Tens of thousands of Croatians gathered in Vukovar on Friday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the town's fall to Serb forces, one of the darkest episodes of the Balkans wars.
Top officials, including Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, were among nearly 100,000 mourners from across Croatia who joined a silent march and mass at a memorial cemetery.
Vukovar's fall marked the start of the former Yugoslav republic's 1991-1995 independence war between Zagreb and Belgrade-backed rebel Serbs that claimed around 20,000 lives.
"November 18 is a day that we will not and cannot ever forget," parliamentary speaker Bozo Petrov said. "We bow today (to the victims) in the heroic town."
The mourners, including war veterans and relatives of the victims, gathered outside Vukovar hospital, the symbol of the eastern town's resistance during a harrowing three-month siege.
About 1,600 Croatian soldiers and civilians were killed and the Danube town was virtually destroyed during fierce shelling by then Yugoslav forces.
On Friday, mourners walked in silence for five kilometres (three miles) in a traditional "Memorial Column" to the cemetery where they laid wreaths and lit candles as a mass was held for the nearly 1,000 victims buried there.
A quarter century on, relations between Croatia and its ethnic Serbs and Serbia proper remain tense, and Vukovar is strictly divided between ethnic Croats and Serbs.
On Thursday, the Croatian government named retired general Ante Gotovina, who was acquitted four years ago by a UN court of war crimes against Serbs, to a key defence ministry post, a move not welcomed in Belgrade.
In one of worst atrocities in Croatia's war, about 400 wounded Croats and other non-Serbs were taken from Vukovar hospital by the Yugoslav People's Army after the town's capture.
Soldiers bussed about 260 people to a secluded pig farm where they were beaten, killed and buried in mass graves.
Afterwards, Yugoslav forces expelled some 22,000 non-Serbs, almost half Vukovar's population. About 290 people are still missing.
The UN war crimes tribunal sentenced two top Serb officers, Mile Mrksic and Veselin Sljivancanin, to jail terms of 20 and 10 years for the massacre.
After the war Vukovar was put under UN administration and reintegrated into Croatia in 1998.
