"Бој на Љубићу у званичној репрезентативној култури Чачка током XIX и XX века"

English title: The Battle of Ljubić in the Official Representative Culture of Čačak in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The paper “The Battle of Ljubić in the Official Representative Culture of Čačak in the 19th and 20th Centuries” analyzes how the memory of the Battle of Ljubić of 1815 was used, reshaped, and politically interpreted in Čačak from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The Battle of Ljubić and the death of Tanasko Rajić are treated as historical events that gradually became symbols of local and national identity, as well as memorial resources used by different political regimes for their own legitimation.

The paper follows several phases of this process: the formation of the Ljubić tradition in the Principality and Kingdom of Serbia; attempts to materialize memory in the late nineteenth century; interwar military and public commemorations; the construction of the unfinished monument pedestal in 1940; wartime and postwar competition over the figure of the “new Tanasko Rajić”; and the socialist linking of the Second Serbian Uprising with the Partisan struggle, revolution, and the cult of the Red Army.

Particular attention is paid to the fact that socialist authorities did not simply erase older national symbols, but reshaped, selectively appropriated, or suppressed them. In this process, Ljubić remained a powerful local site of memory, but did not become a central memorial space of the Yugoslav state. The paper also shows how, at the end of the twentieth century, in the context of the crisis of the socialist order and the revival of national symbolism, the Battle of Ljubić was reactivated as a site of political representation, especially in the commemorations of 1990 and 1995, with the analysis extending partially toward 2000.

In this way, the Battle of Ljubić becomes an example of a long-term struggle for control over the past. The study reveals how local memory, state ideology, national myths, political rituals, and musealization intersect in the construction of public memory culture in modern Serbia.