My father and I would always visit Gradina during breaks between our chores. This hill in the centre of Vrebac bears the memory of many events and has always been a place around which the people of Vrebac gathered.
Passing the cistern built at the foot of Gradina, we would enter through the stone gateway and climb to the top of Gradina, to the monument commemorating the suffering of the people of Vrebac during the Second World War.
We would slowly climb the winding steps to the stone plateau at the summit of Gradina. To the north and west, it was enclosed by a stone wall, on which, alongside a relief symbolically depicting the suffering and struggle of the people, were plaques bearing the names of the 279 people of Vrebac who perished.
We would sit on the stone bench opposite the relief and plaques, and my father would sometimes tell me things from his memories of those wartime days, part of which he spent in Vrebac and, from the middle of the war, in the summer of 1943, with the Partisans.
Then, as now, I have always felt profound respect and reverence for the people of Vrebac who perished, sharing in the fate of the people of this region. I often wondered whether they deserved such a fate, and whether their sacrifice had ever truly been acknowledged.
As we slowly descended the steps, we would visit the grave of “prota” – priest Bogdanović, lying in the shade of a field maple tree, looking east toward the place where a church once stood. They say it was the largest and most beautiful church in Lika, with bells whose sound could be heard throughout the Lika Plain.
On the site of the church stood the remains of the building, which was ultimately demolished in 1948 or 1949 by a group of Vrebac residents driven by ideology. They did not see in the church a valuable cultural monument built by our ancestors in 1868, but rather an ideological symbol that had to be destroyed.
On the site of the old wooden church, a drainage slab was built to collect rainwater for the cistern at the foot of Gradina.
In those years, as today, Gradina was covered with pine trees, but at that time they were young, dense, and almost impenetrable, concealing every trace of the village’s earlier life—the places where people had gathered for religious and secular occasions, places of conversation and agreement, of joy and sorrow, where young girls and boys met, and where people placed their faith and hopes in a better life on their native soil.
Željko Narančić