Category: Vukovar

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Dark Tourism and Bullet Holes

This is the winning theme from the latest poll (see previous Blog post), which is also the one that had come second in the poll before that (see this post) and was thus eligible for another chance. And it narrowly took it.
An especially famous bullet hole is one of the dark star attractions at the Military History Museum here in Vienna (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum – HGM): it’s in the bloodied uniform worn by Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he was assassinated at the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo in 1914 (which was the trigger for WW1) – the bullet hole just below the collar is marked with a little arrow

Dark Tourism & Broken Glass

Our latest theme poll had a clear winner so today I give you the requested one of broken glass (DT & bullet holes came second, and I may field that again in a future theme poll).

The photo above is what I consider one of the most appealing images of broken glass in my archives. It’s a close-up of a large war ruin I discovered in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina, in 2009. Here’s a

wreckage from the Balkan wars

Balkan Belligerents

On this day, 29 years ago, on 25 June 1991, both Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves independent, marking the first proper secessions from the Yugoslav Federal state. This happened amidst rising tensions between different ethnicities and especially between Serbs and Croats, which eventually developed into war.

Slovenia got off comparatively lightly, with a military intervention by the Yugoslav army that lasted only 10 days and cost “only” 65 or so lives, before the country was reluctantly but effectively released into independence. The above photo shows a relic from that short war, namely a piece of wreckage of a Yugoslav helicopter that is on display in the generally excellent modern history museum in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana.

In Croatia, on the other hand,