Andrew Herscher

Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-Memory in Post-Yugoslavia

“Preserve it: it’s yours!” In Albanian, Serbian, and English, this message— or, more precisely, this command—appeared on billboards throughout Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, in the summer of 2004. (See Plate 8.1.) The billboards displayed what the people of Kosovo ought to preserve in a series of twelve images. Each image showed a historical site: the Decani and Gracanica monasteries, the Sinan Pasha mosque, an Ottoman-era konak (mansion), the Prizren League building, traditional stone tower houses, the Roman-era Ulpiana archaeological excavations, and so on. These sites comprised an exemplary set. Including Byzantine and Ottoman heritage, Christian and Islamic patrimony, Serb and Albanian monuments, and high and vernacular culture, this set represented nothing less than the United Colors of Kosovo, a multi-cultural and multiethnic Kosovo of vivid and complementary differences. Looming above all other images on the billboards was the form of a Neolithic figurine, among the oldest products of human culture discovered in the territory that is now known as Kosovo. The figurine’s size and position on the billboard were easy to understand; as a pre-ethnic artifact, it was the only heritage object whose multi-ethnic credentials were truly impeccable.

Architecture, Violence, Evidence

Architect Eyal Weizman and historian Andrew Herscher discuss their research on architecture as a target of political violence and the consequent interpretation(s) of architectural destruction in international law. The act of destruction fundamentally transforms the meaning of a building, and often architecture only acquires significance at the very moment of its destruction. Their discussion reveals the complexity of meaning surrounding architecture as both victim and witness, and challenges the too-frequent assumption that buildings only ever serve as static symbols of identity.

Urban formations of difference: borders and cities in post-1989 Europe

The devastation of the historical cities of the former Yugoslavia, perpetrated by the contending parties in the civil war, was regarded in Western Europe as an act of destruction against European cities. However, the cultural rhetoric of the European identity of cities, such as Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, and Vukovar displays a stark contrast with the European Unions lack of political engagement with the future of Bosnia and Croatia. This rhetoric is also diametrically opposed to the collective politics of exclusion of Bosnian and Croatian migrants from a United Europe. These ambiguous approaches to the notion of ‘Europe’ prompt an analytical focus on the concrete, localized and at times contradictory urban sites where Europeanization is taking place.

Städtebau as Imperial Culture: Camillo Sitte's Urban Plan for Ljubljana

Camillo Sitte9s planning work has rarely been examined as anything other than an application of the theory laid out in his treatise, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1899). However, Sitte9s theoretical precepts alone do not account for the transnational geography of his practice. Sitte9s work as a planner developed around the distinction between Vienna, the imperial capital, where he was never able to influence urban development, and the empire9s predominantly Slavic provinces, where almost all of his projects were commissioned. Focusing on the preparation of Sitte9s plan for Ljubljana in 1895, this essay relates the theoretical formulation and practical application of city planning to two dynamics that dominated late-nineteenth-century Austro-German liberal culture: the appropriation of humanist Italian culture by scientific art and architectural history, and the redeployment of that culture as professional expertise in a putatively uncultured eastern Europe.