Stone Flower
Kameni cvijet
Interesting facts
- The concrete flower rises about 24 metres above the former camp grounds.
- Its curved form needed such complex formwork that Bogdanović drew on the skills of traditional Dalmatian shipbuilders to build it.
- Shallow round hollows and low mounds in the surrounding meadow mark where camp barracks once stood.
- Visitors reach the monument along a raised path that runs between two small lakes fed by backwaters of the Sava.
- The reinforced-concrete structure was built by a construction company from the nearby town of Novska.
- Inside the flower's hollow, the concrete traps heat on sunny days, an effect some commentators read as a deliberate evocation of the camp's suffering.
- The competition to design the memorial was announced only in 1960, eight years after the local initiative committee was founded.
Why it is worth it
On open ground near the Sava river, a single concrete form opens towards the sky. The Stone Flower at Jasenovac rises from a low base like a plant unfolding its petals, and its maker, the Serbian architect and former Partisan Bogdan Bogdanović, described it as a sign of faith in life and of rebirth that overcomes suffering. It stands on the ground of the former Camp III, the brickworks section of the Jasenovac concentration camp, where the Ustaša regime of the Independent State of Croatia killed Serbs, Roma, Jews and Croatian opponents of the regime during the Second World War.
For years after the war the site had no proper memorial. A local committee formed in 1952 began pressing for one, and in 1960 the veterans' association of Yugoslavia held a closed competition that Bogdanović won. While preparing the design he was offered the camp's archives – documents, photographs and survivors' testimonies – and chose not to study them, seeking instead a form that would purify the place rather than illustrate its horror. He spent almost four years on the monument and its landscape; construction began in 1964 under his supervision, and the reinforced-concrete flower was completed in 1966.
The structure is more complex than it looks from a distance. The base holds six niches separated by concrete walls, with basins of water along their edges, and six trapezoidal slabs reach up from the niches towards the bloom. Beneath it lies a crypt paved with railway sleepers, and on the north side a bronze plaque carries lines from Jama ("The Pit"), Ivan Goran Kovačić's wartime poem. Bogdanović thought of the whole as a cosmic plant whose crown reaches the heavens while its roots descend into the underworld. In 2007 he and the Jasenovac memorial site received the international Carlo Scarpa Prize for the creation of a space for preserving memory. The village of Jasenovac lies at the point where the Una flows into the Sava, on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Getting there
The memorial is on the edge of the village of Jasenovac in Sisak-Moslavina County. The nearest Croatian town of size is Sisak, about 48 km away in a straight line; Prijedor in Bosnia and Herzegovina is about 37 km away across the border. The nearest airport in Croatia is Zagreb Franjo Tuđman International Airport (ZAG), about 85 km away; Banja Luka International Airport (BNX) in Bosnia and Herzegovina is about 48 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Stone Flower is a monument to the atrocities perpetrated in the Jasenovac concentration camp by the Ustaša regime during World War II in Yugoslavia: Serbs, Romani people, Jews, and Croatian dissidents of the regime. According to its author, the flower that opens its petals towards the sky and the Sun represents faith in life and rebirth, overcoming suffering.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
45.28040, 16.92840per Wikidata