Many
of the memorial buildings, to which I have devoted my best mental and
physical strengths, do not exist any more or are, at least for now,
condemned to an invisible deterioration and disappearance. I would feel
miserable if I would — even for a moment — allow myself to regret, for
instance, the most opulent work of my architectural youth: the Partisan
monument in Mostar, today when the real old Mostar has disappeared,
along with the even older Mostarian families, whose children rest in
this honourable war cemetery. When I once explained my idea for the
monument, I told a grateful audience the story of how one day, and
forever after, ‘two cities’ will look each other in the eyes: the city
of the dead antifascist heroes, mostly young men and women, and the
city of the living, for which they gave their lives…
The
stone allegory of two cities did not accidentally, nor without any
external encouragement, land on one of the rocky high grounds west of
Mostar. The first formula was probably offered by a lecture I gave at
the time. Namely, pretty vaguely, somewhere between the heaven and the
earth — according to the ancient books at least — floats the city Hürqualyâ, the Sufist counterpart of the Manichaeist Terrae lucidae,
which, according to gnostic speculations, was the representation of the
basis for the world’s most beautiful and naive, but eternally
philosophical and cosmo-poetical images. And I thought that the fallen
Mostarian antifascist fighters, all still boys and girls so to say,
have the right, at least symbolically, to the beauty of dreams. At the
time that the monument was being built — a peaceful, quiet,
bureaucratic time, with a senseless mental state and moral environment
— and looking back after 20 years of war, the purity of their motives
and the all-encompassing, naive self-sacrifice can only recall the
memories of the tragic crusades of our children.
Contrary
to the design for Jasenovac, which was for too many reasons too
difficult for me, the travels to Mostar conveyed me to a totally
different world of poetry and reality. For the design of the memorial
in Jasenovac, the memories of former concentration camps, no matter how
much I tried to flee them, were often transformed into a state of
prolonged, nearly unbearable stress. The construction of the
Akro-Necropolis in Mostar, on the other hand, lit a deep fire within
me. I endured the not so simple and easy work without nausea or
tiredness, and actually worked from my new perspective on life and
death. Maybe it is too absurd to say, but it was as if I hoped that I
could give some of my hidden joy to my “new friends”, whose names —
Muslim, Serbian, Croatian names — lined up on the terraces of the
necropolis. Their small superterranean city overlooked, as I had
promised their families, the heart of the old Mostar and the then still
existing bridge built by the great architect Hajrudin, once the most
beautiful and daring stone bridge of the world, a divine act of the
architectonic statics, in comparison to which Bogdan was just a humble
builder, as one is in comparison to a supernatural appearance.
The
Partisan Necropolis was a miniature Mostar, a replica of the city on
the Neretva banks, its ideal diagram. However, that ideogram of the
city, that hieroglyph, that stone mark was not as modest in size. It
reached the contours of a modest, primeval Balkan-Hellenic acropolis.
Between the entrance — the lower gate — and the fountain at the top one
had to ascend an elevation of about twenty meters, and hike some three
hundred meters of winding paths and hairpin turns. The road upwards was
discernable by the water streaming down the stone organs towards the
visitors.
What
do stonemasons who carve a city out of space and time look like? My
Mostarian friends found them on the island of Korčula in Croatia and
took everyone from the village who could hold a chisel or hammer. They
were brought to Mostar at the end of the 1950s or in the early 60s.
They were modest, polite and friendly, and they did their work
religiously, almost liturgically: the resonance of their chorus-like
liturgy of the chiseling took, a little interruption included, five
years.
They
were guided by ‘Barba’, which means uncle and grand father in their
dialect; a paternal head of the fellowship; a guardian; the person
that, once they return to the island, will report to the parents and
fiancees who did what and how. Once Barba arrived he determined a
location for the ‘quarry’, built a construction shed and made room for
his working space, which resembled both a chair and a pulpit. He then
ordered that the chest made out of poles, though without lid or bottom,
be filled with sand and little pieces of stone, so that the piece of
stone to be carved could lie softly and would not be damaged during the
works. Across from his working space, directly facing him, the workers
put their, somewhat smaller, chests.
Because
of the heat in Herzegovina, they worked more often at night than during
the day — from dawn until breakfast and from dusk till deep in the
night. During the summer months, Mostar — that beautiful, and now
bygone, city — and its citizens had the strong habit of waiting in the
street for the coolness to emerge from the riverbed of the Neretva
around midnight. Sometimes it seemed as if everybody, even children,
had forgotten that one could also sleep at night. I adopted their habit
— not just because I too needed the coolness to get sufficient sleep
and a productive working rhythm for the following day — but also
because I was playful, or rather nervous, and also even a little
afraid. I had promised the inhabitants of Mostar to make something that
would be unparalleled, I had driven them up to costs, I initiated a lot
of work — but was I even sure that I would succeed and finish
everything the way I envisioned it?
A
little feverish and distracted, I repeatedly crossed the bridge of
Hajrudin from the one end of the river bank to the other, over the
cliff. Sometimes I got the idea that I was looking for advice from my
predecessor on the problems he had encountered that always suddenly
emerge when working with stone. I touched the stone balustrades and
profiles and my fingers found things that during the day had been
obliviously overlooked. In the dark I found connections between the
stones, calcified ages ago; I felt the metal leeches and bonds, that
stopped the squirting in time to safeguard the old structure from
falling apart.
One
night I decided to go up, to the building site. From a distance I could
hear a song, a harmony of voices, a choir without words. Step by step I
came closer. I looked from the sidelines, from the darkness: acetylene
lamps, or maybe even lamps from the previous century, caustic light and
even more caustic shadows. In this light something mysterious occurred.
Barba, grey, hair electrified dispersed to the fours corners of the
world, commits a crime like a magician, as the ghost of the stones.
Suddenly, he lifts the hammer and the chisel up in the air, everybody
lifts their hammer up in the air; they reverently keep silent, a
silence takes hold of the place that reveals the voices of the night —
crickets, whistling night birds, the distant sound of the Neretva. One
of the masons, apparently appointed for this purpose, once again
initiates a melody without words, nasal and mysterious, as in a ritual
of stone worshippers. Barba picks up the rhythm with his chisel, hits
the block in front of him, and starts to work the stone. The song
clearly prescribes the pace and force of the hack. As soon as the
melody starts to ‘rise’ (everybody is singing now), the sound of the
hacks get ear-splittingly loud. Once it ‘sets’ again the hits get less
intense.
Every
stone sounded like a musical instrument. I knew, predictably, that
different kinds of stone would resonate differently — the softer the
stone, the deeper the tone. It is paradoxical, and also a bit comical,
that the most solid granite whispers; that marble sings a
mezzo-soprano; and chalk, the most musical stone, sings a beautiful,
velvet-soft alto. Sculptors know how to perceive and even more. “Every
piece sings its own song” — says one of them, in the conviction that
every piece of stone is a being in itself. But when the collective
hacking commences, the rhythm includes every “stone instrument” and,
suddenly, every hand movement, every body posture functions in such a
way that the whole orchestra serves as its own metronome at the same
time. And when the hits of the tools begin to falter — a sign that the
concentration is starting to drop — Barba, the spectre of the stone,
unsatisfied, holds up his hammer. It is a sign that the work will be
momentarily halted and that the hacks have to be harmonised from the
beginning. Everybody waits for the first voice and Barba’s first hit…
The
fact that it was a harmony without words, got me thinking that the
ancient, proto-historical version came from times that people on the
island, and on the mainland, spoke another forgotten, pre-Slovenian
language. Civilisations switched, languages melted, but men had stayed
the same… “Why doesn’t the song have words?”, I once asked. The replies
were simple and convincing: “They’re not there, they never were!”, or
“That’s how our ancestors use to sing it as well!”
The
monument slowly got built, laboriously and carefully, by voluntary
contributions, even also in natura (in which case the “natura” was
stone), even stone of Mostarian houses, that were for the most part
destroyed by time and urban planning; and families gladly donated their
stone buildings. Even the quiet moving of the material, the material
from the Old Town included, had a symbolic value. The stones, often
with centuries old traces of smoke and calcified moss, with
‘housekeepers’ [a plant species], transported pieces of memories and
the spirit of piety from one time to another, and mixed it with mighty
quantities freshly masoned stone, as white as cheese.
On
the highest terraces, at the inner stone walls of the “city”, in the
folds of the stone walls: semi-circular niches, apsides, buttresses —
squandered themselves in hundreds and hundreds of stone flowers. At
least partly because of the belief in the ancient suspicion of the
builder-alchemist that the mason is the child of the sun and the moon
and that he therefore is so exceptionally suitable for, even destined
to, the carving of heavenly phenomena, the stone flowers got abundantly
mixed with the representation of the sun, the moon, planets,
constellations … A place was found somewhere for the constellation of
the Great Dog, which I had never been able to discern when I looked at
the skies; and even for a group of stars that doesn’t even exist in the
celestial carpet, but that I christened “seven slender cows” in my
imagination. For those not familiar with the question these were the
Vlašići [referring to the Mountain Vlasici in Bosnia-Herzegovina].
Eventually it turned out that the Partisan Necropolis as a whole
recalled the grand astronomical model from which we all originate.
The
lilting, heathen character of the Partisan Necropolis could not remain
unnoticed. Its terraces were quickly seized by children, whose playful
voices echoed in a choir amid an almost scenographic stone landscape,
sometimes until deep in the night. The only thing I could still wish
for is generously offered, a bit a joke, and a bit serious as well: the
right to, as honorary citizen of Mostar, create a secret niche to the
left of the entrance gate, to accommodate my future urn. However, it
now seems like I will not be in the company of my friends that way: the
gravestones have cold-bloodedly and sadistically been taken away and
crushed in a stone grinder. All that is left of my original promise is
that the former city of the dead and the former city of the living
still look at each other, only now with empty, black and burned eyes.
Bogdan Bogdanović in Mostarska Informativna Revija MM, no. 12/13, June 1997
Originating from Belgrade, the architect and urban planner Bogdan Bogdanović (1922-2010) designed about 20 monuments commemorating
victims of the Second World War, spread all across former Yugoslavia.
He wrote 18 books and over 500 articles, mainly on the subjects of the
city in history, critique of the modern city, utopias, and the death of
the city. He also taught at the Architecture Faculty of the University
of Belgrade, and served as mayor of Belgrade from 1982 until 1986. In
the 90s he fought against the ritual killing of cities during the civil
war in former Yugoslavia. All his life he studied the rise and demise
of cities, and he visited many of those cities when they lay in ruins:
Gdansk, Lviv, Arnhem, Rotterdam, Novgorod, Coventry, Lubeck, Rouen. He
considered cities as people, possessing their own soul, with which
legibility and (historical) layering is important. Once the legibility
disappears one can question whether one still can speak of a real city.
Bogdan Bogdanović and Arna Mackic at the Partisan Necropolis in Mostar.
Arna Mackic is an architect based in Amsterdam. Since 2009 she is part of the core design team of RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances], and in 2013 she started a design research on
the cultural heritage of former Yugoslavia: the monuments commemorating
the victims of fascism during the Second World War and destroyed
cultural heritage during the Bosnian war (1992-1995). Her book Mortal
Cities & Forgotten Monuments will be published in May 2016.
