Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia

<p>Across the globe memorial and grave sites are being increasingly weaponized in conflicts and politicized by parties to advance agendas. Here Carol S. Lilly examines ideas of death politics memory ideology and nationalism in the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia & Hercegovina Croatia and Serbia to shine fresh light on cemetery culture in 20th-century Europe. <p/> More specifically <i>Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia</i> argues that while the CPY created its own communities of the dead in postwar Partisan Cemeteries it failed to do the same for civilian cemeteries in ways that might reinforce its ideals of secularism pluralism and brotherhood and unity. Moreover the communist regime left the previous system of ethno-religious segregation in place further isolating Catholics Orthodox Muslims and Jews who continued to be buried in separate locations. Finally it explicitly politicized burial rites and grave markers making cemeteries into legitimate spaces of political discourse. <p/>As a result by the time Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s dead bodies and cemeteries had become a concerted weapon of war in the ongoing ethnic conflict. Ultimately then this timely study reveals for the first time the extent to which the communist regime not only failed to created their own communities of the dead but also further divided and alienated living communities in Yugoslavia.</p>