For the past two years and two months activists have been fighting to name a street in Banja Luka, a town known as the “city of women,” after an exceptional woman – Vahida Maglajlić. This fight has lasted longer than the wartime journey of this partisan, adorned with the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia. And it seems it […]

It has now been thirty years since February 5th was marked on Sarajevo’s memory map simply and undeniably as – Markale. Situated in the city center, the green market got its name from the nearby marketplace built during the Austro-Hungarian period (Markt halle). On February 5, 1994, it became the site of an unprecedented massacre. That day 68 residents of […]

“All this happening after the war is what is the hardest thing for me. Why do we, ordinary people who are not in politics, hate each other (Not everyone!) so much? Why are they not being convinced that we should hate those who made us hate each other, to kill each other? (…) They [the politicians] agreed well on how […]

Jo Berry daughter of a British politician who was killed in the 1984 IRA attack

In late September, an inscription was written on the memorial plaque in Kazani in huge red letters: Caco lives in us 10 br

The young people of the post-war generation in the Drenica region

The initiative ”Peace with a Woman’s Face” that involves 13 women’s non-governmental organisations from Bosnia and Herzegovina and forumZFD initiated a campaign entitled ”100 Women – 100 Streets Named after Women” at the end of 2021. The idea was to make the names of public spaces in our country gender-sensitive. More specifically, in practical terms this meant submitting initiatives for […]

Nexhmije Selca closes her eyes wistfully and tries to find the words to say that most of the history of opera and ballet in Kosovo is just a sound. The first three decades of the entire repertoire of the Kosovar opera and ballet troupe have been burnt, and Selca, one of the first three ballerinas in Kosovo, says that all […]

Sound researchers and composers say that for the process of memorialization, sounds can serve as allies for the societies whose past has been distorted or denied. For the people and places whose past has often been denied, sounds are considered a rich resource for documentation and remembrance. The concept of sound as a means of documenting the dealing with the […]

Music, emotions, and joy in Kosovo’s wartime The concepts of war and joy may seem almost incompatible. On one hand, there are moments of violence, displacement, and trauma, while on the other, there exist joy and positive emotions. However, an individual’s experiences during wartime can be multifaceted, and not every emotion felt during war needs to be negative. In recent […]

Music in the culture of remembrance during times of war in Kosovo Music can serve as significant emotional resource for people and create a sense of community. Moreover, it has the potential to distract from realities and inspire collective enthusiasm. In times of war, alongside its political and military functions, music can assume a central role in portraying normalcy of […]

Imagine that there was a memorial plaque on the wall of the former police station in the regional centre of Bosnia Posavina region. A memorial plaque with an inscription indicating that Bosniaks and Croats from Brčko were tortured in the building, and especially in the room number thirteen. Just because they had different names, some of them were killed at […]