 252 burial, 118, 120, 143, 232, 238, 239, 251–253 Rudnik, 102, 103 Ruin, 111, 121, 122, 124–126, 150

S Sandby borg, 4, 5, 9–11, 28, 34, 227, 229, 231–234, 236–244, 246–248, 250–254, 261–279, 290, 291 Serbia, 5, 123, 160, 161n2, 163, 165, 168, 170, 175, 179, 180, 190, 208, 213, 214, 249 Serbian Orthodox Church, 168, 207, 210, 213 Silences, 33, 38, 63, 64, 68, 70, 71, 88, 90, 91, 112, 149, 151, 181, 195, 235, 237, 271, 291 Skeletons, 227, 233, 240, 242, 266, 267 Smith, Laurajane, 7, 9, 17–22, 37, 57, 65, 104, 135, 195, 196, 205, 218, 270, 272 Socialism, 100, 104, 145 Space, 7, 30, 41–43, 51, 52, 54–59, 61, 64–67, 71–73, 84, 92, 96, 102, 104, 105, 112, 116–119, 121, 124n2, 125, 127, 134, 136–138, 142, 150, 151, 194, 205–224, 229, 235, 245, 246, 277, 285, 286, 289 production of, 59, 64, 65 Spirit of Mostar, 98–101, 105, 123, 127, 141 Stari Most, 56, 72, 86, 87, 90, 93, 119, 121, 122, 138–141 Sultan Murad’s Türbe, 165, 166, 214, 214n2 Sweden, 4, 5, 10, 28, 85, 232, 238, 241, 272, 274, 276, 277, 290 T Temporalities, 2–5, 10, 17–44, 61, 72, 73, 79, 81–105, 155, 157, 158, 179, 187–201, 215–217, 220, 227, 229, 231, 234, 244, 246, 261, 266, 272, 277, 278, 285–291

 INDEX 

Tito, Josip Broz, 38, 162 Tourism dark, 36–38, 127, 267 Tradition, 20, 40, 42, 54, 55, 60, 66, 70, 139, 169, 172, 181, 212, 213, 218, 222, 238, 239, 247–250, 263, 290 invention of, 250 Transformation, 53, 59, 62, 125, 137, 220, 246, 247 Trauma, 1, 2, 6, 10, 42, 125, 171, 286 Trivialization, 117, 223, 268, 275, 289 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 7, 19, 51, 64, 68–71, 88, 110, 151, 289 U UNESCO, 19, 25, 72, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 119 Ustaše, 38, 119, 146 V Values, 3, 7, 8, 10, 18–22, 25–29, 32, 33, 43, 59, 67, 69, 84, 88, 90, 92, 94–96, 105, 110, 111, 119,

297

126–128, 138, 147, 149, 162, 169, 171, 172, 180, 187–192, 201, 210, 215, 217, 222, 235, 236, 238, 240–242, 246, 247, 261, 264, 268, 270, 273–276, 278, 286, 289–291 Venice Charter, 18, 19, 138 Vidovdan, 160, 164, 165, 168–170, 173, 177, 181, 194, 197, 198, 200, 207–216, 218, 220, 223, 249 Violence, 1, 17, 55, 111, 157, 188, 229, 264, 286 W War, 4, 24, 55, 81, 109, 133, 160, 191, 215, 234, 267, 285 WWI, 213 WWII, 1, 38, 88, 102, 119, 120, 134, 143, 213, 249 Y Yugoslavia, 4, 25, 71, 83, 90, 91, 93, 96–98, 100, 104, 110, 120, 143, 161, 162, 171, 197 Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), 55, 86