The Long History of Remembering War DeadThe impulse to create public monuments to remember collective death, like war, is millennia old. The first known war memorial dates to over 4,000 years ago in modern-day Syria. As societies have progressed and architectural tastes have changed, so, too, have war monuments. In Soviet-era Ukraine, for instance, the 335-foot-tall Mother Ukraine was erected to tower over Kyiv as a monument to World War II. The architectural language of the war memorial was completely insufficient for remembering the victims of genocide.