ABSTRACT
When the Mostar Bridge was destroyed in 1993, the then chief of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Federico Mayor, drew attention to the bridge's work as a powerful social symbol. The bridge had been a much-loved site of heritage during its lifetime, in death it gained new meaning and symbolic status. The place of monumental destruction may pose particular challenges for discourses of memory. The monumental place is both a material space and a tangible social object. It is strongly spatial and deeply temporal. In both New York and Bosnia the reconfiguration of both monumental places as sites of public memory and collective remembrance has been conditioned by a sense of urgency in relation to the political present. The transformative power of heritage has been particularly important in producing symbolic resources for the creation of a national public memory, and by extension a form of national identity.
