The Struggle to Save Croatia’s Vanishing Anti-Fascist Monuments

A photograph from the small Croatian coastal town of Kastel Luksic, taken in April, in which a statue dedicated to the fallen fighters of World War II is pictured lying on its back amid construction refuse, went viral in Croatia and appalled many people.

After receiving the picture from a reader, a journalist from the local website Kastela.org, Dijana Putnik, wrote an open letter to the mayor of Kastela asking about the future of the monument and the reason why it was lying there amid the debris after it was removed from the town square in November last year.

In her letter to the mayor, Putnik imagined a scenario in which such a discarded monument could become damaged and then "someone in power will say to the newspaper that the monument is damaged and that it takes time to fix it" - after which, the authorities "will hope that we will forget about it".

Putnik told BIRN that she was disappointed about the attitude of people in Kastel Luksic to the monument - "for some of them, it was just a pile of metal, without knowing its real, intangible value, from the historical to the cultural", she said.

But she added that she was glad that the local authorities reacted immediately to her letter: the statue was removed from the dump, and will apparently be reinstalled soon.

Destruction trend continues from the 1990s

Away from Kastel Luksic, however, many similar monuments in Croatia have disappeared or have been seriously damaged.

As Croatia grows more conservative, many monuments built in the Communist era to commemorate victims of the country's 1940s fascist Ustasa regime or Yugoslav Partisan forces' victory over fascism during World War II - which was known as the People's Liberation War during the Yugoslav...