In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the landscape is rich in traces of the past. They are often signs of memories and identities that were in conflict among them and with those dominant today. More in detail, the elements of the landscape inherited from the past may refer to a long time when Bosnia and Herzegovina was a country characterised by the coexistence of different identities and by a strong multireligious cultural environment where diversity was normality. On the contrary, one of the main results of the war in the 1990s has been the production of clearly segregated areas where a single national-religious group is dominant and where contacts or mixing among groups are prevented. The destruction of cultural heritage and symbolic monuments during the war had clearly the aim of erasing the traces of previous cohabitation, while the new buildings erected after the war have been often intended to convey the identity of the dominant group in the place. However, the Dayton Peace Agreement provided that the destroyed cultural heritage should be restored or rebuilt recreating a landscape where conflictual memories and identities, past and present face one another.
My contribution derives from my ongoing PhD research on the symbolic and identity meaning of abandoned places of worship in six municipalities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through the landscape analysis, the research will investigate the symbolic role of the monumental objects and buildings, their relationship with the other ones and their use as references for identity claims. The state of preservation, the accessibility, the relative visibility and the prominence in the landscape of the ancient or new buildings could be used as indicators in each of the selected municipalities to recognise one of the following conditions: materialisation in the region a) of the clear dominance of one group over the others, b) of a new balance among coexisting communities, or c) of the level of conflict among rival identities.
Mots clés : conflicts of memory|conflicts of identity|post-war landscapes|identity monuments|Bosnia and Herzegovina
A103138AG