Journal of Design History Advance Access published June 26, 2007

Journal of Design History Vol. 20 No. 2 doi:10.1093/jdh/epm007

Designing Identities
Reshaping the Balkans in the First Two Centuries: The Case of Serbia

Bratislav Pantelić

It is not an easy task to imagine one’s nation in the Balkans. The elusive and complex
interrelation of ethnicities and shared traditions in this region are the result of centuries of
mixing and blending in complex social and cultural processes. Nationalism imposed ethnic
and religious denominators upon these vague cultural entities, writing ethnic and national
histories, appropriating and inventing traditions to impart ethnic exclusivity. Imaginaries of

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cultural uniqueness have been developed by each of these groups and shaped according to
a visual code believed to be innate or to echo ancient traditions. This article focuses on the
Serbian situation. It looks at some representative examples of the visual arts, architecture
and material culture to examine how national uniqueness has been visualized in the past
two centuries and to understand how changing perceptions of ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ designs
have accompanied and accompany identity changes in this volatile region.
Keywords: architecture—decorative arts—national identity—nationalism—Serbia—
south-eastern Europe

The beginnings (later Austro-Hungarian) and Ottoman empires.

An unsuspecting observer of the many political rallies
during the crises of the 1990s in former Yugoslavia
would have been perplexed at the mixture of iconog-
raphies: communist banners featuring the hammer
and sickle, old Serbian standards with real or invented
royalist insignia, flags of socialist Yugoslavia with the
red star, all mixed together with pictures of Serb
nationalist leader Slobodan Milošević , Saint Sava, the
twelfth-century founder of the Serbian church, and
Draža Mihailović , the leader of the royalist resistance
in the Second World War. Among the plethora of
conflicting, ideologically opposed symbols were
reproductions of icons and images of places sacred to
Serbdom, notably the medieval monasteries of
Kosovo.
Such conflation of past identities sums up two cen-
turies of the Serbs’ experience in their vain attempts
to forge a viable identity. It all started when
Herderian Romanticism and its messianic vision of
the Volk ignited dreams of liberation and unity
amongst the South Slavs divided between the Austrian
Instead of binding them even more closely together,
however, nationalism divided them. Defining a
nation entailed construction of ethnic identities that
would differentiate these communities that had lived
side by side for centuries. But how does one delineate
ethnic belonging if these groups share the same core
cultural traditions and language? Linguistic variants,
the dialects and subdialects of the common language,
came with settlement patterns and migration; as
myths, beliefs and customs, they reflected regional
specifics that often overlapped political boundaries. It
was upon such fluid cultural entities, formed around
kinship communities and often rather vague religious
affiliations, that the nation builders of the nineteenth
century imposed ethnic denominators.1
The story of the nation, woven from episodes in
history and legend and often blurring the distinction
between fact and myth, provides a semblance of his-
torical authenticity and is accepted as indisputable
truth and testimony to cultural continuity. The
national imaginary within is an equally dreamlike
world that contains the entire body of real or invented

© The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved. 1
 Bratislav Pantelić
traditions, ranging from religious beliefs and customs,
dress, songs and cuisine, to ethical standards and
moral values. To these ethnic attributes we should
add ancient heroes, sacred places and monuments
that testify to the glory of the nation’s past.2 These
markers of cultural identity are shaped into a visual
framework using a formal and symbolic language that
is believed to be innate to the group or to echo
ancient traditions, an ‘aesthetic’ that reflects affilia-
tion with broader cultural contexts with which the
group may claim affinity or descent: it is a visual code
that defines identity.3
For two centuries now, perceptions of nationhood
in the Balkans have been in constant flux; over and
over ‘national’ histories have been written, traditions
have been invented, languages and cultural legacies
have been constructed. As the themes of linguistic,
ethnic and cultural belonging mutated so did their
visual expressions. They were designed and rede-
signed in a continuous process of assertion and denial:
new identities overwrote previous ones, adding layer
upon layer of memories and traditions to the imagi-
naries of national or ethnic uniqueness.
Writing the narrative
The first significant remapping of traditional values
began in the early eighteenth century among those
Orthodox Slavs who had fled their Ottoman-ruled
homeland and settled in Austrian Habsburg territory.
For these rural kin communities, adaptation to a
modern centralized state was a painful process that
entailed relinquishing customary beliefs and lifestyle;
for the clerical establishment, exposure to secularism
meant ceding much of the control they had enjoyed
in the Ottoman Empire. Eventually they adapted: the
peasants became citizens; not long thereafter they
were to become Serbs.
It was in Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci), the seat of
the Orthodox Church in the Austrian monarchy, that
archaic Byzantine models in icon painting were
replaced with the vibrant colours and formal abun-
dance of the Baroque visual language. As the new
aesthetic imbued traditional religious imagery with
new life, Baroque and classicist designs transformed
the church architecture. These developments gave
rise to secular arts and literature that were to position
the Orthodox Slavs within the intellectual framework
of central Europe. When later in the century Dositej
2
Obradović, the rational-minded advocate of the
Enlightenment, contested the deep-rooted clerical-
ism, he provoked an intellectual discourse that was to
disrupt traditionalist values. New generations brought
new challenges—from Josephine anticlericalism to
Romanticism and ideals of nation. The most con-
tended issue that arose in the early nineteenth century
was the linguistic reform of Vuk Karadžic´; despite
violent opposition from the conservative ecclesiastical
establishment, his new ‘Serbian’ language, constructed
out of one of the Slavic dialects, set the groundwork
for linguistic-based nationalism amongst the South
Slavs of the Habsburg empire: the Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes.4
The story that these Romantics told was not unlike
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the narrative widely accepted today. At the centre of
the narrative is the notion of perpetual victimization,
starting with the loss of statehood after the Battle of
Kosovo in 1389 and followed by ‘five centuries of
suffering’ under the ‘Turkish yoke’. But this, we are
told, did not subdue the Serbs. Throughout the Otto-
man centuries, their identity was kept alive in Ortho-
dox monasteries, those centres of learning where
liturgies celebrating the holy kings and patriarchs of
the medieval Nemanyid dynasty perpetuated collec-
tive memories of ancient glory.5
The Habsburg Serbs’ perceptions of their brethren
under the Ottomans resonated well in this narrative-
in-the writing; they were the alter ego, primitive but
pure, and a repository of archetypal myths and tradi-
tions that had only to be awoken. When in 1814 the
language reformer Vuk Karadžić published in Vienna
a body of popular epics that he had collected amongst
the Orthodox Slavs in the Ottoman provinces, they
were embraced by the Romantics as the voice of the
ages: the living memory of the nation passed down
from time immemorial.
In reality, the largely peasant Orthodox popula-
tion in the Ottoman Empire had accommodated to
Ottoman society and adopted Ottoman culture—
albeit transformed and ultimately perceived as indig-
enous or ‘Orthodox’—which they came to regard as
their own ‘perennial’ traditions. The church did sur-
vive the collapse of the medieval state; in fact the
restored Serbian Patriarchate at Peć was even more
powerful, with jurisdiction extending during the
two centuries of its existence (1557–1766) to nearly
all territories inhabited by the Christian Slavs—a true
Orthodox theocracy within an Islamic empire.
 Designing Identities
Frescoes and icons painted in this period suggest a
continuing veneration of the Nemanyid saints among
the church elite, but that does not say much about
the general population. Are we to assume — as
nationalist historiography would have us believe—
that such memories of the medieval past were sus-
tained among the Orthodox population, and that
they reflected a widespread national sentiment main-
tained by the church?6 If we refer to the oral poetry
collected by Vuk Karadžić, we shall notice that the
Nemanyid times, celebrated in the nationalist dis-
course as the high point of the Serbian achievement,
are not as prominent as one would expect; it would
appear that the common people, dispersed in self-
sustaining kinship communities, did not relate to the
medieval kings of some distant past. Their epics were
not knightly romances of chivalry but tales of leg-
endary or semi-legendary heroes endowed with
supernatural powers and vengeful Christian saints
with pagan attributes. Barely literate village priests
who themselves did not understand the archaic Sla-
vonic language of the very liturgy they celebrated—
let alone the faithful—were hardly in a position to
disseminate proto-Romantic ideas of medieval glory
and lament lost statehood. It is even doubtful that
they managed to preserve the Christian faith, whose
vestiges had been merged with pre-Christian beliefs
and rituals and sustained only through fasts and
church holidays.7
When the Habsburg Serbs started arriving in the
semi-independent Serbian principality, established in
1830 within the confines of the Ottoman Empire,
they were not received with great enthusiasm. The
Serbs from the principality displayed little under-
standing for their kinsfolk from across the Danube,
whose sophisticated manners and Western dress were
seen as a betrayal of tradition and customs; so they
referred to them as the ‘Germans’. While many came
for profit, some, such as Dositej Obradovic´, were
driven by a missionary zeal to promote ideas of civil
liberties and rationalism. Such idealists saw themselves
as the enlightened bearers of civilization whose mis-
sion was to educate their unfortunate brethren who
had suffered under Ottoman rule for centuries. They
wished to instil in them a sense of belonging, a
national identity based on common language, religion
and heritage. But this was easier said than done: all
the two groups had in common was a vague sense of
ethnic and religious affinity.
3
Indeed, this was a dramatic confrontation between
two worlds, quite literally an encounter between lib-
eral cultural nationalism and an archaic breed of
ethno-religious patriotism. It is not difficult to appre-
ciate the lack of interest of the Serbs from the princi-
pality in these inventions coming from the ‘other
side’. When they had rebelled in 1804, their goals
were not revolutionary: they had not demanded social
reforms or national emancipation but protection from
the excesses of the local Ottoman officials (dahis).
Events, however, unfolded in unexpected ways and
they ended up with a state of their own hopelessly
entangled in the complex political and military con-
frontation of the great powers.
Adding to the shock was the new visual language
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that the Habsburg Serbs brought with them. It pro-
vided a dramatic contrast to the rudimentary art that
had been practised by self-trained iconographers dur-
ing the Ottoman centuries almost without change
from its Byzantine roots. It is hardly surprising then
that the sophisticated Baroque and classicist imagery
were not immediately appreciated by the Serbs in the
principality; their taste was conditioned by the sacred
meaning and familiarity of traditional icons and not
by trends in aesthetics. The Serb elites in Habsburg
Austria, on the other hand, had developed a refined
taste in fashion and the arts; furniture and portraits
painted by Viennese-trained artists in that prototypi-
cal middle-class style, the Biedermeier, were in par-
ticular demand among the wealthy mercantile
classes.
It was only a matter of time before such trends
would be adopted in Serbia proper. Despite resistance
from the overwhelmingly traditionalist rural popula-
tion, who ridiculed the newcomers’ novel dress and
sophistication in deportment, it took only one gen-
eration of city dwellers to shed their traditional Otto-
man-style dress for waistcoats and crinolines and
adopt urban lifestyle.
Designing the nation
The designing of the newly adopted Western identity
was extended to the built environment; while urban
planners remapped cities, cutting wide boulevards
through the mazes of ‘Turkish’ streets, architects
introduced the full range of academic historicist idi-
oms to replace the picturesque old ‘Balkan’ architec-
ture (as it came to be called to avoid the use of the
 Bratislav Pantelić
terms ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Turkish’). This involved the
destruction of the previous identity: by the second
half of the nineteenth century only one mosque out
of thirty remained standing in Belgrade. Without the
numerous minarets the skyline of the city assumed a
more European appearance; it was now dominated
by the bell tower of the new Baroque Cathedral.
Such shifting of identities was a continuing pro-
cess. It was not long before immersion into Western
culture came to be perceived as a threat to the peren-
nial cultural traditions and customs. Perhaps in a
sense this was even true: this was a radical interrup-
tion of traditions. A much larger question would be
what is the perennial tradition of a people, especially
one whose cultural traditions were formed within
the framework of three empires: the Byzantine,
Habsburg and Ottoman?
For the ideologues of nationalism there was no such
dilemma. Once the national narrative was internalized,
the Baroque bell towers that had once replaced the
minarets no longer fitted in the new imaginary. This
was bluntly conveyed by the architect Andra
Stevanović when he described Belgrade’s cathedral as a
‘Catholic-Jesuit Baroque monstrosity’.8 The Serbs
should not be looking to the West, he was implying,
but to the East. As Russian influence in the region was
growing, identity formation was channelled towards a
nationalism based on cultural affinity with ‘Orthodox
Slavdom’ and its Byzantine heritage. Religion now
replaced language as a designator of ethnic uniqueness
and a means of distinguishing the purportedly disparate
Balkan groups. The equation of religion and ethnicity
was extended to include the notion of natural disposi-
tion towards cultural traditions and visual styles. Con-
sequently, a decree of 1862 required the ‘Byzantine
style’ to be used for designing new churches. Baroque
and classicist forms were purged from the sacral; these
foreign designs were now restricted to residential and
public architecture. It is ironic that this Byzantine style
was in fact an eclectic historicism promoted by
Theophilus Hansen in Vienna. It was adopted by his
Serbian students not so much for its resemblance to any
specific monuments or architectural forms of Byzan-
tine architecture as for its ‘eastern’ quality; the aesthetic
of the Rundbogenstil and the fusion of Romanesque,
Oriental and Byzantine decorative schemes made the
‘Hanzenatika’ sufficiently distinct from the Baroque to
create an illusion of cultural affinity with Orthodoxy
and continuity with the national heritage.9
4
Indeed, a national heritage was imagined as the
visual counterpart to the narrative-in-the-writing.
Since the eighteenth century the medieval monaster-
ies dispersed throughout the Ottoman Balkans had
been built into the imaginary of the Habsburg Slavs as
holy sites of Orthodoxy. Engravings showing vedutas
of the revered ancient sites mapped the sacred and
rooted it firmly into the popular imagination. As the
idea of nation gained prominence in the nineteenth
century, pious reverence was replaced by reverence
for history, and the holy sites were transformed into
monuments of national glory. Journalists, antiquarians
and historians ventured deep into the Ottoman
domain of ‘Old Serbia’ (Kosovo). Their travelogues
and reports charted the imagination of the budding
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national sentiment: they were symbolic maps of
national memory that added these sacred places to the
catalogues of the saintly kings and patriarchs. Anthro-
pologists such as Jovan Cvijić , for their part, outlined
ethnic spaces by mapping the racial features of the
indigenous populations. The archaeological and eth-
nic topographies of Old Serbia centred on the myth
of the Battle of Kosovo were thus implanted deep in
the national imaginary.
Little was actually known about these medieval
monuments beyond the mythical. Publications were
numerous, but these were legendary histories whose
main purpose was not to provide accurate archaeo-
logical or architectural descriptions but to incite
national sentiment. It was not until late in the century,
after the Serbian principality gained full independence
and was proclaimed a kingdom (in 1882), that archae-
ological research conducted by Mihailo Valtrović and
Dragutin Milutinović brought to light some stylistic
features of this architecture. These two scholars iden-
tified, although somewhat vaguely, an architecture of
highly distinctive features. The prime example of this
idiom, which was to be named ‘Morava’ by the French
scholar Gabriel Millet, is the church of Ravanica
Monastery founded by Prince Lazar, the ill-fated hero
of the Battle of Kosovo.10 This regional architecture,
noted for its excessively ornamented polychrome
exteriors, dominated the architectural scene of the
northern Serbian principalities during the last century
of independence—before they succumbed to the
Ottomans in the mid-fifteenth century.
The discovery of the Morava idiom was followed
by the demise of the Hanzenatika, which was now
deemed an artificial eclecticism of foreign origin. The
 Designing Identities
Morava ‘style’ was swiftly incorporated in the national
imaginary as an indigenous idiom singular to the
Serbs. A decorative design derived from these monu-
ments was included in the curricula of the Depart-
ment of Architecture and the Department of
Ornamental Design (Ornamentika), both at the
Technical School in Belgrade. The latter programme
was led by Branko Tanazević , an architect who did
much of the research and endeavoured to promote
the idiom in public architecture. But how did he
apply this medieval idiom in contemporary design? In
his most prominent work, the Telephone Exchange
in Belgrade (designed in 1906), Tanazević inter-
spersed motifs and devices from the repertory of the
Secession with stylized elements adapted from
churches of the Morava group: blind arcades, rosettes,
interlace patterns and pilaster strips, with alternating
red-and-white-coloured bands that emulate the com-
posite building technique [1].
For many, this was the ultimate evidence of redis-
covered roots. While it may have had special sym-
bolic value for its association with the Battle of
Kosovo and its hero Prince Lazar, the Morava design
also appealed to those revivalists who advocated a
return to the pure and uncorrupted art of the peas-
ants and shepherds. The actual medieval monuments
of the Morava group occasionally lack the sophistica-
tion of some of the earlier architecture of the region.
The occasionally crude construction and carvings
have something of a rustic appeal that suggests genu-
inely vernacular creations. If we add to this the car-
pet-like profusion of patterns and intense colours we
Fig 1. Branko Tanazević , The Telephone Exchange, Belgrade,
1906. Photograph by the author
5
have a design that, although historicist, fits in the
national imaginary as a product of the indigenous
ethnic community.11
Indeed, folklore was seen as the most substantial
evidence of national existence since Vuk Karadžic´
published his epic poems. As Karadžić had uncovered
the ‘original voice of the people’, so it was the task of
patriotic designers to discover that ‘original’ design
principle that arose from the collective unconscious of
the Serbian people. One such designer was Dragutin
Inkiostri, who employed designs from a miscellany of
overlapping regional traditions, from Croatia to Bul-
garia, which he believed reflected the primeval tradi-
tions of the Slavs. These indigenous forms, as he
elaborated with great passion in his writings, would
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inspire the creation of a new national design, free from
the restrictions imposed by foreign academic styles,
and a ‘rebirth’ of Serbian art.12 Inkiostri’s endeavour
to introduce vernacular motifs in architectural and
interior design echoes contemporary trends in east and
central Europe.13 One example of his national style is
the interior decoration of the house of the geographer
and anthropologist Jovan Cvijić . Here, Inkiostri com-
bined Secessionist designs with motifs taken from
rugs, embroidery and attire from the southern regions
of Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria. The furniture is
inspired by carved ornaments from traditional house-
hold objects and musical instruments; the upholstery
and cushions are made from Pirot rugs, a Balkan vari-
ant of Anatolian kilims [2]. On the walls and ceiling
Inkiostri interspersed geometric and floral ornaments
with black, red and white Pirot-style and related ver-
nacular motifs; the occasional patriotic device, such as
the stylized double-headed eagle and cross on the
chandelier and the ceiling, the coat of arms of the
Kingdom of Serbia, is there to assure us of the national
quality of his design [3].
If we look further at the national designs created in
these years we notice that they usually follow a
generic Secessionist formula. Vladislav Titelbah’s
illustration for an epic poem features a set of symbolic
motifs borrowed from the international repository of
allegories [4]. A female personification of Serbia atop
a cloudscape bears in one hand a large shield inscribed
with the national insignia and in the other brandishes
a sword. It does not require great erudition to grasp
the meaning: it symbolizes the battles that were to be
fought for the liberation of the Serbs who still
remained within the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian
 Bratislav Pantelić
Fig 3. Dragutin Inkiostri, ceiling with chandelier, house of Jovan
Cvijić , Belgrade, 1908. Reproduced with permission of the City
Museum of Belgrade
empires. Rather than the female figure, a hybrid of
Britannia and Marianne probably invented by the
artist for this occasion, it is the distinctively stylized
Cyrillic lettering and the interlace pattern of the orna-
mented initial that are immediately recognizable as
national. They were purportedly inspired by the
6
Fig 2. Dragutin Inkiostri, drawing
room, house of Jovan Cvijić ,
Belgrade, 1908. Reproduced with
permission of the City Museum of
Belgrade
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Miroslav Gospel, a twelfth-century Slavonic manu-
script written in the Cyrillic script.
Neither is true, but it went well with the national
imaginary that perceived this gospel book as testi-
mony to the Serbs’ literacy and cultural continuity
since the Middle Ages. In the 1920s, a local lithogra-
pher from Belgrade devised a typographic style he
called the ‘Miroslav’ that has since become the favou-
rite typeface in ‘patriotic’ publications. There is irony
in the fact that the lettering was in fact not based on
the Miroslav Gospel but adapted from standard Rus-
sian typography. But this was not seen as a problem:
the label, it appears, was sufficient to denote its
national character and the Miroslav typeface was
added to the repository of ‘indigenous’ designs along
with the historicist Morava and actual vernacular tra-
ditions. Such a fusion of folklore, history and religion
reflects the communitarian ideal of the national imag-
inary where peasants and kings stand as equals. It finds
expression in a design for a patriotic society where
leaders of the popular insurrection against the Otto-
mans, singers of epic poetry and medieval Nemanyid
kings and patriarchs are brought together in a setting
that combines vernacular and historicist idioms [5].
This sort of folklorism fired the imagination of the
Croatian and Slovenian enthusiasts of Slav unity.
From the perspective of today’s nationalism, and
especially in view of the recent Yugoslav wars, it
 Designing Identities
Fig 4. Vladislav Titelbah, illustration for the cover of Ustanak na
Dahije [Rebellion Against the Dahis], 1890. Reproduced with
permission of the National Library of Serbia
sounds remarkable that a Slovene, Jernej Kopitar,
provided the initial impulse for the rise of Serbian
nationalism. It was he who encouraged Vuk Karadžić
to construct a new vernacular language out of a
Slavic dialect and to collect and publish oral epic
poetry. Equally remarkable was the Croatian Pan-
Slavists’ acceptance of the new language that Karadžić
called Serbian. The paths of development of the
Yugoslav nationalisms were indeed multifarious and
complex. Just as they had adopted the language, these
proponents of unitary Slavic culture appropriated the
Serbian epic narrative as the most forceful and ancient
of the South Slavic traditions and a repository of pri-
meval Slavic heritage. When artists around the Cro-
atian sculptor Ivan Meštrović organized into art
societies (Lada in 1905 and the Medulić Society in
1908), they were motivated by discovery of a primi-
tive heroic impulse in their own roots: spontaneous,
inherently free and just, the Slavs were destined for a
greatness that only had to be aroused by an equally
7
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Fig 5. Ðord-e Milovanović , Diploma of the Society of Saint Sava,
1927. Reproduced with permission of the City Museum of
Belgrade
heroic inspiration. This messianic and visionary ide-
alism was expressed in the epic pathos of Meštrović’s
sculptures dedicated to the Battle of Kosovo, the
central theme of the Pan-Slavic vision and of the
Serbian epic narrative.14
This, however, was not just innocent idealism.
Awoken by the call of their race, the rugged and pri-
meval bodies of such legendary heroes from the Ser-
bian epic imaginary as Prince Marko and Miloš Obilić,
the former a medieval noble who assumed superhu-
man abilities in the popular imagination and the latter
a knight whom the epic tradition credits with slaying
Sultan Murad I at the Battle of Kosovo, emerge from
their millennial sleep to lead the Slavs into new victo-
ries in the impending wars of liberation. Indeed, sol-
diers who fought in the successive wars against the
Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires identified
with these precedents. Serbia’s military successes and
valour in the two Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913) and
then in the First World War encouraged the Slavs of
Austria-Hungary to support openly these ‘wars of lib-
 Bratislav Pantelić
eration’, which they imagined would lead to the ful-
filment of their dreams of unity.
A series of exhibitions of Yugoslav art were orga-
nized in European capitals to promote, mainly through
the symbolism of Kosovo and the Serbian epic tradi-
tion, the ‘poetry and idealism of the Yugoslav race’,
as a British official saw Meštrović’s heroic and awe-
inspiring figures in 1919 at an exhibition in the
Victoria and Albert Museum; for him these ‘inherent’
Slavic qualities were a ‘counterpose to the heritage of
German materialism’.15 Meštrović was indeed central
to the South Slav ideal: international success, particu-
larly at the 1911 International Art Exhibition in Rome
where he and the other artists—mainly Croats from
the Austro-Hungarian Empire—defiantly chose to
exhibit in the pavilion of the Kingdom of Serbia,
established him as the ‘Prophet of Yugoslavism’. Josef
Strzygowski understood the mobilizing power of
Meštrović’s art; his fears that it would spell trouble for
the Habsburg empire proved to be prophetic.
Austria-Hungary crumbled and so did the Otto-
man Empire. The Pan-Slavic ideals became reality:
the South Slavs united in the Kingdom of the Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). Upon unifi-
cation in 1918, King Aleksandar adopted Meštrović’s
vision to promote a monumental visual expression of
the new unitary state. Looking at these works today
does not, however, inspire the awe they were intended
to and undoubtedly have done; rather, the rustic
appearance and primeval power of these figures, meant
to embody the forces of nature and history, appear to
overwhelm humanity itself for the sake of grands idé-
aux. It is tempting to compare Meštrović’s superhu-
man Slavic race with Pan-Germanic racial visions.
Whether or not these sculptures can be compared to
those of Arno Breker or Josef Thorak is less of an
issue than the obvious affinity in their ideological
provenance. Indeed, although Pan-Slavism may be
seen as an idealistic attempt to unite people based on
common traditions and language, it also contained
the seed of a messianic racial ideology. Meštrović’s
design for a monument dedicated to the Battle of
Kosovo is imbued with such meaning. Rather than
following the principles of his teacher Otto Wagner,
Meštrović adhered to the tendency towards monu-
mental structures overflowing with massive sculptures
and sculpted ornaments found in the works of Franz
Metzner. Meštrović’s Slavic heroes find parallels in
the Teutonic knights that Metzner sculpted for Bruno
8
Schmitz’s colossal Monument to the Battle of the
Nations, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, built to cele-
brate the centenary of the 1813 Battle of Leipzig. It is
this kind of ideal that Meštrović pursued in his Kosovo
Temple. He envisioned an immense structure replete
with sculptures of intertwining bodies of epic heroes,
sphinxes and caryatids, all exaggerated in scale and
proportion. The Kosovo Temple, as its German
counterpart, can but cause wariness amongst viewers
today, not for its ostentatious monumentalism, but
for its meaning: this was not meant to be a monument
to an ideal as much as a shrine to a race. Such racial
fantasies came to an end with unification and the
temple, intended to be built on the site of the Battle
of Kosovo, was never carried beyond the planning
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stage; perhaps for the best.16
The ideals of a unitary culture were pursued in
socialist Yugoslavia, established after the Second
World War by Josip Broz Tito, leader of the com-
munist resistance. Tito’s views in some ways were not
very different from King Aleksandar’s. It was thus
possible for him to overlook Meštrović ’s growing
religious sentimentalism and personal reservations
towards communist ideology. Meštrović left for
America, but his visionary ideals were pursued in
socialist Yugoslavia, albeit with some alterations: the
communists would accept the messianic narrative if
they were the messiah. Therefore, the adapted narra-
tive described Tito’s guerilla fighters within the same
imaginary as the mythical heroes of Slavdom; their
revolution and struggle against the Nazis were
absorbed as an integral part of the Yugoslav peoples’
heroism and ‘eternal’ resistance to foreign invaders.
Uniquely among socialist countries, Yugoslavia
was almost untouched by the revolutionary optimism
of the Soviet imaginary and had no equivalent to
Stalin’s historicist monumental designs. After the split
with the Comintern in 1948, a moderate version of
modernism was to become a trademark of socialist
Yugoslavia.17 This was certainly not a reflection of
Tito’s personal taste; on the contrary, his disagree-
ments with the proponents of modernism were com-
mon knowledge.18 In view of his preference for the
products and aesthetic of ‘folk’ art, it comes as no
surprise that he was partial to the academic descrip-
tive realism that had persisted since the nineteenth
century in the form of ethnographic narratives and
genre scenes (which had also been adapted to the
imagery of socialist realism), but also as historical
 Designing Identities
images, such as Uroš Predić’s Maiden of Kosovo where
traditional folk costume and jewellery imbues this
historical scene with a vernacular flavour [6]. Both
such autographic images of Balkan life and history
that convey ethnic pride, moral integrity and heroism
of the Volk and Meštrović ’s epic messianism were
carried into mainstream academic modernism. For
example, Petar Lubarda’s rugged expressionist forms
in glaring colours evoke visions of primeval heroism
and the uncontrollable stamina of the Balkan peoples.
In his Gusle Player, a blind bard of epic poetry accom-
panied by his primitive instrument seems as if verses
from the mythical depths of time immemorial are
gushing forth from his gaping mouth [7].19
Folklore is a persistent theme in the self-percep-
tions of identity that mutated according to the chang-
ing ideological structures, from Serbian to Pan-Slavic
and Yugoslav. In its modernist guise, cleansed of reli-
gious and ethnic connotations, folklorism could fit
into an image of modernity and prosperity. The new
Yugoslav and socialist identity required the redesign-
ing of the urban landscape along modernist lines and
the mass production of standard housing equipped
with modern-style furniture and appliances.20 The
showcase of such ideals was New Belgrade, built on
marshland by ‘youth work brigades’ as a display of
the new collective spirit of the working class. A
locally assembled diminutive ‘people’ s car’, the
Zastava 750, made under license from the Italian
company Fiat, and its successor, the Yugo, along
with locally designed fashion clothing, contributed
to the image of a modern lifestyle that was in sharp
contrast to the dismal image of the Soviet bloc. Even
Fig 6. Uroš Predić , The Maiden of Kosovo, oil on canvas, 1919.
Reproduced with permission of the City Museum of Belgrade
9
the coarseness that was so often associated with the
primeval and uncorrupted spirit of the common peo-
ple, such as in Lubarda’s vision, was rendered ‘clean’
in the colourful ‘naive art’ of peasant artists that was
internationally promoted in the 1970s to demon-
strate the optimism of socialist Yugoslavia’s peas-
antry. 21 This image of ‘modern folklorism’ was
constructed through the promotion of folk dance
ensembles and products of traditional arts and crafts
mainly by the Narodna Radinost (Folk Arts and
Crafts), a state-run cooperative that marketed an
assortment of handicrafts, including Pirot rugs from
Serbia, coffee sets from Bosnia, wood carvings from
Croatia, and a selection of products such as crockery,
musical instruments, filigree jewellery, lace and
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embroidery from all regions of Yugoslavia. In par-
ticular, there was demand for knitwear made by local
village women in Sirogojno, a reconstructed ‘ethnic’
village on Mount Zlatibor in Serbia. These products
were admired for their colourful designs and unre-
fined texture, which created a sense of authentically
indigenous products. Just as naive art was promoted
to the status of high art and exhibited in art galleries,
Sirogojno knitwear was displayed in fashion shows
alongside designer clothing.
Fig 7. Petar Lubarda, The Gusle Player, oil on canvas, 1952.
Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Belgrade
 Bratislav Pantelić
The elusive identity
The unlikely combination of modernity and a pol-
ished folklorism could not, however, forge a unitary
identity that would simply brush aside traditional
identity structures. Yugoslav identity thus came to be
conflated with socialist ideology. When communism
collapsed it became obsolete, creating an identity vac-
uum that opened doors to ethnic and religious nation-
alisms. But the building blocks of identity
reconstruction had already been fashioned in the first
Yugoslav state. The kingdom of the South Slavs was
not a model democratic country; nor was it, despite
considerable efforts, a truly multicultural society.
Once disenchantment with the unitary state set in,
artists from the Pan-Slavic circle turned from extol-
ling the Serbian past to discovering their own. The
Serbs for their part had been largely unresponsive to
the idealistic vision of Pan-Slavism and had little
interest in cultural traditions other than their own.
It is not an easy task to imagine one’s nation in the
Balkans. The ethnic and cultural topography of the
region is defined by complex interrelations of elusive
ethnicities, overlapping traditions and a shared his-
torical fate. Croatia, whose statehood tradition
stretches all the way back to the eleventh century,
was, after a short period of independence, absorbed
into the Hungarian kingdom. Similarly, the somewhat
more clearly outlined Serbian principalities emerged
from Byzantine dominion in the early thirteenth cen-
tury only to be engulfed by the expanding Ottoman
domain two centuries later. These brief interludes in
the South Slavs’ long history of obscurity within the
Byzantine, Habsburg and Ottoman empires were
expanded in the national narratives into glorious
kingdoms arbitrarily encompassing territories accord-
ing to political imagination and the mutations of the
nationalist discourse.
In reality, these two groups have difficulties even
distinguishing between themselves; their national and
ethnic identities are just as much the product of imag-
ination as their nationally specific cultures. Nationalist
theories tend to assimilate callously, disregarding lay-
ers of regional cultural traditions that are the result of
centuries of mixing and blending in complex social
and cultural processes. The same is true of the equally
preposterous notion of a visual language or aesthetic
principle that would somehow be inherent to only
one group.
10
So what remains of that national or ethnic-specific
design in Serbia? Inkiostri’s passionate dedication to
folklore did not result in a rebirth of authentic Serbian
art (or Yugoslav, as he labelled it after the Yugoslav
kingdom was formed). The designs he promoted as
national were nothing more than a blend of local ver-
naculars interspersed with generic fin de siècle ornamen-
tal devices [8]. The same is true of Tanazević’s Morava
decorative design and the many other historicist and
vernacular ‘revivals’. However much these designers
and artists strove to define a national style, all they
could come up with was a local variant of an interna-
tional idiom. The Hanzenatika historicist fantasy and
Meštrović’s Slavic symbolism lack even regional refer-
ences; they are national only in the label.
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The power of illusion
If we were to ask the question of how these visual
languages of diverse origins came to be accepted as
representative of nation or ethnicity we would be
entering the uncharted domains of the irrational.
Identification of the source of this phenomenon
would require an investigation of the militant and
oppressive discourse that dominated the intellectual
scene for most of the time period under consider-
ation. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the
militancy intensified. It was then that the influential
Andra Stevanović attacked foreign academic styles
and demanded the use of Serbian historical and ver-
nacular models; these in his belief represented innate
spiritual values of the nation.22 His words resounded
strongly. They came not long after Valtrović and
Milutinović had identified the Morava idiom. The
discovery of an indigenous style was a powerful
incentive in the increasing militancy that heralded the
impending wars. The two Balkan Wars and the bat-
tles of the First World War stretched the national
imaginary to the limits, evoking memories of mythi-
cal battles for mythical ethnic spaces that needed to be
‘liberated’: Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo.23
These were not lonely voices. The goal of most cul-
tural and intellectual activity was reduced to explica-
tions of nationalist policies.24 Such parochialism had a
devastating effect on the creative output of
artists, designers and architects. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, many of them were educated in Western acade-
mies, often in Vienna and Munich, to which they went
driven by the sense that they were on patriotic missions
 Designing Identities
Fig 8. Dragutin Inkiostri, wall decoration, house of Jovan Cvijić ,
Belgrade, 1908. Reproduced with permission of the City
Museum of Belgrade
to acquire knowledge. Very few stayed abroad: after
completing their studies they returned to government
positions and squandered their talents on uninventive
public projects and tedious patriotic debates. This
indeed was not an atmosphere conducive to creativity
and innovation: mainstream trends in the visual arts
and design, from various academic historicisms to
incarnations of the Secession in vernacular guise, were
mere simulations of styles; they were removed from
their theoretical framework and adapted to the vacu-
ous discourse that dominated the intellectual scene.
Nationalism even penetrated the modernist and
avant-garde scenes of interwar Belgrade and Zagreb.
One such case is the Zenit movement founded in
1921 by Ljubomir Micić, who promoted an extrava-
gant concept of the ‘barbaric’ creativity and ‘genius’
of the Slavs, which would supplant Western culture
11
in the impending war of civilizations. This cultural
radicalism was in fact a restatement of Russian Slavo-
phile theories expressed through the visual languages
and discourses of Dada and Futurism. Ironically, it
draws from the same imaginary as mainstream cul-
ture, whose conservative values Micić and his associ-
ates believed they were challenging.25
Modernism in the Balkans is a trompe l’œil of
modernity, an illusion that conceals social underde-
velopment and deep-set traditionalism. Despite all its
shortcomings the art scene in socialist Yugoslavia did
make significant progress. The proscription of ethnic
and religious nationalism and refutation of the equally
doctrinaire socialist realism in the years following
Tito’s split with Stalin was a liberating moment.26 Yet
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underneath the veneer of the academic modernist
visual languages was that persistent traditionalist
underpinning and parochialism centred on the local
milieu and perceptions of the indigenous. When
notions of modernity were actually expressed, as they
were by some independent movements and occa-
sional brilliant individuals, they were tolerated as the
escapist resorts of the elite few and kept at safe dis-
tance from mainstream culture.27
The profusion of images described at the beginning
of this article was a pageant of traditionalism and patri-
archy. It was the summation of all past identities. This
imagery, drawn from the various imaginaries of the
past, announced yet another identity change: from the
unitary Yugoslav and socialist to religious-based ethnic
identities. Shifting from Marxism to Orthodoxy and
from proletariat to nation hardly required a leap of
faith; both were communitarian populist ideologies
with closely related and overlapping mythological
matrices. Folklore remained the dominant theme, but
this was not the polished folklorism of Tito’s Yugosla-
via. It was a strain of conservative Slavophilism devel-
oped by émigré Russian clerics in the 1930s and
reiterated by Serbian bishops as an ethnic ontology
named Svetosavlje (‘St Savaism’) after Saint Sava. In
this bewildering mixture of theological mysticism and
organicist history, Orthodox Christianity is described
as the spiritual essence and true identity of the Serbs.
It is hardly surprising that the visual expression of
this Svetosavlje identity is formed by the ‘Byzantine’
aesthetic. The scintillating gold of icons and the
irrational spatial setting known as ‘inverted perspec-
tive’ are seen as a visual code that defines cultural
belonging. Indeed, icons evolved from their traditional
 Bratislav Pantelić

role as objects of private devotion—closely related to

the celebration of the family patron saint, the slava—
into markers of collective identity. In this transforma-
tion, the Baroque-derived visual language, traditional
since the eighteenth century, was discarded in favour
of simulated medieval visual models; this, according to
the ideologues of Svetosavlje, was the authentic style
of the Serbs. Indeed, the ethereal two-dimensional
saints hovering in surreal gold settings were more con-
sistent with the Serbs’ new ‘spiritual’ identity.
The Byzantine aesthetic was not restricted to icons;
it appeared on a range of products, from calendars to
slivovitz decanters—and even Easter eggs, the other
significant artefacts of religious folklore that underwent
a transformation from colourful symbols of a church

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holiday into markers of ethnic identity. This sombre
religious imagery has displaced the vibrant colours and
lively vernacular designs of ‘folk arts and crafts’ and
assumed the most prominent place in the national
imaginary as perceptions of the indigenous. When new
identities are constructed, however, they do not forfeit
earlier ones. Thus, a profusion of symbols drawn from
past imaginaries, including monasteries, saints, military
heroes and emblems of church and state were adapted
to the Byzantine aesthetic and branded as ethnic [9].
This dysfunctional agglomeration of myths and
Fig 9. Shop window in Belgrade. Photograph by the author
history, folklore and religion is yet another triumph
of parochialism. Sustained by a folkloric religion, the
If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to
Svetosavlje identity perpetuates the same cultural the journal website on http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article.
inertia and self-isolation that has plagued Balkan There is a facility on the site for sending email responses to the editorial
mainstream culture since the Slavs started to emerge board and other readers.
as Serbs and Croats in the early nineteenth century
(and most recently as Bosniaks, Macedonians and
Montenegrins). However much identity structures Notes
changed and new narratives were written and imagi-
naries developed over these past two centuries, the Acknowledgments: I would like to express my appreciation to
traditionalist underpinning remained. Gordon Dobie for his help and suggestions. My thanks also go to
Hülya Canbakal.
These identities, as we have seen in the case of
1 It is not uncommon to find in scholarly literature, as in the
Serbia, are in fact nothing but illusions, chimeras of nationalist discourse, views that today’s nations are in one way
collective desires, as are their visual expressions: the or another comparable or traceable to pre-modern ethnic
visual languages and designs that were grafted onto groups. For a critical summary of such perennial theories, see
Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, Routledge,
these collective self-perceptions of uniqueness. As New York and London, 1998, pp. 145–98. Adrian Hastings,
visual codes that define identity, they were just as much for example, argues for the development of ethnic or even
illusions as the identities they were meant to convey. national sentiment in some parts of Europe in the Middle Ages;
thus in the Balkans, according to this author, the Serbs and
Croats had assumed distinct identities in the later medieval
period. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood:
Bratislav Pantelić Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, Cambridge University Press,
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Cambridge and New York, 1997, pp. 124–47. The mélange of
Sabanci University, Istanbul isolated rural communities that formed the medieval and post-
E-mail: pantelic@sabanciuniv.edu medieval Balkans does not, however, in any way correspond to

12
 Designing Identities
the large ethnic groups that emerged in the nineteenth century
and that we more or less encounter today (as nations). It is
unlikely that these disconnected communities could have
developed identities other than those shaped by kinship
loyalties, regional and local customs and traditions; when they
did extend beyond the local milieu they referred to the shared
pool of traditions such as language, social organization and
remnants of ancient beliefs that subsisted as part of religion and
custom. But these transcended political and religious boundaries:
Catholic and Orthodox Slavs (and later Muslim) would have
had some sense of mutual affinity (not necessarily loyalty) based
on this shared heritage. (See below, notes 2 and 6.)
2 These traditions were often extracted from a common pool of
traditions and assigned to the cultural heritage of one or another
ethnic group. Such appropriated traditions correspond in part
to Hobsbawm’s definition of ‘invented traditions’. Eric
Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in Eric
Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1983,
pp. 1–14. They were not necessarily invented or revived; living
traditions were often transformed (spontaneously, at the
popular level) to accommodate changes in perceptions of
identity. Examples discussed in this article include the icon and
the Byzantine style, the national heritage and the epic narrative,
all of which mutated from their original contexts into markers
of collective identity.
3 Benedict Anderson’s printed vernaculars may have been the
initial medium for the spread of national narratives, but only
amongst the elites. It was through such familiar visual styles
that these narratives and their imaginaries were widely
disseminated among the population. Cf. Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd edn., Verso, London, 1991.
4 For Vuk Karadžić, see Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times of
Vuk Stefanovic´ Karadžić 1787–1864: Literacy, Literature, and
National Independence in Serbia, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1970.
5 For the medieval history of the Balkans, see John V. A. Fine,
The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth
Century to the Ottoman Conquest, University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor, 1987. On the Battle of Kosovo, Thomas Emmert,
Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo 1389, East European Monographs
278, Columbia University Press, Boulder and New York,
1990.
6 This nationalist claim has been accepted by some historians.
Arguing against Benedict Anderson’s view that nations were
not possible before the advent of print capitalism Adrian
Hastings maintains that the church and the popular epic poetry
sustained Serbian national consciousness throughout the
Middle Ages. Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, p. 135. Even
the modernist Eric Hobsbawm complies with the perennialist
argument. Although it could easily fit into his notion of
invented traditions Hobsbawm accepts the contention that in
Serbia memories of a medieval kingdom were preserved in this
popular lore and by the church, in the daily liturgy which
celebrated the saintly Nemanyid kings. Eric Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1990,
pp. 75–6. It should be noted, however, that much of this
poetry consists of fragments compiled from disparate sources of
unknown age and provenance. Even as we know them today,
from a nineteenth-century redaction, there is hardly anything
that would indicate ethnic (let alone national) consciousness. In
13
fact it was only after their publication in Vienna that these epics
were transformed from popular lore into a powerful tool in the
construction of national memory. From there, they were
transmitted back to the population in the Serbian principality
as part of the national narrative.
7 For the history of the Balkans under Ottoman and Habsburg
rule, see L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 with a New
Introduction by Traian Stoianovich, New York University Press,
New York, 2000.
8 This was stated in a public lecture at the university in 1890.
Two articles appeared in the same year where he expounded
his views on national art and architecture: Andra Stevanović,
‘Umetnost i arhitektura’ [Art and Architecture], parts 1 and 2,
Srpski tehnićki list, no. 10, 1890, pp. 159–63 and nos. 11–12,
pp. 179–82.
9 The different strains of historicist architecture in Serbia and
their relation to national ideology are discussed in Bratislav
Pantelić, ‘Nationalism and Architecture. The Creation of a
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National Style in Serbian Architecture and its Political
Implications’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
vol. 56, no. 1, 1997, pp. 16–41.
10 Gabriel Millet published the first systematic survey of Serbian
medieval architecture where he identified three major ‘schools’
of architecture: the Raška, the Serbo-Byzantine and the
Morava. Gabriel Millet, L’ Ancien art serbe: Les Églises, Boccard,
Paris, 1919. These three medieval idioms have inspired all
church architecture in Serbia since the late nineteenth century.
11 Tanazević’s inclusion of a historicist idiom within a Secessionist
framework finds parallels in the work in Hungary of Ödön
Lechner, who oscillated between historicist eclectic fantasies
and a panoply of motifs purportedly derived from Magyar
ethnic traditions (for example, his Postal Savings Bank of 1901
in Budapest). For Tanazević and the spread of the Morava
decorative design, see Pantelić, ‘Nationalism and Architecture’,
pp. 29–30. For the Hungarian Secession, see Jeremy Howard,
Art Nouveau: International and National Style in Europe,
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996, pp. 108–10.
12 Dragutin Inkiostri Medenjak, Preporod-aj srpske umetnosti [The
Rebirth of Serbian Art], Zadužbina Ilije Kolarca, Belgrade, 1907.
13 Such as Dušan Jurkovič’s Czecho-Slovak national style,
Stanisław Witkiewicz’s Zakopane style in Poland (see David
Crowley, ‘Finding Poland in the Margins: The Case of the
Zakopane Style’, Journal of Design History, 2001, vol. 14, no. 2,
pp. 105-16), or that of Ion Mincu, the originator of the national
style in Romania. Analogies are to be found in Hungary where
nationalists such as Károly Kós found inspiration in the
traditional architecture of Transylvania, the imagined original
homeland of the Magyars. Along similar lines was the Finnish
nationalists’ discovery of the wooden architecture and folk arts
of Karelia which they associated, very much like the Serbs,
with their national epic, the Kalevala. For these national styles,
see Howard, Art Nouveau, pp. 103–22, 123–36, 160–83. See
also the essays in Michelle Facos & Sharon L. Hirsh (eds.),
Art, Culture, and National Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Europe,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2003.
For a survey of Inkiostri’s work, see Sonja Vulešević, Dragutin
Inkiostri Medenjak: pionir jugoslovenskog dizajna [Dragutin Inkiostri
Medenjak: The Pioneer of Yugoslav Design], Muzej primenjene
umetnosti, Belgrade, 1998. Inkiostri’s attempts to promote
vernacular motifs in architectural design, however, met with
great opposition from architects who were more inclined
towards international historicist styles. In church architecture it
 Bratislav Pantelić
is a historicism of academic neo-Byzantine provenance, such as
Aleksandr Pomerantsev’s St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in
Sofia, which finds closest parallels in Serbia.
14 For a summary treatment of the ideological and political impact
of these art movements, see Ivo Banac, The National Question in
Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca and London, 1984, pp. 203–8.
15 As stated by Lord Robert Cecil, Undersecretary of Foreign
Affairs at the opening of the exhibition. Quoted from Branka
Magaš, ‘The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing’, Against the Current,
no. 48, 1994.
16 The Kosovo Temple is summarily treated in surveys of Yugoslav
art and in some popular monographs on Meštrović. For a brief
analysis of this monument in the context of national ideologies,
see Banac, The National Question, op. cit., pp. 204–5.
17 Despite fierce opposition from proponents of socialist realism,
modernism prevailed: abstract art officially represented
Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. For the ideological
debates surrounding modernism, see Lidija Merenik, Ideološki
modeli: Srpsko slikarstvo 1945–1968 [Ideological Models:
Serbian Painting 1945–1968], Beopolis and Remont, Belgrade,
2001.
18 Ibid., pp. 98–9.
19 For these two artists, see Stanislav Živković, Petar Lubarda,
SANU, Belgrade, 1981 and Miodrag Jovanović, Uroš Predić,
Galerija Matice srpske, Novi Sad & Zlatna grana, Sombor,
1998.
20 This entailed the establishing of industrial design: in 1948 the
old School of Arts and Crafts evolved into the Academy of
Applied Arts; it was followed by the founding of the Museum
of Applied Arts two years later.
21 A popular survey of this art in English is Nebojša Tomašević,
Naive Painters of Yugoslavia, Hippocrene Books, New York,
1978.
22 Curiously, Stevanović’s own architectural designs display the
full range of academic idioms from neoclassical to neo-
Renaissance and little if any trace of a national design. For his
views on national art, see above note 8.
23 It was not a figure of speech when in 1906 the dean of
Belgrade’s Technical School argued that design was an
important tool in the ‘contemporary cultural battle’ that was
being fought between nations and that researching and
14
preserving medieval culture and ‘popular taste’ would ‘…
strengthen the resistance of the people in that battle’. Quoted
from Dušica Živanović, ‘Počeci proučavanja vizantijske
arhitekture u Srbiji’ [The Beginning of Research of Byzantine
Architecture in Serbia], in Proceedings of the Second Conference
‘Niš i Vizantija’, Miša Rakocija (ed.), Niš, 2005, pp. 400–1.
24 In Serbia, as elsewhere in the Balkans, opposition to official
academic styles and calls for a return to archetypal cultural
models lack the utopian and revolutionary ideals of John
Ruskin and William Morris or even the religious and moralistic
outlook of the Cambridge Camden Society and Augustus
Pugin. Rather than being in opposition to the institutional
framework and the nationalist mainstream, intellectuals and
artists in the Balkans were usually part of it. In this respect,
perhaps, the Serbian situation could be compared with the
nationalist discourse in Germany and August Reichensperger.
Parallels can be found also in neighbouring Hungary where
harking back to the rural simplicity of the ethnic past was
motivated by a desire to resist foreign influence. For Hungary,
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see above, note 12 and for Germany, Michael J. Lewis, The
Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger, MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, and New York, 1993.
25 For the manifesto of the movement, see Ljubomir Micič, ‘Delo
Zenitizma’ [The Purpose of Zenithism], Zenit, vol. 1, no. 8,
1921, p. 2.
26 Although it may be true that official endorsement of formalism
was in fact an efficient way of preventing social and political
commentary, freedom to pursue individual artistic invention
was not challenged.
27 The advent of modernism in the 1930s opened up the Yugoslav
cultural scene to international developments and prospects for
a unitary culture. Among the avant-gardes that appeared
Belgrade’s Surrealist movement (active from the 1920s) is
notable for its authentic alternative to mainstream cultural
models. But it was only in the second Yugoslavia that the
alternative art scene diversified into a variety of original trends.
For a critical survey of the avant-garde scene in Yugoslavia, see
Dubravka Ðuric´ & Miško Šuvakovic´ (eds.), Impossible
Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-
Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991, MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA, 2003. Modernism in the architecture of Belgrade is
discussed by Ljiljana Blagojevic´, Modernism in Serbia: The
Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture. 1919–1941, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 2003.