Gordan Lederer Memorial

The Gordan Lederer Memorial is a contemporary monument on Čukur hill above the town of Hrvatska Kostajnica, on the Una river in the Banovina area of central Croatia. It honours a television cameraman and photographer who was killed on this hill on 10 August 1991, in the first months of the Homeland War, while he was filming Croatian soldiers. The memorial is known as Slomljeni pejzaž, which means Broken Landscape, and it was built as a tribute not only to Lederer but also to the many journalists and media workers who risked their lives to document the conflict. The hill where it stands is called Čukur, and from the top there is a wide view over the valley, which gives the site a calm, open setting.

Gordan Lederer worked for Croatian Radio Television, and the memorial was unveiled in 2015. It was designed by the architects Kate Marunica and Nenad Ravnić together with the sculptor Petar Barišić, who combined architecture and sculpture to make a piece that feels both modern and austere. Rather than a statue of a person, the memorial uses a spare set of forms that speak of his work and of what happened to him.

Visitors approach along a path made of concrete slabs set in dark steel frames. Each slab is engraved with a year, so that as you walk, you move along the years of a short life, and the slabs also recall frames of a film strip, a reference to his profession. The path leads to the viewpoint, and the effect is that of walking through time toward the moment of death and then looking out at the landscape. A large lens-like sculpture with a bullet hole, which gives the work its sense of a broken view, is the central image of the monument. The materials, concrete and steel, are hard and plain, and the planting is sparse, which encourages quiet reflection rather than spectacle.

The memorial is free to visit and open at any time. Because it stands on a hill, the walk from the road is short but may be steep, and the surface can be slippery when wet. Below the hill, Hrvatska Kostajnica sits on the Una, which forms the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina here, and its old fortress by the river is worth a look.

The memorial suits visitors interested in recent Croatian history, contemporary design and journalism, and those who want a quiet, reflective stop with a view. Allow about thirty minutes.