The Yugoslavian Garden presents a particular problem of naming. When it was established, Yugoslavia existed—a federation of South Slavic peoples, Slovenes and Croats and Serbs and Bosnians and Macedonians and Montenegrins, united under one state. In the American diaspora, immigrants from these different regions found common ground, and “Yugoslavian” became a meaningful identity.

Masumi photographed this garden in 1987. Four years later, Yugoslavia began its violent dissolution. The wars of the 1990s would make “Yugoslavian” an anachronism at best, a painful memory at worst. The garden now documents something that no longer exists: not just a nation, but a particular idea about how different peoples might share a single identity.

Cleveland’s immigrant communities from the former Yugoslavia—now identifying as Croatian-American, Serbian-American, Slovenian-American—maintain complicated relationships with this space. The garden remains, its name unchanged, a monument to a vanished country and to the immigrant generation that built it when Yugoslavia still meant something.

This is part of what makes the Cultural Gardens so historically valuable. They are not static monuments but living documents, their meanings shifting as the world changes around them. Masumi’s photograph captures a moment before the fracture—the garden still representing unity, the name still carrying its intended meaning.