Kosakenstein

The Kosakenstein is a memorial in Judenburg, a town in the Murtal district of Styria, Austria. It stands in a small park beside a bridge on the left bank of the Mur river. A natural stone slab bears an inscription recalling the events that followed the Second World War, when British forces handed over tens of thousands of prisoners to Soviet troops. The agreement reached at Yalta had called for the return of Soviet citizens, but the operation later became known as the Lienz Cossack tragedy. People from many backgrounds—Cossacks, Caucasians, Slovenes and Croats—were involved in these weeks of forced repatriation.

The inscription records how thousands were sent eastwards to labour camps or to mass graves in Yugoslavia. The Austrian writer Karl-Peter Schwarz has described the episode as a migration that ended in the Gulag and in Tito’s partisan killing fields. The painter Sergei Grigoryevich Korolkow, who emigrated to the United States in 1945, created a large canvas called The Surrender of the Cossacks in Lienz. Korolkow had once been a close friend of the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov and had illustrated his epic The Quiet Don.

Visitors find a quiet spot beside the river, where the stone slab stands among grass and trees. The park is small but open, allowing light to fall on the inscription. A footpath runs from the bridge to the memorial, making it easy to reach without leaving the town centre. The setting is calm, yet the words on the stone recall a time of great suffering. The memorial serves as a reminder of what happened there in the weeks after the war ended.