A group of mountaineers, who last weekend visited Ozren, located above Sarajevo, were quite surprised when they came to the site of necropolis tombstones Bandjera.
“The tombstones are getting destroyed because at the site of necropolis logs are taken out after cutting the forest trees” said for Fena Đido Dervišević, one of the mountaineers who sent photos confirming that the tombstones are threatened.
He announced that he will report to the Cantonal Institute for protection of cultural, historical and natural heritage, in order to react on time and to protect the cultural treasure of B&H from destruction on the mountain Orzen.
The necropolis at Orzen has 30 tombstones which are located in the forest. From this area the hiking trail passes to the top of Orzen, which was also destroyed due to the extraction of logs.
Unfortunately, this is happening at the time when B&H, together with Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro wants to nominate tombstones for the list of World UNESCO heritage, and as is announced the application will be filed soon.
The project of enlisting tombstones in B&H was presented last Thursday at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. The aim of this project is to gather data on the number of tombstones, medieval stone monuments in B&H and to determine their state of preservation for possible protection.
The first list of tombstones in B&H was done during the Astro-Hungarian period and the last list was done in the 1980’s by Šefik Bešlagić, who according to some sources recorded 687 sites with 59.593 tombstones.
(Source: Fena)
