Legislative and institutional frameworks for transferring objects of cultural heritage in the postwar Yugoslavia

Abstract

Drawing on legal sources and selected literature, the contribution sheds light on the legislative and institutional frameworks for transferring objects of cultural heritage – that is, physical transfers, which especially took place during the war, and changes in ownership, which resulted from transforming private property into public property after 1945. Although in part also reaching back into the time of war, the contribution is conceptually based on the creation of the foundations and the functioning of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia and the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, respectively, and the then international situation. The substantive starting point for the analysis is the interplay between the key processes of physical transfers and changes in the ownership of cultural heritage objects – namely, the nationalization of property, the survey of war damage, the introduction of monument protection principles, which affected the sales, imports and exports, and restitution. The presented study is thus placed at the intersection between historiography and art history, with its results offering a broad enough platform for further research in both disciplines, especially for expanding it to include analyses of materials of individual institutions, investigations into the provenance and fate of individual artworks, examinations of the establishment of individual state institutions and their collections after the war, and for introducing wider comparative aspects concerning the transfers of cultural heritage objects after 1945 in the neighbouring countries, e.g. the repatriation of artworks from Italy, Austria, and Germany.

After 1945, Yugoslavia transformed private property into public property, first through confiscation and sequestration, and later through nationalization. The baseline act for this transformation was passed by AVNOJ (the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) already in 1944. The key legal bases adopted in 1945 contained provisions introducing, among other things, the principle of priority allocation of confiscated and sequestrated property to national institutions. Regarding objects of cultural heritage, the procedure for allocations to these institutions was laid down by the law governing the collection, safekeeping, and distribution of books as well as other cultural, scientific, and art objects while giving the executive role to the federal Ministry of Education and its republic counterparts. The Slovenian Ministry of Education, also having jurisdiction over federal collection centres and their operations, established itself as the central republic institution for handling objects of cultural heritage. It was already during the Second World War that first republic and then federal decrees were adopted, each in its own right introducing the protection of objects of cultural heritage. Immediately after the war, the state adopted further legal bases for setting up the system of monument protection, by which it introduced state control over the entire management of cultural heritage, including any potential transfers, such as e.g. restitution, sales or exports. Still prior to the end of the Second World War, AVNOJ also passed legal bases for the determination of war damage. The federal commission for determining war damage to objects of cultural heritage was set up in February 1945 and its republic counterparts somewhat later that same year. The then institute for the protection of cultural heritage (founded in July 1945) was appointed to coordinate the assessment of war damage to objects of cultural heritage; subsequently, especially in the period 1947–1949 and later on, it also led the preparation of restitution claims and lists in collaboration with the republic institutes (founded in November 1945). This attests to the close intermeshing between both procedures and to the important role that institutes for the protection of monuments had in the direct handling of objects of cultural heritage in the new state. Restitution was led by the federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which also appointed members of restitution delegations abroad, thus placing the procedure within the framework of the new state diplomacy. At the republic level, the procedures related to restitution were led by the Ministry of Education, which also disposed of repatriated objects of cultural heritage. Because international peace treaties served as the fundamental legal bases for restitution, in the years immediately following the war, Yugoslavia did not regulate this area with laws but rather with decrees, rules, and regulations (similarly as war damage). However, despite those legal bases, certain questions regarding the restitution of objects of cultural heritage have continued to be raised decades after the war, requiring not only state diplomatic activity but also further research into this topic.