Under the wall

A sort of fascinating look here at the post-Soviet murals of Kazakhstan.

Very like the abandoned monuments of Yugoslavia, both in their hierophantic style and their air of already-ancient desuetude.

What I find fascinating about these things is the monumental quality they share. The heroic figures, immense and grave, in their postures of struggle or triumph, seem to shrink the passerby like Caesar's colossus. I can't help but feel like a petty man staring up at the images on the walls, so very different from the sort of commercial imagery I'm familiar with. No happy smiles or enticement to buy this or that, just stern reminders that the paths of duty are hard and the rewards for service are more service.

It seems impossible that these images are mere decades old; they seem to me as remote and distant as the winged bulls on the walls of Sumer.

I wonder how the local people feel about them, living as they do under the impassive gaze of the icons on the walls?

(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the linkage)

Podgarić

This is the monument in Podgarić, in the Bjelovarsko-bilogorska district of central Croatia.The photograph is from a book by the Dutch artist Jan Kempenaers entitled "Spomeniks, apparently the Serbian for "Monuments".

These things - and there are several more good reproductions of the Kempenaers photos here - were constructed by the Yugoslav government in the Sixties and Seventies to commemorate various events in the partisan campaigns of WW2, as well as the usual sort of "Monument to the Revolution" sort of thing. They are all very abstract, and, as you can see in the collection pictures in the blog "Crack Two" here, range from fairly well maintained to utterly destroyed.I don't think there's a deeper meaning here. I was just fascinated by the images; these vast, contextless, desolate things, a sort of abstract Ozymandias in the Balkan hills. You wonder what a passerby will think a hundred years from now, if there is anything left of them. Will they be pointed out to the tourist, their provenance described and meaning explained? Or will they be forgotten, to be chanced upon by the adventurous journeyer standing mute and incomprehensible as Linear A?