It's been forty-five years since the imposing monument of freedom rose on Jasikovac hill in Berane, the work of a top performer of monumental architecture, professor Bogdan Bogdanović.
The monument, in the presence of thousands of citizens, was unveiled on September 15, 1977, on Beran Liberation Day. Đoko Pajković, prominent Montenegrin revolutionary, one of the organizers of the uprising in Vasojevići against the fascist occupier, national hero; he was the president of the Executive Council (Government) of Montenegro and the president of the Central Committee of the Union of Communists of Montenegro...
At the beginning of the seventies, the idea of building a monument on Jasikovac, under which, as he sang, dawned Radonja Vešović, from time immemorial, spring caresses the Lim and summer rafts downstream...
At one of the first meetings dedicated to the construction of the monument, held in the Ivangrad hotel "Berane", which was attended by Budislav Šoškić, then president of the Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Montenegro, there was a detailed discussion about Bogdanović's future work in Jasikovac. Prominent Montenegrin architect, born in Vasojevići, Radosav Zeković, engaged in the construction of the monument, vividly explained the author's idea. He placed a jug on the table and arranged a dozen glasses around it; the jug represented a dome, and the glasses represented marble blocks on which history was written.
The architect Bogdanović, the author of a number of great monuments throughout Yugoslavia, including the "stone flower" in Jasenovac, said that he never had the opportunity to build a monument so dedicated to words. He knew that our society must have its own sacralized places where fallen heroes or martyrs are honored and events of essential importance are recorded.
- When they are marked in the right way, such places become material traces of "retained", seen, or understood history. And not only political and military history, but also the history of ideas and understandings, morals and views of the world - Bogdan Bogdanović told me in 1974. - One civilization, some "civilizational model", one society that would renounce such features, would opt, by the same fact, for ahistoricity...
Bogdan Bogdanović (1922 - 2010), professor at the Faculty of Architecture, mayor of Belgrade when it was the capital of Yugoslavia; son Milan Bogdanović, writer, literary critic, director of the National Theater in Belgrade...
In the wartime nineties, Bogdan opposed politics Slobodan Milosevic, so since 1993 he lived in Vienna as a political emigrant, where he died in 2010.
Following over the years various manifestations of the spiritual imperative of our man to leave his mark on past events, Bogdanović was convinced that our revolution never for a moment renounced a complex historical statement. It is quite natural that such a statement also requires special means of expression, a special architecture, and a special art, which we can call memorial, or even sacred, because that is essentially what it is. Focused on spiritual values, her task is to express and perpetuate them.
- Until now, I have always tried to build each monument complex that I work on as a special case, a special "personality", something that should belong to only one area, one type of common historical ideas of our peoples - says the author of the monument in Jasikovac. - So all my works are different, but they are internally connected by the same armature. This is the determination of the author to always try to express the same thought in a new way. Metaphorically speaking, revolution is the wheel of life. Even death, the death of a fighter, the death of a hero in that whirlwind of life, is only the "night of life", the moment after which, in an integral sense, life arises again, that is, a new morning comes...
Bogdanović points out that, for example, a Homeric picture of the world and life is close to this understanding; in The Iliad the hero's death is neither a painful nor a dark act, but a natural one, one could almost say cheerful. The idea of life is so strong in this poetry that it completely dispels the shadows of death...
For someone who is not familiar with the craft secrets of memorial construction, according to Bogdanović, the paths of inspiration can often seem completely random, although they are not.
As for the monument in Berane, Bogdan Bogdanović remembered the beginning well. That was the feeling when he first climbed the Jasikovac hill and when he suddenly found himself in the middle of a small, tame, slightly lying meadow in the middle of the hill, he immediately realized that it was an unusual topographical situation, created by the merging of the perimeter ramparts of the old Turkish fortress with terrain and saw that the situation on the hill should be used.
- On Jasikovac, there is already an area naturally separated from the everyday landscape. From that depression, you can see all the surrounding mountains, the whole three hundred and sixty degrees around, and you can't even see the city, nothing that is below the "bend", but only what is above it. The landscape, seen and understood in the way that circumstances lead us to, has something legendary. It is only necessary to draw attention to its inner meaning - Professor Bogdanović explains. - It reminds, roughly, like when you write an exclamation point with your hand next to a sentence that carries modest but hidden wisdom, so that you can easily glance over it without understanding it. That sign, in itself, is not God knows what, it is not even a word, not a letter, not even a particularly interesting artistic twist, and yet it has an energetic charge, it has the power to change, to emphasize, that is, to make an invisible meaning visible. From the moment when I formed a problem for myself, I realized that, first of all, I was missing something that would be equivalent to an exclamation mark...
From the multitude of signs, a few began to stand out that could be taken into account. Bogdanović also points to other difficulties. The monument had to be visible from the city and from various access roads, but at the same time it had to be an integral part of that "inner space".
And: as a sign of exclamation, an eighteen-meter-high dome rose to a height, and forty granite blocks were ritually arranged around it, on which master masons wrote the history of Vasojević, carved ornamentation that reflects Montenegrin costumes and weapons.
- The monument, therefore, has two "landscapes" in which it will be experienced with equal value - says architect Bogdanović. - I put aside the difficulties of such compositional ideas and draw attention only to the expressive possibility of this duality, which also acquires certain metaphorical properties. Two landscapes are always two times, two sides of time, where the memorial group itself can be understood as an absolute point of knowledge, a moment of full feeling of life, that precious hypnosis of the absolute present that we are so rarely able to evoke in ourselves, except when we are in a special moments, faced with a philosophical experience of space and time...
Bogdan Bogdanović knew Montenegro well, and that, as he says, not only the one that can be seen and known in the field of vision along the asphalt roads, so he came to the conclusion that completely simple, mathematically reduced forms will play their role better than complex ornamental ones - plastic assemblies. He told me that in this respect the Beran monument is a surprise for him as well. He often thought, even in his construction youth, about some features of construction in Montenegro.
- Both the Montenegrin house and the grave marker have something extremely reduced, extremely mathematically simple in their expression, unlike costumes or games, which always seemed descriptive to me - diagnoses architect Bogdanović. - And those are, I would say, two views of time and the world. One absolute, established, proverbial, established forever, permanent (house, grave), the other sung, playful, I would almost say Dionysian, such as ornaments and colors of costumes, or figures in a game...
He did not, of course, rule out the possibility that in the second part of his work, when the monument begins to appear, and when the mason's passions flare up, some previously playful motif will be woven into the solemn, hieractically mirrored image of time, past and future.
His wish was not to betray the trust of the client, not to betray the value of the historical message, and not to abuse the exceptional beauty and purity of nature, which, he says, is always passive and has no possibility to defend itself against people, then when they spoil and destroy it either by their own careless carelessness, or wrong taste, or perverted "artistic" ideas.
Stone archive on Jasikovac; as a syntagm, a collection of events that, says Bogdanović, gradually led to the National Liberation War, and to the victory of a great humane idea in that war; therefore, a document of its kind, a collection of inscriptions, which begins: Sheet flows, stone remembers, and ends Njegošev: What would the people teach chivalry, if there were no martyrs...
...And over there, two young architects from London, a married couple, were banished to Berane. Rebeka i Paul. Climbed Jasikovac, viewed the work of the famous architect.
They also visited the Polim Museum, from where the director of the Museum, Violeta Folić, pointed at me. During the pleasant meeting, we talked about Montenegro, the Vasojevićs, the creation of the monument on Jasikovac and the author.
- I am preparing a doctorate on the topic of how memorial objects, that is, partisan monuments in Montenegro, have significance in various "scales" of identity, from personal to local to transnational memory - Rebeka, a Londoner, tells me. - I am interested in whether that significance changes in the context of new political and social situations. I will use examples of Bogdanović's monument in Jasikovac, then Kane Radević on Barutana and the Memorial Home in Kolašin...
Soon, in London, the young architect Rebeka will defend her doctoral dissertation on Montenegrin monumental architecture, with a special focus on Beran's Jasikovac.
- It will also be useful for us in Berane regarding the conceptual design of the whole of Jasikovac - stresses director Violeta. - The conceptual solution includes the monument and the entire park area...
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