Monument to the International Brigades in Belgrade, Serbia

During socialist Yugoslavia, thousands of monuments, memorial plaques, busts, ossuaries, and other types of memorial spaces were created throughout the country as part of the cultural memory of the Partisan movement. While many were simple obelisks with descriptive texts, others were figurative representations of revolutionaries in a socialist realist style that by the 1960s and 1970s transformed into a monumental abstract modernism that continues to captivate scholars and art aficionados to this day. Although some individuals who had fought in the Spanish Civil War received their own monuments – such as Marko Orešković Krntija, Blagoje Parović, and Nikola Car Crni – most Spanish Civil War volunteers were included on monuments dedicated to Partisans and the People’s Liberation Movement more broadly. The central monument in honor of the Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Civil War is located in Belgrade. Like monuments throughout Yugoslavia since the 1990s, many of those with Spanish volunteers have also been destroyed, damaged, displaced, vandalized, altered, or simply neglected.  

This monument in Belgrade remains in good condition and is used by the organizations still nurturing the memory and legacy of the Yugoslav volunteers. The “Association of Yugoslav Volunteers in the Spanish Republican Army, 1936-1939” had for decades been the driving force in nurturing the cultural memory of the Spanish volunteers, especially its longtime president Čedo Kapor from Sarajevo. Although the last volunteer to have fought in Spain died in the early 2000s, the Association for Spanish Fighters, 1936-1939, has continued the legacy of organizing commemorations, updating the list of volunteers, maintaining an internet presence, and hosting conferences, such as the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the war in 2016.