Aesthetical Spatialization of the State and Creation of New Place of Memory: King Peter's Square in Negotin

Abstract

The King Peter's Square and the Monument to the Fallen for Liberation and Unification 1912-1918 in Negotin represents one of the most monumental spatial entities on the territory of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Social, ideological and political circumstances have generated the morphology and symbolism of this landscape Square (garden) formed in 1930. The Square is formed in accordance with the discourse of the unitary state and the practice of the reconstitution of integral Yugoslavism. The creation of a monumental Square is materialization of the process of creating a provincial town in an imaginary space of a centralized state. Consequently, a new place of memory was formed, based on multiple memory layers: French-Serbian friendship, memory of the Great War, heroism of the Serbian soldiers.