Monument to the Spanish Civil War volunteers in Rijeka

This monument to Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Civil War was unveiled on 6 November 1977 in the barracks of the Yugoslav People’s Army located on Trsat, a neighborhood overlooking the port city of Rijeka in Croatia. The sculpture by Jakov Brdar shows a shirtless fighter holding a rifle that evokes the Partisan guerrilla struggle of World War Two more than the more standardized units in the International Brigades. The pedestal of the monument features the inscription Španskim dobrovoljcima (“To the Spanish Volunteers”), while the sides have the words Neće proći/No pasaran (“They shall not pass”) in Croatian and Spanish. The ceremony was attended by the former mayor of Rijeka, Edo Jardas, who had fought for the Spanish Republic as a volunteer from Canada where he had been active in communist émigré organizations. He arrived in Spain in late March 1937, where he commanded a machine-gun unit for the Dimitrov Battalion and the Third Company of the Lincoln-Washington Battalion. He was wounded twice, the second time so severely that he needed to be evacuated to France. In 1938 Jardas returned to Canada where he became a member of the Central Committee of the Canadian Communist Party and continued his publishing activities, until finally moving back to Rijeka in 1948 after the Tito-Stalin split.  

The monument is particularly significant because the military barracks where it was located was named after the volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (Kasarna Španskih dobrovoljaca); over 100 volunteers had come from Rijeka, its coastal region, hinterlands, and nearby islands. The military of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) began constructing the barracks on Trsat in 1927, completing the central building – today’s Academy of Applied Arts – in 1929. The barracks were used by the Italian army after 1941 and then German units after Italy’s capitulation in 1943, finally coming under the control of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in 1945. The fate of the monument is uncertain after the JNA surrendered the barracks to the Croatian Army and Military Police in 1991 during the first year of the Croatian War of Independence. During that conflict, which lasted until 1995, an estimated 3,000 out of a total of 6,000 antifascist memorial sites across Croatia were destroyed, removed, damaged, or repurposed. The Croatian Army and Military Police used the barracks until 2004, when the entire complex was handed over to the city of Rijeka to be transformed into the University of Rijeka Campus. In 2008, nineteen former military structures were destroyed, including the fortified entrance, completing the transformation from a symbol of militarism to a site of learning and intellectual cooperation.