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10 - Post-x: Community-Based Archiving in Croatia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2020

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Summary

Who will keep my city, my friends, who will bring Vukovar out of the dark? There are no backs stronger than mine and yours, and therefore, if it's not too much bother for you, if any youthful whispering remains in you, join. Somebody has touched my parks, benches on which your names are still carved, a shadow in which you gave and received your first kiss – somebody has simply stolen everything because, how to explain that there is even no Shadow any more? There is no more window shopping in which you took small pleasures, there is no cinema in which you watched the saddest film, your history is simply obliterated and now you have nothing. You have to build it all over again. First your past, search for your roots, then your present, and then if you have any strength left, invest it into the future. And as for the city, don't worry about it, it has been all this time inside you. It has just been hidden. So the executioner doesn't find it. The city – it is you.

(Siniša Glavašević, Croatian reporter on Radio Vukovar, 1991)

Introduction

The Republic of Croatia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in June 1991 and was quickly plunged into war as Croatian Serb populations revolted and the Yugoslav National Army and Serb paramilitary groups attacked along the states’ ethnically mixed borders. Eastern Croatia saw some of the most brutal early fighting. Each lunchtime during its 87-day siege, Croatians across the country tuned their radios to listen to Siniša Glavašević's report from inside the border city of Vukovar, the first European city to be completely destroyed since World War 2. His poignant, reassuring yet defiant invocations continued until the radio went silent. Several hundred soldiers and civilians, Glavašević among them, were summarily executed by Serb forces when the city fell. His body was exhumed from a mass grave on a farm at Ovčara outside Vukovar in 1997.

Glavašević's words paint a picture of the daily life and spaces of this previously vibrant, multi-ethnic Danube city that preserves its citizens’ most intimate moments and personal pleasures in ways that no official archive can replicate.

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