The new European states that had formed in the second half of the 19th century typically had traditions of war memorials, but nothing on the scale that would later emerge from World War I. Italy built various war memorials after unification in the 1860s, but there was little agreement about who should be responsible for these within the new Italian state. Romania erected a number of heroically styled memorials after the Romanian War of Independence in 1877 and 1878, usually celebrating famous leaders associated with Romanian independence, but also including the occasional modest local monuments Bulgaria and Serbia constructed many war memorials after the end of the First Balkan War in 1913. The public played little role in these eastern European memorials, however, which were typically constructed by the central state authorities.