Please join the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies for Coffee and Conversation with visiting researcher Ivan Smiljanić from the Institute of Contemporary History (INZ) in Slovenia.
Coffee and Conversation: Memory and Monuments
It is often said that we must remember the past so we can understand the present. However, dealing with the past often brings complex questions about different views, opinions and interpretations of historic events, processes or personalities. Some of these interpretations, however, become a part of public memory and are propagated through commemorations, holidays, education systems and monuments, where they become, quite literally, set in stone. Europe has seen its fair share of political ideologies trying to promote a specific narrative about the past, and monuments tended to reflect that situation. An interesting example is a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia. It started its existence as a monarchy created just after the First World War and was reborn as a socialist state after the Second World War, until it disintegrated in blood in the 1990s. Both Yugoslavias tried to bring together ethically diverse citizens by creating common memory of the past, but both faced problems when doing so. The first Yugoslavia could not find a way to reconcile the fact that it was formed by nations that fought each other during the First World War, and only the victorious – Serbian – side was granted the position of official memory. In the socialist Yugoslavia, the partisan antifascist struggle during the Second World War was considered the cornerstone of public memory and multiple large scale modernist monuments were built across the country to commemorate it, while any other interpretation of the past was not welcome. While these monuments, which have become known as spomeniks in the West in recent years, still attract the attention of researchers and tourists, they were often not understood well by the Yugoslav public, which has often been interpreted as the state not being able to create a common identity with a shared view of the past. Yugoslav examples can offer us an interesting starting point for (re)thinking our beliefs about how we view the past, and especially to compare it with the situation in the United States.
Speaker Biography: Ivan Smiljanić has received his diploma and MA from history at the Faculty of Arts of Ljubljana University. Since 2019, he has been working at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. He acquired his PhD in 2024. In his research, he is dealing with questions of public memory, monuments in former Yugoslav space, and economic history. He has published about these topics in Slovenian and foreign history magazines, and has presented his work on multiple conferences. His MA thesis was discussing the role of most renowned Slovenian poet France Prešeren in socialist Yugoslavia, and was published by the Institute in 2021. He is also a coauthor of a graphic novel about the fascist burning of Slovenian National Hall in Trieste in 1920.
Photo: Monument to the Resistance on Petrova Gora in Croatia courtesy of Ivan Smiljanić