Valley of Heroes, Tjentište (Sutjeska Memorial)

At the bottom of the Sutjeska valley, surrounded by the forested mountains of eastern Bosnia, two great walls of faceted concrete split apart as though something had burst through them. This is the Valley of Heroes at Tjentište, the memorial to the Battle of the Sutjeska, and it is one of the most powerful sculptures of the Yugoslav memorial movement. The two wings are about 19 metres high and some 25 metres wide, and their surfaces are cut into sharp, crystalline planes that change constantly with the light.

The monument recalls one of the hardest episodes of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Between 15 May and 16 June 1943, in the Axis offensive known as Case Black, around 127,000 German, Italian and allied troops encircled some 22,000 Partisans in the mountains between Durmitor and Zelengora. The Partisans eventually broke out through the ravines of the Sutjeska, but more than 7,000 of them were killed, and Tito himself was wounded in the arm by a bomb on 9 June. The sculptor Miodrag Živković explained that the two blocks stand for the breaking of that encirclement, a breakthrough towards victory; the wings open towards the steep ravine the Partisans used to escape. Hidden in the faceted surfaces are stylised faces, meant as the spirits of the fallen, which only reveal themselves as you walk around the sculpture.

The monument was built between 1969 and 1971 and unveiled in September 1971. It stands above an earlier stone ossuary, completed in 1958, which holds the remains of more than 3,000 fighters. Lower in the valley is the Memorial House, a concrete building opened in 1975, where around 7,000 names are engraved and the Croatian painter Krsto Hegedušić painted a cycle of large frescoes on the battle.

The setting is part of the effect: the memorial lies within Sutjeska National Park, one of the wildest landscapes in the Balkans, and from the terrace below the sculpture the eye moves from the concrete wings straight up to the wooded slopes where the fighting took place.

Getting there

The memorial is at Tjentište, on the M20 road through the Sutjeska valley in the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Goražde is about 47 km away, and the nearest airport is Sarajevo International Airport (SJJ), roughly 63 km in a straight line. There is parking beside the road, from which a path climbs to the monument.