There Was Once Yugoslavia
Photo Story by Albertina d’urso IT WAS A WAR where everyone was against everyone else, inspired at first by “ethnic cleansing,” that is, by the extermination of the opponents. It was one of the bloodiest and most inhumane wars of all time. Millions of people were killed, mutilated, raped, taken to concentration camps and forced to leave their homes.
Today, this area, a few miles from a now united Europe, is surprising not only for the diversity of its languages, ethnicities and religions, but also for its numerous borders, sometimes still shrouded in a palpable tension.
These photographs, taken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia, are the puzzle of what was once Yugoslavia. It is a puzzle that was not only taken apart, but its pieces also changed shape; some disappeared and others were created, so it will always be impossible to put it back together again.
Yugoslavia, first a kingdom then a federal republic, was a Balkan nation for almost the entire twentieth century. My generation and I were able to study it in geography books. The Balkans have always been an area of overlapping cultures and beliefs and, in fact, at the start of the 90s, after the demise of Tito, nationalism and ethnic and religious hatred prevailed and led to a series of armed conflicts.
