I've often been asked, "What's that Star Wars thing in the back?". I first encountered these structures during a summer spent in the Balkans (Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Albania, etc.). Their official name is "Spomenik." This term refers to the many monuments erected in the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia during Tito's era. Most of these monuments, with their brutalist architecture, celebrated the patriotic war of the Yugoslav troops against the Nazi invaders.
The Podgarić Spomenik is located in the Moslavina region of Croatia. To get there, one crosses a forest that leads to a hamlet that was supposedly dedicated to the memory of Tito's partisans. Today, the place is silent and sparsely populated. This isolation catalyzes the strange sensation provided by the pagan beauty of this Spomenik.
Les cinq ailettes du Spomenik (trois sur la partie gauche et deux sur la partie droite) symbolisent les cinq nationalités constitutives de l'ex-Yougoslavie: slovène, croate, serbe, monténégrine et macédonienne.
