Stele

A stele (plural steles or stelai, from Greek: στήλη, stēlē) or stela (plural stelas or stelæ, from Latin) is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected as a monument, very often for funerary or commemorative purposes. Stelae may be used for government notices or as territorial markers to mark borders or delineate land ownership. They very often have texts and may have decoration. This ornamentation may be inscribed, carved in relief (bas, high, etc.), or painted onto the slab. Traditional Western gravestones are technically stelae, but are very rarely described by the term. Equally stelae-like forms in non-Western cultures may be called by other terms, and "stela" is most consistently used for objects from Europe, the ancient Near East and Egypt, China, and Pre-Columbian America.

History

Steles have also been used to publish laws and decrees, to record a ruler's exploits and honors, to mark sacred territories or mortgaged properties, as territorial markers, as the boundary steles of Akhenaton at Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, most likely independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, more surely independently, by Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the Olmec and Maya.

Stela (disambiguation)

Stela may refer to:

See also

Stela (name)

Stela is a Romanian feminine given name. Notable persons with that name include:

Yugoslav National Movement

The Yugoslav National Movement (Serbo-Croatian: Jugoslavenski narodni pokret), also known as the United Militant Labour Organization (Združena borbena organizacija rada, or Zbor) was a Yugoslav fascist movement led by politician Dimitrije Ljotić. Founded in 1935, it received considerable German financial and political assistance during the interwar period and participated in the 1935 and 1938 Yugoslav parliamentary elections, in which it never received more than 1 percent of the popular vote.

Following the Axis invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Germans selected several Zbor members to join the Serbian puppet government of Milan Nedić. The Serbian Volunteer Corps (SDK) was established as Zbor's party army. Ljotić had no control over the SDK, which was commanded by Colonel Kosta Mušicki. In late 1944, Ljotić and his followers retreated to Slovenia with the Germans and other collaborationist formations. In March, Ljotić and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović agreed on a last-ditch alliance against the Yugoslav Partisans. Ljotić's followers were placed under the command of Chetnik commander Miodrag Damjanović. Ljotić was killed in an automobile accident in late April 1945. His followers later fled to Italy alongside the Chetniks. The Western Allies extradited many back to Yugoslavia following the war, where they were summarily executed and buried in mass graves. Those who were not extradited immigrated to western countries and established émigré organizations intended to promote Zbor's political agenda.