FREEDOM's ORATOR : Abandoned Old Monuments From The Soviet Era

Saturday 7 February 2015

Abandoned Old Monuments From The Soviet Era

Abandoned old monuments from the Soviet Era, (In post Soviet Countries) that look like they're from the Future.
'Here is a selection of some great photos of modernist abstract memorials to partisans in the former Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine.
These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place or where concentration camps stood. They were designed by different sculptors and architects; Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković , conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their "patriotic education." After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.
(Makedonium monument in Krusevo)

"Those monuments have an abstract, often monumental, but always unusual and peculiar formal vocabulary in common. They are located in the centre of Yugoslavian modernism, because they mark its starting point and they announce the modern outlook. In doing so, they still proclaim a future, which already has become past. They are expressions of this future and they refuse to stop epitomising its coming. They keep calling: Ahead! Spectres still inhabit the monuments, but their context, their audience has been lost... They open the scene for numerous associations; they could be ambassadors from far-away stars, or from a different, unrealised present."
--Robert Burghardt

(Partisan Memorials in Former Yugoslavia)