page_title: Church of Saint Sava
section_title: Criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Church of Saint Sava / Criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail of the St Sava Temple
context_page_description: The Church of Saint Sava is a Serbian Orthodox church which sits on the Vračar plateau in Belgrade, Serbia. It was planned as the bishopric seat and main cathedral of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The church is dedicated to Saint Sava, the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church and an important figure in medieval Serbia. It is built on the presumed location of St. Sava's grave. His coffin had been moved from Mileševa Monastery to Belgrade. It was placed on a pyre and burnt in 1595 by Ottoman Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha. Bogdan Nestorović and Aleksandar Deroko were finally chosen to be the architects in 1932 after a second revised competition in 1926/27. This sudden decision instigated an important debate in interwar Yugoslavia which centred around the temple's size, design and symbolic national function. This was accompanied by a sizeable increase in the base area of the ambitiously conceived project. The new design departed from the competition guidelines issued in 1926, and was to replicate the dimensions and architecture of Hagia Sophia.
  The first stone was laid in 1935. When Yugoslavia was under occupation in 1941, the construction was approximately ten metres high.
context_section_description: The architecture of the church has been criticised in several ways through several epochs. It was especially debated after the second competition for Saint Sava in 1926/27, when no first prize was awarded, and after Patriarch Varnava assigned Bogdan Nestorović (1901–1975) in 1930 as winner of a second prize as principal architect to synthesise his plan with Aleksandar Deroko (1894-1988). The result was now asked to resemble the appearance of the Haghia Sophia in Istanbul, which hadn't been a requirement during the competition. The guidelines required an edifice in the Serbian tradition of the late medieval period under Stefan Lazar (i.e. the five-domed churches of the Morava monasteries). Nestorović's own competition entry, based on the most-acclaimed achievement of Serbian medieval architecture, the katholikon of the Gračanica monastery, had also circumvented competition guidelines. Most of the 22 participants had deliberately chosen Haghia Sophia as inspiration. Few entries used modern designs with expressionistic features. Thus Haghia Sophia was the chosen archetype even during the official contest. Most Serbian critics considered this unfitting, as it was not in the national tradition. The universal sacral expression of the Haghia Sophia did albeit fit requirements in the heterogeneous Yugoslav state, which consisted of many different religions and nationalities.
  After a criticism campaign started early 1932 in the newsletter Vreme, the most important art debate in the former Yugoslavia began to unfold. It led to the intervention of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, who approved the reworked plans of Nestoroviċ and Deroko. Nestorović's change of model from "Gracanica" to "Haghia Sophia" is attributed to the new demands of the king and the clerics. The architects had each to present a plaster model at 1:100 scale, that appeared on 6 and 7 January 1932 in the Politika newspaper. Later that year, a new design, the final model, was presented.
  Even after this had been adopted, the debate continued. Especially modern art-critics, analyzing the ideological circumstances of the 1930 debate, labelled its appearance clumsy, non-inventive or a reproduction.
  Ljubica Jelisavac, art historian and art critic from the University of Arts in Belgrade, noted that the criticism was primarily based on ideological differences between traditionalists and modernists. Thus the real architectural achievement of the building was left marginalized in the debate. It was not even a topic inside art critic and architecture circles, but it wasn't omitted, that the decision to follow a traditionalistic design programme has been partly detrimental for architectural tendencies in Serbia in the interwar period.
  Milica Ćeranić defended the architectural achievement and stylistical form. She stated that the well-proportioned and harmonic interior of the church is a result of a cohesion in designing the exterior and the interior. To achieve this, the architects used a rigorously centralized arrangement, which is especially known from early Christianity. The spheric and cubic elements are especially exponentiated - domes, exterior walls, shapes of openings, the stratification of facade surfaces, capitals and columns -  with the excellent mastering of all these elements, apparent in their volume, a memorable impression is given.
  "In particular, the condensated forms, the simple and subtle use of decorative sculpturing in combination with the buildings monumentality creates a sublime visualization of its powerful architectural fabric, which despite being latent hermeneutic, pleases and generates interest"
  — Milica Ćeranić, 2005
  She points to the fact that the greatest impression to the percipient lies in the gradual pyramidal composition of the structure, which starts harmoniously from its portals across the conchs and representatively culminates in the dome. Observable at all four sides of the wings, whereby the western, southern and northern are identical, this cascading of the masses is most interesting and has the strongest imprint on the east wing, the si
caption: East facade. The harmony of vaulting structures in pyramidal fashion is noticeable.
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