OVERVIEW
Cultural Memory of Yugoslav Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War 1
Vjeran Pavlaković Associate Professor , Department of Cultural Studies , University of Rijeka
In June 2019 , I was in the state archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo , digging
through a totally disorganized box of photographs , when I found the image that had been eluding me for years . It was in the collection of Čedo Kapor , a Spanish Civil War veteran from Trebinje who later rose to prominence in the Partisan movement during the Second World War and held numerous political positions in Tito ’ s Yugoslavia . The photos were piled up inside a box , with pictures from the Gurs internment camp in southern France mixed in with photographs of Partisans marching through the harsh Herzegovinian landscape and ribbon-cutting events with communist party dignitaries in the 1970s . A number of images in the collection included the unveiling of various monuments , but one caught my eye . The monument featured a shirtless Partisan defiantly striding forward with a raised fist , an archetypal figurative depiction of the Yugoslav resistance movement that can be found on monuments throughout the former Yugoslavia . But what was different was the inscription on the base , written in Spanish : No pasarán . Behind the dignitaries and soldiers in the photograph I noticed a striking building , currently the Academy of Applied Arts at the University of Rijeka campus , but once the command centre of the Yugoslav People ’ s Army ( JNA ) barracks located on Trsat hill in Rijeka , Croatia . Until 1991 , the barracks were named after the nearly 2,000 volunteers from Yugoslavia who had fought to defend the Republic in the Spanish Civil War . 2 During the Croatian War of Independence , the Croatian Army and military police had occupied the barracks , which were then handed over to the city of Rijeka and finally transformed into the university campus that opened in 2011 . Since then I have heard rumours that a monument to the Spanish Civil War had
1 This research was supported in part by the University of Rijeka under the project “ Riječki krajobrazi sjećanja “ ( unirihuman-18-273 ). 2 Kasarna španskih dobrovoljaca ( Barracks of the Spanish Volunteers ).
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Observing Memories ISSUE 4