The head of Croatia's embattled war-time hospital in the town of Vukovar, Vesna Bosanac, died on Monday, according to officials. She was 73.
Bosanac "became the symbol of Vukovar's defence and resistance", said Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic of the former pediatrician and one time prisoner of war.
Bosanac gained renown during the bloody, three-month siege of Vukovar by the Yugoslav army and Serb rebels in 1991 during the first year of Croatia's independence war.
During the siege, Bosanac oversaw operations at the city's only hospital that treated some 4,000 wounded people and was subjected to regular shelling and artillery fire.
"The hospital was bombed every day with an average of 100 projectiles," Bosanac told a UN war crimes court in The Hague in 2003.
After Vukovar's fall, Yugoslav forces expelled some 400 people, including several who were badly wounded, from the hospital. More than 260 of them were later executed at a secluded pig farm outside the town.
Bosanac herself was among the approximately 5,000 people who were taken prisoner and transferred to Serbia.
She returned to Croatia during a prisoner exchange later in 1991. After the war, she took over her old position at Vukovar's hospital.
More than 1,100 civilians were killed during the Vukovar siege that saw the once-prosperous Danube port virtually razed to the ground.