Stara Gradiška

Stara Gradiška is a small settlement on the left bank of the Sava, facing Gradiška in Bosnia and Herzegovina across the river. It lies 14 kilometres southeast of Okučani and 30 kilometres southwest of Nova Gradiška, at a point shaped by the border and an old route through western Slavonia. The settlement grew beside a Sava crossing: it appears in records from 1295, while a fortress was documented in 1528 as vadum Gradysche. After the area was permanently retaken from Ottoman rule in 1691, Stara Gradiška became part of the Military Frontier and acquired a new fortress; its Baroque Church of St Michael followed in 1776. The defining and darkest chapter began when the former fortress prison became part of the Jasenovac camp system during the Second World War. Men, women and children were imprisoned here, and the Kula building remains a particularly powerful symbol of the suffering inflicted on women and children. A visit is therefore less a conventional sightseeing stop than an encounter with a border landscape and a place of remembrance. View the surviving complex respectfully and remain outside any closed or structurally unsafe buildings.

Stara Gradiška’s identity comes from its position on the Sava, its centuries as a border crossing and the surviving fortress complex. The same ground carries traces of Roman Servitium, a medieval estate of the Knights Hospitaller, Ottoman-era Berbir and the Military Frontier fortress rebuilt after 1691. From the Austro-Hungarian period the fortress served as a prison, before becoming part of the Jasenovac camp system during the Second World War. The Jasenovac Memorial Site describes Stara Gradiška as that system’s second-largest camp and records the imprisonment of women and children, giving the Kula building particular memorial significance. With only 207 residents recorded in 2021, the settlement’s present-day stillness beside the Sava contrasts sharply with the history held within its walls.