Spomeniks literally meaning 'Monuments' in Serbo-Croatian, look like spaceships conspicuously parked up in the middle of nowhere, alien to their surroundings, their bizarre beauty deriving from both their location and imaginative symbolism. Follow in the footsteps of French photographer Jonathan 'Jonk' Jimenez as he tries to track down these super-sized public structures. Once numbering in their thousands and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, in particular “young pioneers” for their communist and patriotic education. Pushing architecture to its limits, Spomeniks are what happens when brutalism, symbolism, space age aesthetics and abstraction meet.

'Spomenik' is the Serbo-Croat word for 'monument'; this book concentrates on the monuments built by the Yugoslav state to commemorate partisans who fell in the Second World War. Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, these have had mixed fortunes; some have been maintained, some have been neglected, and some have been demolished. Quite a few of them bear the scars of the Yugoslav civil wars, or have been graffiti'd subsequently in ways that demonstrate that a new generation often sees these monuments as having no relevance to the new countries they are building.

Jonk Jimenez's photographs do these monuments justice; the author has spent considerable time tracking them down, not always an easy task. Two things emerge from reviewing these pictures: firstly, the way even cared-for monuments suffer through the excessive use of concrete as a building material, and secondly, the extremely abstract nature of nearly all the designs. Many have an alien quality about them; and one even (from some angles) resembles a spaceship from Star Wars!

It is said that Hitler prepared drawings showing some of his designs for the Greater Reich in a state of decay, to be certain that the remains of the Thousand-Year Reich would still look romantic (or at lest, what Hitler thought of as romantic) after its passing. Some of the abandoned spomeniks in this book have a similar air about them, though they have only been abandoned for thirty years or less. Perhaps their state of neglect makes some of the more brutalist monuments seem less so.

All these monuments were architect-designed, though in a few cases it hasn't been possible to identify their designers. People put time, effort and thought into designing and building these monuments, for what ever motive they may have had. There are some now who set out specifically to record unloved constructions like these, precisely so that this effort should not go unrecognised. This is admirable, and this book deserves an audience beyond those who like abandoned places. ( )