Ossuary on the island of Vido

The island of Vido in the Ionian Sea, near the Greek island of Corfu, has a special significance in the recent history of the Serbian people, because it housed a hospital for Serbian soldiers who came to Corfu after crossing Albania during the winter of 1915/1916. year. The most seriously wounded and sick who fell ill on the way to the Greek island of salvation were disemabarked on the island of Vido. In the 1930s, an initiative was launched to build a dignified ossuary on the island of Vido, which would house the remains of Serbian soldiers who were buried in military cemeteries on the Ionian Islands, but also to be a memorial to the Blue Tomb (soldiers buried in the sea). Architect Zloković also took part in the competition for the conceptual design of the Ossuary on the island of Vido, whose competition work was awarded the first equally valuable (ex aeque) prize, and which represents a lesser-known Zloković design of memorial architecture, available to researchers in the Milan Zloković Collection at the Museum of the City of Belgrade. Belgrade. Zloković’s solution of the memorial ossuary, located on the slope above the sea, is a monumental elongated open altar (altar of the fatherland) with a blind arcade of nine arches in the background in which the remains of the fighters would be placed. Simple geometrized structures lined with stone, with a centrally placed entrance leading to a stepped path, Zloković’s proposal of a memorial whose basic surface connects with the sea horizon and the sky, as indicated by sketches and drawings of characteristic views, can be interpreted as a link between earthly suffering and heavenly salvation.