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Carol Lilly, "Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia: The Politicization of Cemeteries and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans" (Bloomsbury, 2024).
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- [00:01]
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- [01:30]
Carol Lilly
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
Polina Popova
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I am your host, Polina Popova, and today I have an honor to speak with Carol Lilly, historian who recently wrote a book, published a book, Death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia. The Politicization of Cemeteries and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans. The book came out in Bloomsbury Press last year and the paperback was out this year in August of 2025. Carol hello and welcome to the show.
- [02:13]
Carol Lilly
Thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.
- [02:17]
Polina Popova
Yes, we're happy to host you. And of course, my first question would be, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners?
- [02:25]
Carol Lilly
Okay, thank you again. My name is Kira Lilly. I did my undergraduate work in Russian language and East European studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where which is where I'm from. And then I took a little time off. But while I was at the University of Colorado, I spent four months in the Soviet Union in Leningrad, and at that time decided that as much as I loved learning about the Soviet Union and Russia. I just didn't think I wanted to go back to that country again. So when I came back, I started learning Serbo Croatian from a colleague of my father's and switched my focus to Yugoslavia, which certainly at that time, and I still believe is, was a kinder, gentler, socialist country. And after a couple of years off, I applied to and was accepted to the Department of History at Yale University, where I worked with Professor Eva Bonitz. And that's where I ended up getting my degree. I then went on to work eventually in the History department at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, where I taught for the next 30 some years.
- [03:51]
Polina Popova
Oh, wow, that's impressive. And let me begin with this quote from one of the first pages of your book. That is something wrong with the American way of death. And so this way I want to introduce our main topic of discussion today. It's death and burial. And Carol, if you can sort of unfold this for us and maybe also define what is asymmetry and the burial site.
- [04:24]
Carol Lilly
Okay, So I had no connection to studies of death or cemeteries throughout my entire career, really. I studied propaganda and I studied women in Yugoslavia, but not this topic. And I had no connection to it in my life really either. I grew up in a very secular and mobile American family. My father's family was from California, my mother's was from Florida. And then I grew up in Colorado. And what that meant was that we never went to cemeteries. Honestly, my first graveside experience was when I was in my 20s, when my grandmother died. So at that point, pretty much everything I knew about burials came from tv, from movies. And so throughout the short service of my grandmother's, I was waiting for that moment I'd seen on movies when they would lower the coffin into the ground and we would all throw a handful of dirt into the grave and make our final goodbyes. And so I was shocked and really horrified when the service was over. And then we. They ushered us away gently, and the coffin was still sitting over this giant hole in the ground. And it felt so sterile and so terribly incomplete. And I didn't think about it too much at that time, except for the fact that I couldn't even cry. But many years later, on my first trips to Yugoslavia, I was really honored to be included in a family's, my host family's celebration of the Day of the Dead on November 2nd. And everyone goes and they clean and they decorate their loved ones graves and they all visit the cemetery together. And then they go home for this meal in their honor. And I was so impressed, not just with the ceremony, though I was, and the attention to the dead, but to the grave markers themselves, which were so much more personal and so much more interesting than those in the United States. And it really got me thinking over a longer period of time of how different everything is in these countries than in my own. And then I started reading the books of Caitlin Doughty, who talks about the different ways in which the dead can be treated and how they are treated in this country, and problems about embalming and. And all of this sort of just gradually led me into this. And then also other. You know, I visited grave mark, grave cemeteries and burial grounds in Yugoslavia and in Europe every time I went. But it didn't actually turn into a topic of research until the wars of Yugoslavia and the constant conversations I found myself having with. With my colleagues there, mostly about occurrences of grave site and cemetery desecrations and their descriptions of those desecrations as equally horrific and possibly worse than physical attacks on the living. Which reminded me again of how important is the role that the dead continue to play in their communities and how little of a role they play in ours, and how little I understood about.
- [08:09]
Polina Popova
All of this in some sense. And I might sound cruel, and I understand this. I just wanted to say that former Yugoslavia or the Balkan region seems to be a perfect place to study death and relationships with. Of living with the debt. Right. And the memorialization because of so many wars happening just in the 20th. I'm not even mentioning before that, just in the 20th century. The first, first world war, then second and then the 90s. And it seems like.
- [08:47]
Carol Lilly
It'S a rough place, you know, I mean, considering. I consider thought of it as a kinder, gentler place. And in so many ways it is. The people are so love, lovely and so kind, but they've had a rough time. And also because there's so many different cultures there and so many different approaches to dealing with death.
- [09:10]
Polina Popova
Yeah.
- [09:11]
Carol Lilly
Yeah, that night it's. It made it so interesting. And again, I went in knowing nothing, which. Which was like, made it. It was incredible act of hubris. But, you know, it was really interesting. I had no preconceptions. We can say that.
- [09:30]
Polina Popova
Speaking of different traditions coexisting, and in what I got from your book and from general knowledge, there are some specific traditions in Orthodox Christianity or there are Islamic and Jewish traditions that coexist in Yugoslavia. Burial, so to speak, institution. Is that right?
- [09:54]
Carol Lilly
Absolutely right there. I mean, you have so many different religious traditions in that country. You have Catholics, you have Protestants also And Orthodox and Muslims and Jews and Roma and so many others. And, you know, it's really hard to talk about in any generalized way, though of course, I do in the book the different burial traditions because they are specific not only to the religions, but to time and place. So, you know, I spend, you know, some paragraphs in the book trying to give some general information on them, but I know that I get things wrong and that I'm in. I will inevitably get them wrong because those are only the ones that, you know, I can say, well, sort of generally, you know, in Islamic tradition they do things this way and it's very different from how the Catholics who do them this way. But, you know, in Islam, it's specific to where in Islam. Right. And the Islamic traditions of the Ottoman Balkans are not the same of those of Saudi Arabia or perhaps Tajikistan or Indonesia. They're going to be different. And then they change over time too, as they did in the Balkans as well. So it was difficult to not get things wrong all the time and, and understanding that I'm, you know, that I, that I inevitably would. Right. But to try and, and be aware of it at least and be respectful.
- [11:34]
Polina Popova
Yeah. I think our, our job as historians is trying to be truthful to, to the.
- [11:43]
Carol Lilly
As much as possible. Yeah.
- [11:45]
Polina Popova
And trying to avoid mistakes, but when we do them, just admit it and understand our limits and our biases.
- [11:52]
Carol Lilly
Right. And, you know, recognizing I have access to, you know, x many sources that I can read in the languages I know and with the time available to me and, and here's what I got out of it. And please, will other people do more research on this? Because that would be great.
- [12:09]
Polina Popova
Yes. Kiril, could you discuss the general concept of cemeteries which we touched upon, but also how. My question is, how do burial sites and memorials get weaponized? Got weaponized during and after major wars and political conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
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Carol Lilly
So the purpose and structure of burial grounds have evolved significantly over time. As I said, as far as we know, the first deliberate burials took place about a hundred thousand years ago. In Western societies, burial grounds were originally placed very far from settlements due to a fear of the dead. But with the influence of Christianity, they come with this idea that prayers to the dead could be beneficial to the living. So then they start putting the dead in graveyards next to and even in churches. Now, over time, these churchyard burial grounds were very hierarchically structured with the highest ranking religious figures and nobles buried inside the church and those of lower rank just outside, and everybody else, well, outside, pretty often in mass graves. And subject to frequent removal. But those who were outside the church for any reason. And these could include unbaptized babies, suicides, criminals, and those who were of other religions. They could not be buried on what was considered sanctified ground. And this is the basis on which we consider graveyards, communities of the dead. Comparable then, to communities of the living. Inasmuch as they are simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. Right. They are communities of those people who belong to the community. But. But they kick out people who don't. And they were not allowed to be buried on church ground. Later, however, and this is in the 17th and 18th century, under the pressures of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation, Many burial grounds in Western societies became secularized, which is to say that they passed from ownership and management by religious authorities into those of municipal authorities or the local communities. And in those cemeteries, all dead, all of the dead were welcome. Although it still was quite common for different religious groups to have their own sections within them. So you would still very likely have separate sections for Jews and Muslims in particular, if they were in those cemeteries at all and didn't still have their own religious cemeteries. So usually when you talk about cemeteries per se, those are secular cemeteries, Whereas churchyards are more often those still attached to a religious institution. And then there are sort of burial grounds which are. I don't know. Those tend to be less clearly defined. Julie Rugg has done some really great work on this in England. So now about the weaponization. Yeah, okay, so this is a really difficult question, but it's super important. We tend to think of cemeteries as places of peace, right? These are sites where we commemorate and then visit our deceased loved ones. We think about history. Sometimes in. Sometimes in places, people just go and enjoy nature there. People used to go and have picnics in cemeteries, Right? But precisely because they are these communities of the dead that have been both inclusive and exclusive, they can also be politicized and even weaponized. Historically, this has actually been a relatively rare phenomenon. And cemeteries have generally not been considered anything like a legitimate target in wartime. Because, you know, most people, including those who are not explicitly religious, quite secular, still consider damage to grave sites as far more barbaric and far more deliberately offensive than the bombing of, I don't know, some other cultural institution like a museum or a library or school. Because it clearly represents the destruction of something that is sort of inherently sacred. Right? I mean, that's why we use the term desecration, because it is desecratization. Right. Already in the 19th century, there were Several efforts that were starting to be made to protect cultural property and war, but those didn't go anywhere until after the Second World War with the 1948 Geneva Convention, and then much more effectively or fully in the Hague Convention of 1954. Those conventions, though they did not specifically mention cemeteries, absolutely included them within their definition of cultural property. So by 1954, cemeteries are theoretically legally excluded as targets. But in fact, the number of desecrations have increased, along with the number of unverified and unverifiable accusations of desecrations. So that leads us to ask, well, so why is this happening? Under what conditions? And whose graves are the most vulnerable? It's not a question I can really answer, and this is one, of course, that needs a lot more research, but I can make some generalized comments along with more specific information about how it played out in socialist Yugoslavia and in past conflicts. Graves desecrated in wartime were most often those probably of enemy leaders or soldiers from opposing armies. But with the rise of racial and nationalist ideologies and policies, the graves and burial grounds of oppressed populations such as Native Americans, African Americans and Jews also suffered desecrations. Although to be clear, many of those desecrations were not really publicized. Of course, we know that during the Second World War, Jewish gravestones and cemeteries were regularly desecrated by Nazi forces as part of their racial war. Then we know, and it is true that for communists and at least the Yugoslav Communists during the Second World War, the enemy was not just the Nazi leader or the Nazi soldier, but really any occupation soldier and even any domestic collaborationist or conceivably anyone openly opposed to the communist regime. And at the end of the war, the communist regime pretty in Yugoslavia, and I don't know what happened in the other countries they would love to know, systematically obliterated the graves of those most obviously open enemies, certainly the occupation soldiers and many of the domestic collaborationists. And it made it difficult to openly commemorate any of its enemies. And then the next step was that in the post war decades, the Yugoslav, and here I do know that the other communist regimes also very deliberately politicized both of both their military and their civilian cemeteries. So the partisan military cemeteries very explicitly not only commemorated their own dead, but they excluded the remains of any domestic soldiers from the opposite side of the war. And that might seem obvious, but it actually isn't. I mean, there were German soldiers who are in the post World War II wartime cemeteries and in the civil war cemeteries in the United States, there are graves of the soldiers from, from the losing side right. And it was controversial, but they were determined to do it. But the partisan military soldiers were very clearly and explicitly only cemeteries of the victors. Their community was the community winners, no losers. And then at the same time, civilian cemeteries were also politicized. And this is when any sort of post war communists who were buried there, and oddly including even some children, had the communist red star placed on their grave markers. Now, of course, in a communist regime they're not going to allow any other political symbols on the gravestones, but the red star introduced and some hammers and sickles, also the concept of political symbols on gravestones which had not really existed previously. So as soon as the communist regime fell, this was now fair game, and other political symbols, now nationalist ones, began to join them and in fact take their place. So this is how the Yugoslav cemeteries were politicized. And that reality, along with their continued ethnoreligious segregation, made them really vulnerable to the desecrations of the 1990s. And it is certainly true the grave and cemetery desecrations during the wars of Yugoslav dissolution were more common than they had been previously, though possibly not as common as has been claimed, but it definitely Muslims and Croats desecrated Serbian Orthodox cemeteries, and Serbs desecrated Muslim and Croat cemeteries as each of them sought to drive civilian populations from disputed territories or maybe just out of spite this holiday.
- [22:55]
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Carol Lilly
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- [24:10]
Polina Popova
It's interesting. I just wanted to make comment. It's not related, of course, to what you write in your book, just in terms of how our conversation is flowing, of how discourses, atheistic and religious discourses can easily coexist. And it's just Interesting how people get. How people easily adapt to things. For example, I remember born in the 80s, we still had the, you know, the New Year traditional Christmas, which was New Year, truly.
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Carol Lilly
Yeah, yeah, the New Year's trees, exactly. Yeah.
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Polina Popova
And we. I remember on our plastic tree there was a red star on top of which, for me, it wasn't a problem. I always. And even now, living in America, in a mostly Christian country, I understand that it's a star of Bethlehem. Right. It's a religious symbol which was simply. Red star was also a Soviet symbol. So those things coexisted and we didn't even think too much about it.
- [25:14]
Carol Lilly
That's right. And they just sort of acculturate, adapt, Use this here, put that there, bring these symbols in, make them part of their own, and it's all fine, you know, until one day it isn't. Right. And, you know, and then those signs of a different ideology and a different culture are like fair game for. For vandalism or, you know, I mean, vandalism doesn't really feel to me like the right word. Vandalism feels like something teenagers do, right. When they're out running around. It's. It feels more like a hate crime, what they do in these cemeteries. Right. And this. These are desecrations. But, you know, then they know whose grave desecrate. It's the one with the red stars or it's the one that's Muslim or Serb, you know, with the. All of the symbols are right there, and they're all separated out. For them, it makes it so easy.
- [26:17]
Polina Popova
It's almost like a battleground for memory, right?
- [26:19]
Carol Lilly
For Columbia. Yes, yes, absolutely right.
- [26:25]
Polina Popova
Speaking of this battleground for memory, my next question is about the communist discourse. And of course, after the CPY took power in the region after the end of World War II, I wonder how. And you touched upon that a little bit. We don't have to go into too many details into this, but I have a specific, specific question about how did Soviet push for atheism, or scientific atheism, like they call it, influence the burial sites and how, again, those discourses coexist? And I wonder how did people who were still openly Muslim or belong to Jewish religion, how did they sort of survive in that environment, push for scientific atheism?
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Carol Lilly
Well, okay, so, I mean. I mean, the atheism didn't just come from the Soviet Union, first of all. I mean, they. It had its deeper origins in Marxist Leninist ideology. And the Communists, you know, the Yugoslav Communists were. Were serious Marxist Leninists. So they, you know, Even after they split from the Soviet Union, they were still serious Marxist Leninists, and they absolutely aspired to secularize all of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav society in line with their sincere belief in Marxism. But for them, the desire to do so was really complicated precisely because national identity and religion in that country were so intertwined. So on the one hand, party leaders were hoping that they could delegitimize the religious hierarchies and structures and in so doing, reduce their influence on national culture and mitigate national divisions. Right? So, okay, if we get rid of the religious, the priests, basically, and the Catholic Church, we can reduce their influence on Croatia, for example. But at the same time, they knew that if they pushed too hard against the religion per se, any open attacks on religious culture would indeed be perceived as an attack on the national identity. So they can attack the priests but not kill Catholicism, Right, Or. And not Islam, because then that is seen as an attack on Croatia and on Bosnian Muslims. And they. So they really had to pull back more often than they wanted to. And this dynamic was even more sensitive when you deal with death and burial culture, which is by far the most sensitive aspect of any religious culture. So most of all, they just didn't touch it. They just tried not to touch death and burial culture when they didn't have to. It's like, yeah, we can't touch that. That's just too sensitive. And that is probably why the civilian cemeteries were really left alone as much as possible. They, you know, they passed so few laws relating to civilian cemeteries. They did ultimately secularize the cemeteries. And again, I only did research in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, so I can't speak to what was happening in the other republics, but they did eventually secularize cemeteries in Serbia and Croatia. In Serbia, it was pretty easy because they were already in the hands of. Of the communities and the municipalities. So it didn't take much to legalize that. Croatia was really hard because the Catholic Church owned them all, but they also were pretty hostile to the Catholic Church, so they were really willing to take it on. Right? And so it was tricky because they didn't want to make it an attack on Croatia, but they were willing to make it an attack on the Catholic hierarchies. And so they did do that, but they didn't do it right away. They waited till the early 60s, and they made it like a legalistic argument rather than anything else. And then in Bosnia, they just didn't do it. And it was pretty shocking. I mean, they left those cemeteries in the hands of the Catholics, the Muslims, and The Orthodox until basically 1989. And by then it was too late. I mean, they secularized a few of them. And what that meant was that they kept getting these reports that said, yeah, you know, our local church won't bury the communists who died here or the wives of. Or the husbands of, you know, in mixed marriages. I mean, it made things really complicated in some areas. So. But otherwise, you know, there were a few difficulties. You know, as I mentioned in my book, there were some problems that had to do with letting people who are in hospitals have last rights. And this was almost entirely in Croatia. That was difficult. Again, they were most hostile in Croatia, but in so many ways, they were so anxious about getting into trouble with burial culture that they pretended they didn't have much to do with it. Right. And then when they created the new cemeteries, yes, they were secular for sure, but they still kept in so many places these segregated sections. So the Muslims had segregated sections, sometimes even segregated cemeteries, especially in Croatia and elsewhere and in Bosnia Herzegovina, they created these sections with these big letters separating not just Muslims and Jews and Catholics and Orthodox, but also Protestants, and then big sections for atheists. And so at the same time that they were really promoting mixed marriages throughout the country, anyone who is in a mixed marriage or the children of mixed marriages had to decide what section they were going to be buried in. And, you know, probably it was usually the atheist section, but they weren't all atheists, and the husbands and wives couldn't be buried together if they weren't. It was just an odd set of choices. From my perspective, it was an odd set of choices to make.
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Polina Popova
It's interesting that in your book, what caught my attention was that you not only talk about cemeteries and burial sites, you also talk about memorial parks. Right. For example, the Vraka or Vratsa.
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Carol Lilly
Yeah, Vratsa. Vraza. Yeah. Okay. So the partisan cemeteries were completely different. Right. And there they did everything actually. Right. Right. So these were the. The. The partisan cemeteries. It's. You know, they're like the first national cemeteries. Military cemeteries are. Right. And for Yugoslavia, the. Right. After the war, you know, an important goal of the cemeteries was to help create a new identity associated with new socialist Yugoslavia.
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Polina Popova
And.
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Carol Lilly
And so they had an enormous, enormous number of partisan memorials, Partisan monuments, partisan ossuaries, partisan cemeteries. And, I mean, there were just thousands and thousands of them. Andrew Lawler has created a database of them just in Bosnia Herzegovina. If anyone is interested, you can find this. The ones at first were almost entirely locally organized and funded, just spontaneously created out of this Desperate need to bury and mourn the dead. That made up, you know, something like six and a half percent of the total population. Although, you know, in some regions it was probably more than 10%, right? Probably in Bosnia Herzegovina. But then over time, they began being financed at a republic or national level and were internationally famous for their, you know, abstract designs and architectural brilliance. And so they had really almost like two different goals in mind. The local monuments were there to help the families mourn the dead, and the larger parks and memorials were to help with tourism and collective identity. But all of them shared this commitment to brotherhood and unity, right? The. The goal of Brastvo Yedinstvo, the brotherhood, unity of the all of the Yugoslav peoples and the unity of the Yugoslav state and. And socialism, whatever that meant at any given time in Yugoslavia, which changed considerably. And how that. What that looked like varied. But one very common element of it was that whether these were cemeteries with actual bodies in them or just names listed on monuments, those who were being memorialized were never ethnoreligiously segregated or even sometimes identified by the nation. They were citizens of Yugoslavia. And that really deliberate equality and integration of the dead in partisan cemeteries is such an evident and stark contrast to their continued segregation in the civilian cemeteries. And it would have been really even more effective if they'd allowed some of the losers to be buried there, too. But. So they too, were politicized in a sense, because they were only the winners. But at least those winners in there were integrated.
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Carol Lilly
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Polina Popova
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- [38:57]
Polina Popova
And my next question is, what role did the grave markers and epitaphs play in the Yugoslav, both private and public culture? And I wonder how things changed.
- [39:15]
Carol Lilly
In.
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Polina Popova
1991, 1999, so after the fall of the communist regime, so to speak. And you touched upon that, you know, Muslim grave markers, but maybe you can talk about them in this context. And it's just such an interesting topic, grave markers and epic lafis in general.
- [39:38]
Carol Lilly
Yeah, I mean, I mentioned a little bit before about how much more interesting the grave markers were in Yugoslavia than they are in America, frankly. I mean, from the broader perspective, they show such incredible variety, and the distinctions between the ethnoreligious markers tell us so much about the different cultures. But honestly, what really pulled me in were the differences and distinctions on an individual level, even within a particular ethno religious group. You know, people talk about the. The cult of death a lot with regard to Serbia, and I don't necessarily want to overstate that because it means different things to different people. But what I saw in this part of the world, and maybe it's true in many other areas, too, is that these grave markers really bring the dead to life in a way that is not true in most of the cemeteries I've been to in the United States, which is to say that they display a real emotional depth and a personalization and show the character of the deceased in a way that allows ordinary passersby to feel like they actually know something about that person. Partly, of course, this just comes from the use of images. Right. And photographs, which are so much more common in this region. And those have changed a lot over time. Right. They used to be very, very formal, and then over time, they became very different. We can talk about that in a minute. And then also epitaphs, and then which we can talk about. And then other symbols, whether they are religious symbols or symbols that relate to the person's intellectual interests or hobbies, maybe musical symbols or baseballs or not baseballs. Soccer balls. Right. Footballs, they would say all kinds of different indicators, and then sort of paraphernalia that is left always on the graves in these areas. So it's also, of course, that degree of personalization that probably made the politicization also feel so easy and so natural. It's like it's just one more step. It's just a different symbol. Right. But of course, from my perspective, also so dangerous but if you think about, for example, the Ottoman Muslim grave markers, for example, traditionally they're just white pillars, right? They're sometimes one pillar, sometimes a headstone and a footstone, sometimes they have a slab in between, right? And theoretically, they should be very simple with just the most basic information on them. And indeed, many of them are like that. So if you look at a Muslim cemetery from a distance, it looks really homogenous, like a sea of white. But then you get into it, and, in fact, almost everyone is different, right? And there are some really fascinating differences. And these differences don't just begin in the latest period, but even quite early on, you'll see distinctions and differences in, you know, in the 1930s and 20s and up through into the present period. And you realize, okay, look, I mean, yes, they're different cultures, but Muslims and Christian Slavs in these areas lived together. I mean, and a lot of the time they lived in peace, right? Not always, but much of the time. And they adapted elements of each other's cultures. And evidence of that acculturation showed up on Muslim grave markers. Sometimes it was the shape of the grave marker, sometimes it was in their use of photographs, sometimes in their use of symbols and epitaphs and paraphernalia. And so there's so much variety, which is why I just want to mention that not only are there a lot of photographs in my book, but I have this associated.
- [44:19]
Polina Popova
Website.
- [44:22]
Carol Lilly
Which has. You know, when I got done, I had, you know, something like 3,000 pictures from all of the cemeteries I'd visited. And I thought, oh, my God, what am I gonna. You know, it's such a shame for all of these to go to waste. So they're all there that anybody can use and borrow at any time. And, you know, also some they're organized into displays on that website, and I would encourage anybody to go and look at them and maybe make corrections onto them if I haven't got it right. But I took so many. So many pictures. So you can really get a sense of what, you know, all of these different grave markers of different types look like.
- [45:08]
Polina Popova
And I wanted to say to our readers who. Sorry, to our listeners, to the potential readers of the book, that the book, indeed reads is somewhat of a. Almost like a scholarly travel journal or. It has a lot of photographs and it has a lot of. It's a very interesting book for anyone and especially for those who are interested in anthropology of death and history of death, but I think really, for anyone who's interested in that region, it's a. It's a good book to even, like, look through.
- [45:46]
Carol Lilly
Oh, I appreciate that. It was. It was really challenging in many ways, precisely because it had to be so interdisciplinary also. So it is, you know. Yeah. I had to look up a lot of linguistics and a lot of. Right.
- [46:05]
Polina Popova
And I know from. From your book. I'm not going to go into those details here, but we, as historians, very often we sit in the archives working with documents, but going out there like anthropologists. Right. And speaking to people and to some extent, earning their trust is hard. It's not what we usually do. And you somehow you walk that line between those disciplines.
- [46:31]
Carol Lilly
Well, thank you. I mean, actually, it was. Walking around the cemeteries was a blast. And I had a really lovely, lovely guide. Selma Haji Hajilovich from Bosnia took me around so many places and other guides also in the other countries. But she was so helpful in Bosnia Herzegovina and, you know, made sure that I didn't walk into landmines, especially for which I'm extremely grateful. There weren't too many places that were still dangerous. But she could tell right away ways like, yeah, you stay right on the path here. Yes, ma'.
- [47:05]
Polina Popova
Am.
- [47:07]
Carol Lilly
So it was. It was a really fun project, I have to say, but it did take a lot of driving around and I took a lot of pictures. So anybody who wants to use them, have Adam. Because it seemed like a shame for them to go to waste. Anyway, by the end, you know, toward the end of the sec. Of the communist period, not into the war, but in the communist period, there were, you know, a lot of the Muslims who had been. Who had become entirely secularized and had adopted the gray and black granite rectangular headstones that we usually associate with Christian burials. And interestingly, what I didn't know was that those in Kosovo were far more secular. The Muslim gravestones in Kosovo were among the most secular Muslim gravestones. And then again in the war, all of them began to adopt these nationalist symbols, which, you know, really just showed you how politicized they had all become and how.
- [48:12]
Polina Popova
How was and is death? Of course, I'm taking this in quotation marks after the fall of communism. And right now, do you. Do you. Can you just. In general, can you paint the picture of how. What. What the burial culture is like right now in Yugoslavia? Not in the former. Of course.
- [48:33]
Carol Lilly
Of course, in each of those places. Right. Okay. So to get to that, I have to say, just make a few more comments about death under communism. Okay. So I stated previously that the ethnoreligious segregation remained in place, and that's true. And it also meant that that allowed for the placement of religious symbols on grave markers, and then also later photos and epitaphs and items relating to personal interests and lend eventually also political symbols for the communists. I mean, there were almost no laws about what could and could not be on a grave marker, which really surprised me. And also, as far as I could tell, the grave monument industry was not nationalized. I mean, I looked and looked for information on this and there was just nothing. It still appeared to be a private industry, but there was a lot of self censorship both among the producers and the consumers of grave markers. And part of this was of course economic because, you know, there wasn't a lot of extra money lying around under socialism for people to spend on large and ostentatious grave markers. But even if some people had it, they generally knew better than to spend it on markers that were too blatantly religious or ostentatious or in any other way non communist. So most of the religious grave markers, which most were frankly had one cross on them, right, or one religious symbol, but not a proliferation. And you know, they had crosses, but not usually crucifixes or Virgin Mary's for example, and the headstones were reasonably modest. All that and more changed with the end of communism. One kind of change was most clearly related to capitalism because suddenly there were multiple monument industries, not just a few old fashioned ones that were now offering people all kinds of options. And now there were people with money who wanted to spend it on grave markers, partly perhaps to show just how much money they had. And so there were a lot of new and often very ostentatious grave markers with even more personalistic images on them, sometimes in poses and attire that would probably previously have been considered inappropriate for a cemetery. The second kind of change was clearly ideological and political. I said before religious symbols had always existed, but now they were far more numerous and much larger and all over the grave, just, I mean, crosses and crucifixes and cupids and everything. And then besides the political symbols, dealing with political symbols, besides the communist red star, you have national symbols beginning to compete with them and obliterate them. So you have people who were renovating their deceased relatives grave markers and putting political symbols on them. And so you would see areas, people would tell me, of grave markers that had previously had communist stars on them that disappeared and now had nationalist symbols on them. So reaffirming they're now religious and distinctly anti communist symbols. So many of them, for example, included the pre communist Croatian Shakhovnica Checkerboard which predated, but then became associated with the fascist Ustasha in the Second World War. Among the Serbs, actually, nationalist symbols were less commonly used, but they did occasionally show up in certain regions of Eastern Slavonia and the Serbian Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina and in Kosovo. The black double headed eagle of Albania appeared really sort of shockingly early, actually in the mid-1980s, but really proliferated in the 1990s, as did, oddly, maps showing Kosovo as an independent state or sometime connected to Albania itself. So it's just a far more public facing and ostentatious burial culture than it than it had been previously. And again, of course, that's not everybody. It's just that it's where you see it. You really, really see it, so you can't not notice it.
- [53:44]
Polina Popova
Okay, finally, I think we covered more or less a lot of the topics that you cover in the book. And again, I would inspire our listeners to go and either read the book or at least look through it because indeed, it's an interesting, very enlightening book which, which really gives a lot of insights on the history of the region in general, I think. And anyone interested in either that region or even anthropology or religious studies or studies of burial culture would really benefit from reading that book. But my final question would be, Carol, if you can talk about your current projects or potential projects or anything, any articles or new books that you're thinking of publishing and that we should be looking forward to.
- [54:42]
Carol Lilly
Well, as it turns out, I actually retired from the University of Nebraska officially this summer and at the same time opened a used bookstore, a nonprofit used bookstore with three colleagues called the Open Book in Kearney, Nebraska. And so that is what is my current project is working with this really lovely project of used books. All of our books are donated and they're only we don't sell anything that's more than $10, honestly. And it's the only used bookstore in town. And people are so, so nice. And it was so, I don't know, gratifying to see that people still read and they still read actual books. And at the moment, it is not giving me much time to do as much reading myself as I had hoped. But I think it will in the near future. So I have not quit reading or quit being interested in my own projects. But I'm also looking at the future of higher education right now. And with the budget cuts and the politicization that's going on in the university system, I feel like I got out at the right time. And I have absolutely no regrets about it.
- [56:17]
Polina Popova
Do you plan to travel to the region, to the Balcoms?
- [56:21]
Carol Lilly
I absolutely hope to. I went to Albania for the first time last summer and, oh, my God, I just loved it. And I would really love to learn Albanian, go back and properly learn Albanian. It's something that was on that I wanted to do forever but was never really possible for me before. So that's still something I would like to do. And then, of course, go back to the Balkan, the rest of the Balkans as well. But again, it's, you know, it's. I've got to give this project at least a year to get on its feet before I can move on to anything else. But, yeah, so that's where I'm at right now.
- [57:00]
Polina Popova
It sounds like a very interesting, very important project to do the nonprofit.
- [57:05]
Carol Lilly
Oh, it's just fun. It's really fun. It's great. So I have no complaints right now. So thank you so much for talking with me.
- [57:13]
Polina Popova
Thank you, Carol, for coming to our show. And again, I just wanted to say that we spoke to historian Carol Lilly about her new book, death and Burial in Socialist Yugoslavia, which is available from Bloomsbury Press in different formats and which was published in 2020, came out in the last year, 2024. Thank you very much, Carol, for being on our show.
- [57:41]
Carol Lilly
Thank you.