It may actually take decades to respond to reader mail, a Jim Gray can attest. I recently found an envelope from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, mailed to Skate and Annoy sometime in 1988, only to be fully examined in an entirely different millennium. Do I regret not reading this letter from Darko Kolesar, AKA “Gricko” from Zehun, Yogoslavia? Do I lament the lost opportunity to create a cross-cultured, transcontinental friendship, let alone the chance to establish an outpost behind the Iron Curtain? Would I have loved to have a copy of the Yugoslavian skate zine Body & Soul in my collection? Do I wonder what Yugoslavian skate rock sounded like in the 80’s? Do fell like a dick? Yes. UPDATE: A response from Gricko! Thanks to everyone who helped track him down. Read the Darko chronicle appended to the post!

These photos are from the “Spomenik: The End of History” photo documentary project by Jan Kempenaers. They are part of a series of photographs of memorials in the former Yugoslavia commissioned in the 60’s and 70’s to commemorate Wolrd War II battles and concentration camps. Two of these monuments look marginally skateable. I tried to find the one on the right (Jasenovac, a network of concentration camps) on Google Maps, but it proved fruitless. If anyone else has better luck, let me know. Now that Yugoslavia is no more, these 25 monuments have all been abandoned and are in various states of disrepair. Truth.fully, theses two are barely interesting from a skating standpoint, but the rest of them are architecturally fantastic. Kempenaers exhibited the work and published a book in 2010. [Source: Sue Du Jour] – Thanks to Aaron Shims for the tip.