Citizens and visitors have gathered in the southern town of Trebinje on Sunday to lay flowers on the grave of Srdjan Aleksic, a courageous Bosnian Serb who was killed 26 years ago while trying to save the life of a Bosniak.

Aleksic saw his neighbour, ethnic Bosniak Alen Glavovic, being harassed by a group of Bosnian Serb soldiers in 1993. He confronted the soldiers, trying to protect the man but the soldiers then turned against Aleksic. They started beating him with their rifle butts until he fell into a coma.

He died a week later at the hospital.

His father, Rade Aleksic, said on Sunday that every day is more difficult for him without his son, but that he is more and more proud of the life his son lived and what he achieved, and that the remembering him this way proves that he did not die in vain.

“Srdjan Aleksic lives within the people across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and further,” Rade Aleksic said.

He is proud that there are streets named after his son, and that Srdjan’s presence can be felt in Trebinje.

“I feel this, because when I walk the streets young people who I don’t even know greet me, but they know me because of Srdjan, and that is how he keeps on living in Trebinje,” he said.

“Today is the day that we remember Srdjan Aleksic, and it can at the same time be a day when we remember all the innocent people, those who are known and those who are not, the heroes who have fallen in a time of great challenges,” the head of the City Assembly, Dragoslav Banjak, said at the gathering.

The town of Trebinje, however, does not have a street named after the young hero.

“For now there is a swimming event named after Srdjan Aleksic, but in regard to naming a street, square or a fountain after him, there is a procedure, and the city assembly is the place where such a decision is made,” Banjak said, adding that there are no streets in the town that are named after any person or event of the 1990’s war.

Aleksic was posthumously granted a Charter of Bosnia’s Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, a street in Sarajevo was named after him, as well as a passage in Novi Sad, Serbia, where there is also a plaque commemorating him. Another passage in the Serbian town of Pancevo is named after him, and in the Bosnian town of Tuzla there is a sports tournament carrying his name.

Serbia’s former President Boris Tadic awarded Aleksic with the ‘Milos Obilic’ medal for courage and heroism in 2012, while Milorad Dodik, the former President of Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s Serb-majority region, awarded him with the ‘Order of honour of Republika Srpska’ in 2013.

A street in Montenegro’s Podgorica also carries his name, as well as one in New Belgrade.

Alen Glavovic today lives in Sweden, is married and has two children. He visits Trebinje, Aleksic’s grave, and the young hero’s father every year.