I created this website in connection with the publication of my monograph Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia: Ethnic Conflict and the Politicization of Cemeteries, Bloomsbury Press, February 2024.

The book investigates the extent to which the Socialist regime in the republics of Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia, and Serbia (including its autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina) worked to create burial policies and rituals that would promote its stated goals of secularism, ethnoreligious pluralism, and “brotherhood and unity.”  As one element of my research for this monograph I examined cemeteries and grave markers throughout the region to see if and how they had changed over time.

Over a period of a decade, I visited nearly 120 cemeteries and memorials:  34 in Croatia, 41 in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 18 in Serbia, and 26 in Kosovo/Kosova.  I specifically sought out a mixture of larger municipal and smaller rural cemeteries, religious, secular, and military, some homogenous, but especially those with ethnoreligious diversity.  I took well over 2000 photographs which serve as a primary source and form of evidence, providing clear explicit evidence of the continuing segregated nature of most cemeteries, the existence of and limited burial options available to those in interfaith marriages, and the face of politicized grave markers.  I have placed over 1600 of those photographs in this website with the goal of making them available to any interested viewers and scholars for their own research. 

-Dr. Carol S. Lilly