The Symbolic Markers of Belgrade’s Transformation: Monuments and Fountains

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to examine a number of Belgrade’s freshly constructed monuments as symbolic markers of the transformation the city has recently been undergoing. The selection includes statues to Tsar Nicholas II Romanov and Gavrilo Princip, as well as the fountains at Slavija Square and Topličin venac. It is argued that by their physical and aesthetic properties, as well as in how the process of their construction unfolded, these structures embody in a nutshell the crucial features of the overall urban change in Belgrade lately. These features may best be described as twin developments of postmodernization and demodernization. The first refers to an overemphasis on tourism, consumption, entertainment and “pleasure”, foregrounding visuality and surfaces; as well as to disposing of previous practices of rational, strategically guided urban development based on expert opinion and relatively transparent lines of administrative decision-making. The latter concerns the aesthetic aspect where the legacy of Serbian/Yugoslav modernism is being discarded and increasingly replaced with older, more monumental and “literalist” artistic forms of earlier epochs.