Abstract

The necropolis known as Grčko groblje, or the Greek Cemetery, at Zagrađe in Šćepan Polje, Plužine, Montenegro, provides an important case study for reconsidering the cultural origins of the stećci. The cemetery forms part of the UNESCO-listed Stećci Medieval Tombstone Graveyards, a transnational group of medieval necropolises distributed across Bosnia and Herzegovina, western Serbia, western Montenegro, and parts of Croatia.

While the monuments are conventionally dated to the medieval period, their cultural interpretation should not be confined to the medieval Slavic political structures that controlled the region. This study argues that the Greek Cemetery should be understood within the much older indigenous funerary landscape of Montenegro and, more specifically, within the pre-Slavic cultural horizon conventionally associated with the Illyrians.

The designation “Greek Cemetery” is particularly significant. In the Balkan historical landscape, such terminology often reflects the perception of monumental cemeteries as belonging to a remote and forgotten population. Rather than interpreting the “Greeks” literally as immigrants from ancient Greece, this study proposes that the tradition may preserve a distorted memory of an indigenous population perceived by later communities as ancient and foreign.

In the present study, “Greek” is therefore used as a historical folk designation, while the population underlying the tradition is interpreted as belonging to the pre-Slavic indigenous population of the western Balkans, here discussed in relation to the Illyrian cultural horizon.

The argument does not claim that every individual buried at Šćepan Polje can be ethnically identified as Illyrian. Rather, it examines cultural continuity through landscape, funerary monumentality, stone-working traditions, ancestral burial practices, and the relationship between medieval stećci and the much older archaeological heritage of Montenegro.

The evidence indicates that medieval Slavicization and Christianization should be understood as processes of cultural transformation rather than necessarily complete population replacement. The stećci of Šćepan Polje can consequently be interpreted as medieval manifestations of an older indigenous Balkan funerary tradition, subsequently inherited and transformed by Slavic-speaking communities.

Their medieval date therefore does not establish Serbian origin, and their later use by Orthodox Christian communities does not make the underlying funerary tradition Serbian.

1. Introduction

The Greek Cemetery of Šćepan Polje, also known as Grčko groblje in Zagrađe, lies in the Piva region of northwestern Montenegro, beneath the medieval fortress of Soko. It forms one of the three Montenegrin components of the UNESCO World Heritage property “Stećci Medieval Tombstone Graveyards.” UNESCO describes the stećci as medieval monuments dating principally from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, with their greatest period of production occurring in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The World Heritage property encompasses 28 selected necropolises in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia.

The standard chronological description is not controversial: the stećci at Šćepan Polje are medieval.

The question is what this chronology actually tells us about their cultural origin.

A medieval date establishes when these particular monuments were produced. It does not automatically establish that the underlying funerary tradition was invented by the medieval populations who erected them.

This distinction is particularly important in Montenegro. The territory surrounding Piva, Durmitor, Nikšić and the northern Montenegrin highlands contains a deep archaeological record of prehistoric burial mounds and indigenous settlement. Recent archaeological research has identified dozens of prehistoric tumuli in the high-altitude landscapes of Sinjajevina and Durmitor, while excavated Bronze Age tumuli in Montenegro demonstrate the antiquity of monumental stone burial traditions.

The stećci therefore need to be placed within this longer archaeological chronology.

The central thesis of this study is that the stećci should not be interpreted as a Serbian invention simply because medieval Slavic-speaking communities eventually used them. Rather, the evidence is more consistent with a model in which medieval communities inherited and transformed a much older indigenous funerary landscape.

In the case of Montenegro, that indigenous substrate belongs to the pre-Slavic population of the western Balkans and can reasonably be examined in relation to the archaeological cultures conventionally associated with the Illyrians.

2. Šćepan Polje and the Piva Landscape

Šćepan Polje occupies an important position in the Piva region, at the meeting of major river systems and communication routes. The area is associated with the Piva, Tara and Drina valleys and possesses an exceptionally rich medieval historical landscape.

The medieval fortress of Soko was the principal political centre of the Kosača family in the area. The settlement of Šćepan Polje developed in association with the fortress, while Zagrađe lies in the wider suburban landscape. The surviving historical and architectural remains include medieval ecclesiastical structures and monuments associated with Sandalj Hranić Kosača and Stjepan Vukčić Kosača.

The medieval character of the immediate settlement is therefore undeniable.

Yet this should not be confused with the age of the cultural landscape.

A medieval political centre can be established within an ancient landscape. A medieval church can be constructed in an environment already used by earlier communities. A medieval cemetery can likewise occupy a landscape whose significance predates the political structures of the Middle Ages.

The key methodological question is consequently not whether Šćepan Polje was medieval.

It obviously was.

The question is whether medieval Šćepan Polje represented a cultural beginning or a later historical layer.

The broader archaeological record of Montenegro strongly favours the second possibility.

3. The Greek Cemetery

The necropolis at Zagrađe is comparatively small. The current documentation records approximately fourteen stećci, consisting of chests and slabs, although other descriptions and earlier records give slightly different numbers. The monuments are manufactured from local stone and are generally finely worked but relatively modest in decoration. One of the most important monuments is the large stećak bearing the inscription mentioning Petko Krstjanin and Duke Stjepan.

The inscription provides a valuable chronological anchor.

Because it refers to Stjepan Vukčić Kosača as duke, the monument can be placed between his acquisition of the ducal title in 1435 and his assumption of the title of Herzeg in 1448. The necropolis itself is generally assigned to the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

This is important evidence for the medieval chronology of the cemetery.

But again, chronology should not be confused with ethnic origin.

The inscription establishes the social and political environment of the deceased.

It does not establish the origin of the funerary institution itself.

Petko Krstjanin lived within the medieval Kosača political world. His monument therefore belongs to that world. But the existence of his stećak does not demonstrate that the Kosača dynasty invented monumental stone burial or that the tradition was ethnically Serbian.

The distinction between cultural context and cultural origin is fundamental.

4. The Meaning of “Greek Cemetery”

Perhaps the most intriguing element of Šćepan Polje is not the medieval inscription but the name Grčko groblje—Greek Cemetery.

The name occurs in numerous parts of the western Balkans. Local populations frequently attached the term “Greek” to ancient-looking cemeteries whose original inhabitants had been forgotten. The traditional explanation is that the monuments appeared to later inhabitants as belonging to an earlier and unknown population.

This phenomenon deserves much greater historical attention.

A community does not normally call its own ordinary cemetery “Greek.”

The term indicates distance.

It indicates that later inhabitants perceived the cemetery as belonging to people from an earlier historical world.

The conventional explanation—that “Greek” simply became a synonym for something ancient—may explain part of the phenomenon, but it does not resolve the historical question of why these particular cemeteries were perceived as ancient and different.

The folk tradition associated with “Greek cemeteries” often describes their inhabitants as an earlier population that disappeared after periods of famine, severe winters or other catastrophes.

Such traditions cannot be treated as literal historical records.

Nevertheless, they constitute cultural memory.

They preserve the perception that these monuments belonged to people who preceded the communities that later encountered them.

This is particularly significant when the monuments occur within regions with demonstrable pre-Slavic archaeological populations.

5. “Greek” as a Memory of the Indigenous Population

For the purposes of this study, the “Greeks” of the Greek Cemetery tradition are interpreted not as ethnic Greeks from classical Greece but as a later folk designation for an ancient population.

The identification proposed here is with the indigenous pre-Slavic population of the western Balkans, conventionally described in antiquity through the term Illyrian.

This interpretation requires caution.

It would be methodologically unjustified to claim that a fifteenth-century stećak inscription can itself prove that its owner was an Iron Age Illyrian.

Several centuries separate the Iron Age from the medieval period, and populations undergo substantial cultural transformation during such intervals.

The argument is instead one of cultural and population continuity.

The indigenous populations of the western Balkans did not necessarily disappear when Rome conquered the region.

They did not necessarily disappear when Christianity spread.

Nor did they necessarily disappear when Slavic languages became dominant.

Romanization, Christianization and Slavicization can all be understood as processes through which existing populations adopted new languages, religions and political identities.

Under such a model, the medieval population of Piva could be Slavic-speaking and Christian while still carrying cultural traditions inherited from pre-Slavic ancestors.

This is the context in which the stećci should be examined.

6. Montenegro Before the Slavs

The archaeological record demonstrates that Montenegro was inhabited by organized communities long before the medieval period.

Particularly important are the prehistoric burial mounds distributed across the Montenegrin mountains.

Research on Planinica has identified Bronze Age stone tumuli, while the authors emphasize that tumuli in Montenegro are generally associated with the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. The excavated monuments demonstrate substantial investment in stone-built burial architecture and repeated funerary use.

Even more significant for the present argument is recent research in the high-altitude landscapes of Montenegro.

Archaeological and remote-sensing research on Sinjajevina and the surrounding mountain regions has identified 59 prehistoric tumuli and ten fortified hilltops. Some tumuli occur at elevations exceeding 1,800 metres. The research demonstrates that the highland environment was not an isolated medieval frontier but a landscape actively used by prehistoric communities.

This is important because the major Montenegrin stećak zones are concentrated in precisely these mountainous regions.

The medieval cemetery tradition therefore developed in an environment that had been used for monumental burial for thousands of years.

This does not mean that a stećak is simply a Bronze Age tumulus transformed into a tombstone.

The forms are different.

The chronology is different.

The religious environment is different.

But cultural continuity does not require identical monuments.

What survives is often the concept: the importance of monumentalizing the dead, marking ancestral places, using stone, and maintaining cemeteries within particular landscapes.

7. The Archaeology of Continuity

UNESCO itself provides an important piece of evidence for the continuity argument.

The official World Heritage description states that the stećci display “traces of earlier influences,” specifically mentioning prehistoric, Roman and early medieval traditions.

This is an important qualification.

The international heritage authority does not describe the stećci as an entirely isolated medieval invention.

Instead, it recognizes that their artistic and archaeological development contains earlier influences.

The Montenegrin management documentation is even more relevant. It notes that many stećak necropolises occur on hills, prehistoric tumuli, along roads and around medieval churches. It also emphasizes the concentration of stećci in western Montenegro, particularly in the municipalities of Pljevlja, Žabljak, Šavnik and Nikšić, and in the old parishes of Onogošt, Piva, Drobnjak, Jezera and Breznice.

This spatial relationship deserves to become a central part of stećak research.

A cemetery established on or beside an older burial monument is not necessarily accidental.

It may indicate the persistence of ancestral geography.

The medieval population may not have known the exact identity of the people who built the earlier monuments. But it could still recognize the landscape as a place associated with the dead.

The name “Greek Cemetery” may itself represent the final stage of this process: the monument remains, the original cultural memory fades, and later inhabitants preserve only the idea that the cemetery belongs to an ancient people.

8. From Illyrian Landscape to Medieval Stećak

The proposed historical sequence can therefore be reconstructed as follows:

1. Prehistoric communities establish monumental burial landscapes throughout Montenegro.
2. Bronze Age and Iron Age populations continue the practice of monumental burial, including stone tumuli and ancestral cemeteries.
3. Indigenous Iron Age communities conventionally associated with the Illyrian cultural world inhabit the region.
4. Roman conquest and Romanization transform the political, linguistic and religious environment without necessarily replacing the indigenous population.
5. Christianity transforms funerary ideology while allowing older sacred landscapes and local customs to persist.
6. Slavic-speaking populations become dominant in the medieval period.
7. Older indigenous traditions are incorporated into medieval Christian society.
8. The stećak emerges as a distinctive medieval form of monumental stone burial.
9. Later populations inherit the cemeteries but increasingly lose knowledge of their original cultural background.
10. Cemeteries associated with earlier monumental traditions become “Greek cemeteries”—places remembered as belonging to an ancient population.

This model explains both the medieval chronology and the deeper cultural background without requiring an artificial rupture between prehistory and the Middle Ages.

9. Why the Serbian-Origin Interpretation Is Insufficient

A Serbian-origin interpretation generally relies on medieval political history, Slavic inscriptions, Orthodox Christianity, or the later presence of stećci in western Serbia.

None of these elements is sufficient to establish origin.

Political control is not equivalent to cultural invention.

Language is not equivalent to ancestry.

Religion is not equivalent to ethnic origin.

Geographical presence is not equivalent to invention.

The Kosača-controlled territory of Šćepan Polje provides an excellent demonstration of this problem.

The necropolis is firmly embedded in the medieval world of the Kosača dynasty. Soko was an important political centre, and the monuments are associated with the medieval Christian population of the region.

But this does not make the funerary tradition Serbian.

Indeed, UNESCO emphasizes the inter-confessional character of the stećci, noting that they were used by Orthodox, Catholic and adherents of the Church of Bosnia.

A monument used across religious communities and distributed across four modern states is therefore difficult to reduce to the exclusive cultural property of one medieval political nation.

The stećci are better understood as a regional phenomenon.

Their medieval users inherited a cultural system whose roots were deeper than the political boundaries of medieval Serbia.

10. The Kosača Connection Does Not Make the Cemetery Serbian

The Kosača connection is nevertheless essential for understanding the medieval phase of the necropolis.

Soko was a major Kosača centre. Sandalj Hranić and Stjepan Vukčić Kosača established religious foundations in the area, and the surrounding monuments demonstrate a mixture of Orthodox and Western artistic influences.

This illustrates precisely how cultural transformation works.

An indigenous regional funerary tradition could be adopted by medieval elites and incorporated into Christian aristocratic culture.

The Kosačas did not need to invent the tradition for it to become part of their political world.

The same principle applies to Serbian rulers elsewhere.

If Serbian political authorities later controlled a territory containing stećci, that does not retroactively make the monuments Serbian.

The monuments belong historically to the communities that produced them and to the broader cultural environment from which their traditions emerged.

11. The Christianization of an Older Tradition

The Christian character of the Šćepan Polje monuments is also important.

The inscription of Petko identifies him as a krstjanin, a Christian, and places him within the medieval religious environment of the Kosača court.

Yet Christianity should not be understood as a cultural reset.

Across Europe, Christian communities frequently reused earlier sacred locations and transformed inherited funerary traditions.

The same process is visible in the Balkans.

The Christianization of a burial tradition does not eliminate its older geographical and social foundations.

A prehistoric hill can become a Roman sacred site.

A Roman cemetery can be incorporated into a Christian landscape.

A medieval church can stand beside earlier graves.

A Christian tomb can preserve local traditions that predate Christianity.

Consequently, the Christian identity of Petko Krstjanin tells us about the religious transformation of the Piva population in the fifteenth century. It does not determine the ultimate ancestry of the funerary tradition.

12. The Importance of the Prehistoric Tumuli

The relationship between stećci and prehistoric tumuli is perhaps the most important archaeological issue requiring further research.

The Montenegrin stećak management documentation explicitly records the occurrence of stećci on prehistoric tumuli.

At the same time, archaeological research demonstrates that prehistoric tumuli were widespread throughout Montenegro.

Planinica provides excavated Bronze Age evidence for stone tumuli. Sinjajevina and the Durmitor region provide extensive evidence of prehistoric burial landscapes, including dozens of tumuli detected through remote sensing.

The combination is significant.

If medieval communities repeatedly established monumental graves within landscapes already associated with ancient burial, the possibility of cultural continuity deserves systematic testing.

The question should therefore be investigated through archaeology rather than dismissed through ethnic categorization.

Future research should include:

• stratigraphic excavation beneath and around stećak necropolises;
• radiocarbon dating of associated burials where preservation permits;
• analysis of prehistoric tumuli beneath or adjacent to medieval cemeteries;
• osteological and bioarchaeological analysis;
• ancient DNA where ethically and scientifically appropriate;
• isotopic analysis of human remains;
• petrographic comparison of stone sources;
• GIS analysis of relationships between prehistoric tumuli and stećak sites;
• systematic comparison of decorative motifs across prehistoric, Roman and medieval monuments.

Such research could determine whether the apparent continuity is merely spatial or represents actual social and cultural inheritance.

13. The Greek Cemetery as Cultural Memory

The name Grčko groblje becomes particularly meaningful when considered against this archaeological background.

The local population did not necessarily preserve a precise memory of the cemetery’s original builders.

Instead, it preserved a category: ancient people.

The “Greeks” were people from the distant past.

They were no longer part of the local community.

Their graves remained, but their identity had disappeared.

This is precisely what can happen when cultural traditions survive longer than the names and languages of their creators.

The transition from “our ancestors” to “the ancient people” represents the erosion of cultural memory.

The monuments remain.

The original explanation disappears.

A later society then develops a folk etymology.

The cemetery becomes “Greek.”

The inhabitants become mysterious.

The stones become evidence of an earlier civilization.

Such traditions should not be interpreted literally, but neither should they be ignored.

They provide evidence for how later communities perceived the monuments.

And that perception is itself historical evidence.

14. The Stećak as a Cultural Palimpsest

The Šćepan Polje necropolis can therefore be understood as a cultural palimpsest.

The oldest layer is the indigenous landscape of prehistoric Montenegro.

The next layer consists of Iron Age communities and the cultural traditions associated with the Illyrian world.

Romanization introduces new political and cultural structures.

Christianization transforms the meaning of burial.

Slavicization changes the dominant language and political identity.

The medieval stećak becomes the physical expression of this accumulated history.

The monument is therefore not exclusively “Illyrian” in its medieval form.

Nor is it exclusively “Slavic.”

It is the product of historical layering.

Its deepest cultural ancestry can be pre-Slavic while its visible medieval form is Christian and its inscriptions are Slavic.

This is precisely why ethnic ownership is such a poor framework for understanding the stećci.

15. The Problem of Retroactive Ethnicity

Modern national categories cannot simply be projected backwards onto medieval archaeological monuments.

The concept of a modern Serbian nation is not interchangeable with the medieval identities of the western Balkans.

Likewise, a medieval Slavic-speaking population cannot automatically be equated with every cultural tradition found within its territory.

This is especially important in Montenegro, where multiple historical identities and political structures developed over time.

The stećci existed before modern national borders.

They existed across religious boundaries.

They existed across medieval political boundaries.

And they were concentrated in a cultural zone that had already experienced thousands of years of settlement.

Their proper historical category is therefore regional and archaeological before it is national.

16. Šćepan Polje and the Broader Montenegrin Pattern

The significance of Šćepan Polje becomes even clearer when placed alongside other Montenegrin stećak centres.

UNESCO recognizes three Montenegrin components:

Grčko groblje at Žabljak;

Bare Žugića at Žabljak;

and Grčko groblje at Plužine.

The recurrence of the name “Greek Cemetery” is particularly striking.

It indicates that the perception of these monuments as belonging to an ancient or forgotten population was not restricted to one locality.

The phenomenon is part of a wider cultural memory surrounding stećak necropolises.

This strengthens the case for examining the monuments as remnants of an older regional tradition rather than isolated medieval creations.

17. What Can Actually Be Claimed?

A rigorous interpretation must distinguish between what is demonstrated and what is hypothesized.

It can be demonstrated that the stećci are medieval monuments.

It can be demonstrated that they were used by different Christian communities.

It can be demonstrated that the stećak cultural zone contains traces of earlier prehistoric, Roman and early medieval influences.

It can be demonstrated that prehistoric tumuli are widespread in Montenegro.

It can be demonstrated that some stećak necropolises occur on or near prehistoric tumuli.

It can be demonstrated that Šćepan Polje belonged to a medieval cultural environment dominated by the Kosača political elite.

It can be demonstrated that the famous Petko Krstjanin monument belongs to the fifteenth century.

What remains a historical interpretation is the precise degree of biological, social and cultural continuity between the prehistoric indigenous populations and the medieval communities who produced the stećci.

This is where the Illyrian hypothesis should be formulated carefully.

The evidence supports investigating the stećci as a continuation of an indigenous pre-Slavic Balkan funerary tradition.

The association of that substrate with the Illyrian cultural world is historically and archaeologically reasonable in the Montenegrin context.

What cannot yet be demonstrated from the existence of a single medieval necropolis is that every person buried there was literally an ethnic Illyrian.

The distinction strengthens rather than weakens the argument.

18. Conclusion

The Greek Cemetery of Šćepan Polje should not be reduced to a medieval Serbian or Slavic cemetery.

It is unquestionably medieval in its surviving monumental form.

But its medieval date does not establish the origin of the cultural tradition from which the monuments emerged.

The cemetery belongs to Piva, a mountainous region of Montenegro with a deep prehistoric archaeological history. The wider Montenegrin landscape contains Bronze Age and Iron Age tumuli, fortified settlements and ancient burial grounds. Modern research has demonstrated the remarkable density of prehistoric burial monuments in the highlands of Montenegro, while official stećak documentation acknowledges earlier prehistoric, Roman and early medieval influences and records the placement of stećci on prehistoric tumuli.

This evidence makes a strict cultural rupture between pre-Slavic Montenegro and medieval Montenegro increasingly difficult to sustain.

The “Greek Cemetery” tradition provides an additional layer of cultural memory. The later inhabitants did not necessarily remember the people buried beneath the monuments as their own immediate ancestors. Instead, the dead became “Greeks”—an ancient and forgotten population. In the interpretation proposed here, this should be investigated as a distorted memory of the indigenous populations who preceded the Slavic-speaking communities of the region.

The term “Illyrian” should therefore be understood as a designation for the deeper pre-Slavic cultural substrate rather than as a claim that medieval individuals consciously identified themselves as Iron Age Illyrians.

The historical process is better understood as continuity through transformation.

The indigenous population was Romanized.

The region was Christianized.

The population was subsequently Slavicized.

The language changed.

Political structures changed.

Religious institutions changed.

But the landscape remained.

The mountains remained.

The ancestral burial places remained.

And traditions surrounding monumental burial could remain as well.

The stećci of Šćepan Polje therefore represent a medieval expression of a much older Balkan funerary world. Their medieval Christian and Slavic characteristics should be understood as later layers of this tradition, not as proof that the tradition itself originated in medieval Serbia.

The Serbian connection is consequently a question of later political and cultural participation, not proof of origin.

The most productive interpretation is that the stećci were inherited.

They were inherited by medieval Slavic-speaking communities from an older indigenous landscape.

They were Christianized.

They were adapted to medieval social structures.

They received Slavic inscriptions.

They became part of the political world of the Kosačas and other medieval rulers.

But none of these developments erases the possibility that the fundamental tradition of monumentalizing the dead belonged to a much older indigenous cultural continuum.

The Greek Cemetery of Šćepan Polje thus deserves to be understood not simply as a fifteenth-century cemetery beneath Soko fortress, but as a stone monument situated at the end of a far longer historical process.

Its stones are medieval.

Its inscription is medieval.

Its Christian identity is medieval.

But the cultural landscape in which the cemetery exists is considerably older.

That distinction is essential.

The stećci should therefore not be treated as evidence for the cultural creation of Montenegro by medieval Serbia. They should be investigated as evidence of how an indigenous pre-Slavic Balkan tradition survived, transformed itself, and was ultimately inherited by the Slavic-speaking populations of medieval Montenegro.

In this sense, the Greek Cemetery of Šćepan Polje is not merely a medieval necropolis.

It is a monument to cultural continuity.

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