The Vitality of the Korčanica Memorial Landscape

Abstract

<p class="Abstract" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The Korčanica Memorial Zone is a Yugoslav architectural heritage, one of the many World War II memorials and one of the rare preserved memorial sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Korčanica memorial of the former Partisan hospital is presented as historical landscape research. Through multi-layered, primarily cultural, social and economic aspects of the Bosnian Krajina territory development at a given time, the paper aims to its (re)integration in urban planning and landscape design, with public participation in local and regional development. Korčanica landscape historical contextualization, through available archival materials and periodicals research, information obtained by interviewing the sculptor and on-site analysis, provided a broad insight into heritage as a process within specific discourses, helping in current significance comprehension. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Universal landmark language in the current Korčanica landscape communicates intelligibly by timeless message design quality. The message sent in this place almost half a century ago, although now out of its political and socio-ideological context and currently unprotected, manages to reach the few casual or intentional visitors. Its vitality lies in the uniqueness of the response to, first of all, the historically significant place marking - for the birth of great social strength and unity, to the expected abstraction or symbolism beyond the national, as well as the response to the natural context of this hidden landmark, whereby in formulating such an answer in a sculpture scale, the author himself remains true to his expression. The landscape biography reading discovered many history lessons about the variable territory state, and many traces of social, economic, educational, cultural and technological layers of Grmeč Mountain history are (un)available in the current Korčanica landscape.</span></p>