Introduction
When in 1918 Belgrade became the capital of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), this was not merely a matter of changing its nominal status, but a crucial event in the cultural imagination of the newly recognised nation. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the ex-Serbian capital was rapidly ‘Yugoslavised’. Migrations from all over the country became intensive; not only did the city's population triple, but its ethnic structure altered towards increased heterogeneity, which influenced the transformation of the once dreary, ‘dingy town’,Footnote 1 the place of unpretentious architecture,Footnote 2 into a rapidly modernising city, with numerous urban projects and infrastructural works changing the cityscape and its cultural identity.Footnote 3 The city's architecture, perhaps most conspicuously, reveals how different visions of ‘being Yugoslav’ were negotiated in the public discourse. A particularly vivid example of this phenomenon was the Bridge of King Alexander I, commonly known as the Zemun Bridge, built across the Sava River between 1929 and 1934 to connect Belgrade with the ex-Habsburg town of Zemun. The principal idea of its construction was to both literally and metaphorically span the territories that had been politically separated for many centuries, only to be joined together in the new Yugoslav era. As a symbol of the ‘unified Yugoslav people, which had been severed by the Sava River for centuries’,Footnote 4 the bridge became a crucial landmark in the transforming cityscape.Footnote 5 The very act of spanning the dividing river soon acquired different meanings and ideological slants related to the unsettled national question which far surpassed the bridge's utilitarian importance, as well as its mere symbolism of uniting Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Although extensive, the literature on this modern piece of engineering and architecture has failed to recognise its pivotal role in a wider social and political arena concerning the Yugoslav national narrative,Footnote 6 which otherwise characterises some of the most distinguished studies on Belgrade's interwar architecture, with a notable exception of Tanja D. Conley's work.Footnote 7 These studies have failed to comprehend important relationships between architecture and nation-building in interwar Yugoslavia.Footnote 8 Ljiljana Blagojević's focus on Belgrade modern architecture is one of the key representatives of this historiographical trend. While acknowledging that Serbian modern architecture ‘remained but a marginal and provisional construct of modernity’ and ‘the primary vehicle for deprovincialization’, she unfortunatelly has not appreciated its political relevance, primarily due to the lack of contextualisation.Footnote 9 The same distinguishes essays on architecture in the volume On the Very Edge: Modernism and Modernity of Interwar Serbia, in which the cultural complexities of Belgrade architecture were understood without taking into account their crucial political dimension.Footnote 10
Seen in its own ideological and political context, however, the Zemun Bridge represented not only a modern piece of architecture and engineering but it simultaneously reinforced the officially-driven authority of national unity and both negotiated and questioned the ways in which a prospective Yugoslav nation should be achieved. During the process of its construction the bridge became a kind of ideological laboratory in which different designs by the Russian émigré architect Nikola Krasnov and the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović were being presented and discussed. Their designs seemingly endorsed the official symbolism of national unity – but only seemingly, for both Krasnov and Meštrović's ideas soon acquired different and more complex meanings in the public discourse.
The bridge was among many grand infrastructural projects of the 1930s in Yugoslavia which, apart from their local specificities, testified to a newly invigorated role of architecture as a rhetorical device, which was pertinent to the demise of democratic governments and institutions in 1930s Europe.Footnote 11 In the time when more European countries, like Yugoslavia, were under some kind of authoritarian rule, with the conditions of persistent economic, social and political crises, as well as gaping ideological and political divisions in most of the nation-states, great architectural and infrastructural projects acquired a further important role of displaying the strength of the regimes and their unanimous policy towards centralisation and nationalisation. More specifically, modern large-scale projects, linking different parts of cities and regions, became vivid symbols of national unity and stability of the state, legitimating social transformation, progressivism and technological mastery that characterised the image of all authoritarian regimes – from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to the Stalinist Soviet Union.Footnote 12 Indeed, certain parallels can be drawn between these political projects and Yugoslavism in terms of the use of architecture and visual culture as well as a symbiosis of modernism and monumentalism which the Zemun Bridge truly epitomised.Footnote 13
The case of Yugoslavism is undoubtedly comparable to the propensity of revolutionary and dictatorial regimes of the time for grand architectural and infrastructural works, reordering cities and building bridges – to mention just the ideological relevance of the gargantuan bridges in Germany representing the achievements of the world's ‘master race’ or the imperial topography of Rome's urban landscape.Footnote 14 Even more particularly, the ideological roles of the Zemun Bridge were closely comparable to the engineering enterprises which had a crucial role in other newly-formed political entities in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East of the time, from Czechoslovakia to Turkey and mandate Palestine, where ‘new nation-states . . . initially adopted modern architecture and urbanism as what they perceived to be statements of national independence, pride and progress’.Footnote 15
Although the Kingdom of Yugoslavia is usually perceived as a nation-state, the idea of which nation this state referred to was complex and dubious.Footnote 16 First, there was a notion of South Slavs (or Yugoslavs) as a primordial national community, which appeared in the early-nineteenth century under the label ‘national oneness’ (narodno jedinstvo); it had a chequered history that reached its political climax with the creation of the first Yugoslav state in 1918. Primordialism saw the differences between Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as superficial, minor and caused by foreign influences, as well as by different conditions under which these ethnic groups, believed to represent a monolithic, primordial community, had been developed in the past.Footnote 17
On the other hand, there was a less idealistic prospect of the Yugoslav nation, which is seen as a synthesis of the independent, albeit closely related, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In this synthetic perspective, which can be called Yugoslav syncretism, the particular historical and cultural traditions of South Slavs should remain and amalgamate into a composite but coherent national identity. Contrary to primordialism, which legitimised political centralism and entailed the process of cultural homogenisation, proponents of Yugoslav syncretism opted for cultural diversification and had a more lenient policy towards state centralisation.
Finally, there was a particular framework of seeing Yugoslavs not in terms of ethnicity and history, but common civic identities and political interests. This supra-national Yugoslavism relied on the concept of a solid and stable national culture deeply rooted in the cultural and political values of the West. Apart from keeping the rising threats of particular nationalisms at bay, this ideology helped sustain a coveted image of the nation beyond the traditional stigma of cultural backwardness commonly attached to all Balkan peoples at the time.Footnote 18
These three major identity paradigms, related to different types of the ideology of Yugoslavism which are already well-studied in the literature,Footnote 19 were not mutually exclusive but were all politically highly instrumental. Throughout the interwar period, various political subjects in the country constantly moved from one form of Yugoslavism to another in order to shape their political ends. During the first post-war decade, primordial Yugoslavism was advocated by numerous political parties, from the Serbian Democrats to the Slovene Liberals. In its syncretic variant, Yugoslavism was popular with the Croatian Peasant Party and the Slovene Social Democrats, but also with the major Serbian party, the Radicals. This party, however, was pragmatically moving from one paradigm of Yugoslavism to another. As Ivo Banac has put it, the Radicals believed that each of three national cultures ‘would survive as long as it showed signs of vitality’, assuming however that the Serbs were stronger and superior and would eventually engulf the other two nations.Footnote 20 Primordial Yugoslavism served the ideological reinforcement of such a national policy and a rigid state centralism.Footnote 21 Even during the years of the Royal Dictatorship, the regime combined these two concepts of Yugoslavism in various proportions, with no clear answers which would formulate a properly forged identity formula, as Christian Nielsen aptly demonstrated.Footnote 22
After the reintroduction of democratic parliamentary life in 1931, in the time when the Zemun Bridge was being constructed, the major political actors of the regime continued to pursue Yugoslav primordialism, but most of them were more lenient towards it. At the same time, the main political opponents of the Belgrade regime were tepid supporters of Yugoslav syncretism in their unanimous disapproval of centralism and Serbian hegemony;Footnote 23 various Serbian democratic parties too distanced themselves from primordial Yugoslavism.Footnote 24 After the king's assassination in 1934, primordial Yugoslavism became more and more sidelined in the political discourse. It was in this context when the regime made substantial ideological shifts, becoming more oriented towards Yugoslav universalism, in order to achieve not an ethnically-based but an overarching civic Yugoslav identity which would serve as a basis for their realpolitik. During the time of the royal regency, Yugoslav political elites believed that a supra-national model of Yugoslav identity had a potential to gradually reduce the threats of rising Serbian and Croatian nationalism and strengthen the nation as the political crisis of ‘Versailles Europe’ was moving to its critical point.Footnote 25
These ideologies of Yugoslavism were not abstract premises but were based upon different cultural practices, among which architecture had a very prominent role. Debates concerning the nature of the Yugoslav nation and ways to accomplish national unity – either by uniformity or diversity – were held not only on paper and in public parlance, but also in brick and stone.Footnote 26 This article aims to explore the ideological roles of the Zemun Bridge as a conspicuously vivid example of the instrumentality of the ideological triad of Yugoslav primordialism, syncretism and supra-ethnic universalism. However, the aim is not merely to examine this particular piece of architecture and engineering in terms of its ideological relevance, but to point to a broader phenomenon of architectural culture as being constitutive both to identity-building processes and the symbolic spheres of social life. Specifically useful here is Jeremy F. Walton's thesis about infrastructural politics of space, by which architecture can be interpreted as an infrastructure, a nexus for ‘spatial practice’ and object of ‘discursive practice’.Footnote 27 In that sense, the Zemun Bridge can be seen as infrastructure, functioning on both the utilitarian and symbolic level.
The Zemun Bridge will also be seen from an interpretive perspective in which public architecture, official buildings, and the urban design of official places are ingredients of the establishment of political legitimacy.Footnote 28 Together with its urban settings and the Sava River, however, the bridge was not a mere representation of political ideas but rather a ‘political space’ in the sense that Eldman Murray speaks of the visual culture as a constitutive element of political reality.Footnote 29 This article will show how the ‘political space’ of the bridge negotiated national identity as multifaceted and shifting in relation to the major paradigms of Yugoslavism, ultimately testifying that the Yugoslav elites never succeeded in developing a consistent national ideology.Footnote 30 Yet the broader relevance of this piece of architecture and engineering lies in the understanding of the relationship between visual culture, built environment and politics, where architecture shaped ideologies as much as it disclosed the tensions, discontents and conflicts over political power and identity in the context of rising authoritarianism not only in the Balkans but elsewhere in Europe.Footnote 31
Rejoining the Dismembered, Disjoining the Unified
Like any other structure that facilitates crossing from one river bank to another, the Zemun Bridge physically connected peoples and territories. In the new political context, in which Belgrade lost its position of a military frontier town and became the capital of Yugoslavia, the Sava River suddenly lost its liminal status. By flowing freely through a unified country, from the Julian Alps to its confluence to the Danube, across the territories that had been under the rule of Austro-Hungary, the Sava epitomised the recently accomplished South Slavs’ political unification. The act of spanning the river paralleled the official annexation of the former Austro-Hungarian territories of Zemun and Pančevo into a new administrative unit of Metropolitan Belgrade.Footnote 32 In March 1934, only a few months before the construction works were completed, the communal independence of the city of Zemun was officially disbanded and this ex-Habsburg, predominantly Catholic town became administratively part of the Yugoslav capital,Footnote 33 which had already been drafted in the general plan of Belgrade in 1923,Footnote 34 aiming at ‘reaching an image of the monumental metropolis’ (Figure 1).Footnote 35
Figure 1. View of the Bridge of King Alexander I from Zemun. Contemporary postcard, author’s collection.
The position of the bridge in the symbolic topography of Yugoslavism was particularly telling. First, the crossing of the Sava River resonated tremendously in the political milieu of a newly regionalised country, which, even after the Royal Dictatorship (1929–1931), remained centralised despite the fact that it was administratively divided into nine provinces, or banates (banovine), almost all of which were named after major Yugoslav rivers. The new regional units, aimed at replacing the old historical entities, were deliberately imposed to decentralise the country and build a more homogeneous nation. Nevertheless, out of nine banates six were dominated by Serbs.Footnote 36 A symbolic role of this new order was given to architecture as several massive seats of banates were designed or constructed in the early 1930s.Footnote 37 By spanning the historical border, the bridge ambivalently symbolised the official narrative of uniting the ‘Western parts of the vast and harmonious Yugoslavia with the Eastern regions’Footnote 38 and, more clandestinely, finally achieved the project of Serbian national unification and territorial encompassment. Thus, the construction was simultaneously seen as a symbol of Yugoslav unification and a link between ‘Serbian’ territories, materialising the ideological ambiguity of Yugoslavism.Footnote 39
Although the first initiative to construct the bridge commenced in the early 1920s, an international competition was organised. This happened in a politically crucial moment of the Royal Dictatorship, on a tidal wave of the regime's engagement with modern architecture as an ideological narrative of ‘national oneness’. With its aura of progressivism and supra-national meanings, as well as disinterest in historicism, modern architecture played a crucial role in the official representative culture of the Royal Dictatorship.Footnote 40 The winning entry for the bridge was done by the company Batignolles with a project of a suspended iron bridge. The works started the next year, in 1930, when the French were joined by the German concern Gutehoffnungshütte, which was responsible for the iron construction of the bridge because none of the Yugoslav companies were able to undertake such a laborious, technically demanding task.Footnote 41
As soon as the works commenced, the whole enterprise acquired a distinctive ideological aura and became a useful tool of political propaganda. The contemporaries saw the construction as a virtual embodiment of the ‘recently unified Yugoslav nation which had been forcefully separated by the Danube and Sava for centuries’.Footnote 42 The pro-regime Belgrade press reiterated the notion of the bridge representing a final historical stage of Yugoslav unification, creating a sense of a virtually ongoing accomplishment in the eyes of the spectators. ‘The colossal bridge that will, once and for all, connect Serbia with Srem [Srijem] and all other regions’, read the pro-regime Belgrade newspaper Politika, ‘is now being erected as a token of gratitude for all those who wrote our history with their own blood’.Footnote 43 The construction of the bridge emphatically referred to the construction of ‘integral Yugoslavia’, acted as a completion of the political project of unifying South Slavs, peoples of the ‘same ethnic origins and shared national ideals’,Footnote 44 but also to the territorial linking of Serbs with their ‘national’ areas to the north. Indeed, the bridge palpably materialised what the regime saw as the ultimate ‘victory over bogus boundaries’ artificially imposed on South Slavs in the past. By building the bridge, a need to ‘defeat natural obstacles in order to bring about and attain the economic and cultural development of Yugoslavia has been finally achieved’, wrote the newly inaugurated Minister of Construction Stevan Savković in 1929.Footnote 45
As the construction went on, the bridge's place in the public discourse became more complex, because it referred to both Yugoslav primordialism and syncretism, simultaneously symbolising what was seen as the re-unification of Yugoslavs and the unification of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Consequently, the construction stood for a re-collected national body and, rather perilously, personified the Yugoslav whole which was being united but also kept dismembered by the constant mentioning of different ethnic groups and their respective territorial domains even if recently united. Here, Jeremy F. Walton's idea of ‘textured historicity’ in the context of the ambivalence of imperial legacies, which defines the encounter between the present and the ‘objects that convey the past in the present’, can serve as a useful lens.Footnote 46 The separated identities of South Slavs were the product of the imperial past, so it was the afterlife of the Habsburg Empire which was constantly reshaping the Yugoslav present. The shadow of the despised empire always loomed on the horizon of ‘national oneness’.
Interestingly, the same ideological ambiguity took shape in the symbolism of the Sava River, the major West-East transit route of the country physically linking three national capitals: Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade. One can even assume that the river's already developed fluvial symbolism and its ‘historical enterprise of merging people into an uncompromising whole’Footnote 47 were only appropriated by the iron construction that stood above it. Curiously enough, the river and the bridge altogether represented both the single inner core and demarcation line of South Slavic identities, epitomising the dichotomy that sharply marked the interwar discourse of Yugoslavism.
Yet the bridge also acquired a special role of representing the policy of Yugoslavia's modernisation. The regime propaganda referred to it as an ‘outstanding proof of our intellectual and cultural development’.Footnote 48 If one excludes a few conservatives who remonstrated against the ‘gigantic iron eyesore’ and its detrimental visual impact on the city,Footnote 49 both Serbs and Croats unanimously shared the same opinion. While, for example, the Minister of Construction, Stjepan Srkulj – the renowned Croatian historian who managed to remain in the position for six consecutive governments, from early 1932 to 1935 – praised the bridge for its ‘prime cultural excellence’ and a considerable ‘ability to witness our technical competence’, the mayor of Belgrade, Milutin Petrović, believed that the new construction testified to the country's ‘cultural and economic elevation to a higher level of development’.Footnote 50 On the other hand, the bridge received paeans from architects and engineers who admired its elegant and modern lines.Footnote 51 An account by Djordje Lazarević, one of the most remarkable Yugoslav engineers of the time, was particularly convincing. He employed the rhetorical device of contrast, stressing the superiority of the present over the past: ‘This bridge stacks silhouetted against Belgrade's modern skyline’, wrote Lazarević, ascertaining that there ‘has not been fifty years since the silhouette of the then provincial town appeared utterly Oriental. The original character is still reflected in the city walls and the cathedral’, he continued, ‘but it is now complemented by a thin silhouette of the catenary bridge as proof of [our] progress’ (Figure 2).Footnote 52
Figure 2. View of the Bridge of King Alexander I from Belgrade. Contemporary postcard, author’s collection.
Finally, the meanings of the bridge were complemented by referring to political power, which was observed by many contemporaries, including the engineer Lazarević who spoke about bridges being ‘far better symbols of state power than any other [type of] construction’.Footnote 53 The Zemun Bridge indeed represented an idiosyncratic example of the political aura of many similar examples of the period – from the daring bridges by Robert Maillard in France and Switzerland, to Eugène Freyssinet's prestressed concrete structures and numerous grand bridges in Germany, many of which were built as ‘political monuments rather than works of structural engineering art’.Footnote 54 The Belgrade case emphatically testified to the fact that monumental bridge structures of the 1930s literally cemented claims of authoritarian governments as efficient and powerful regimes.Footnote 55 The modern iron construction acted simultaneously as a form of legitimising political power and professional prowess in the context of architects and engineers working in the gaping divide between the already existing ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernists’ in Serbian architectural culture.Footnote 56 In this perspective, the bridge was instrumental to Yugoslav universalism, thematising the rift between historicity and modernity, which corresponded to broader anxieties concerning the national question in Yugoslavia. In her seminal study on interwar Belgrade, Jovana Babović has shown that defining parameters of unified national culture also included the consumption and performance of those cultural practices which were interpreted as a ‘symbol of European metropolitan modernity‘, not necessarily national values.Footnote 57 However, her argument that class relations and the defense of bourgeois values played a more important role in interwar Belgrade urban society than national identity is only partially relevant to the study of modern architecture, which operated in the intersection of the national, transnational and supranational. Nor can Yugoslav universalism be comprehended through the theoretical lenses of ‘imagined noncommunities’ set by Tara Zahra.Footnote 58 The supra-national Yugoslavism, as embodied by modern architecture in interwar Belgrade, cannot be understood as a product of the nationally indifferent ‘who remained altogether aloof to the nation's appeal’,Footnote 59 but rather as a purposely imposed identity-building strategy which complemented the highly ethnicised rhetoric in the political discourse of the 1930s.
Architectural Rhetoric of a National Synthesis
The intractable problem of Yugoslav national unity, locked in the throes of opposing forces of uniformity and diversity, was manifested in various ideas as to how to enrich the modern, austere iron bridge. After a series of different proposals, the final solution was a hybrid of the slender, iron catenary construction and the historicist supporting elements made of robust stone. Five river-bank piers, onto which the deck of the bridge was laid and its superstructure erected, were designed by Nikolai Nikolaevich Krasnov, the Russian architect-immigrant who was the most eminent figure of the Architectural Department of the Ministry of Construction.Footnote 60 The architectural rhetoric of the piers, which Krasnov designed between 1929 and 1933, leaves no doubt that their style was chosen advisedly. The contemporaries dubbed its eclectic character the ‘Romanesque-Byzantine Style’, distinguished by an unorthodox combination of various Romanesque- and Byzantine style-like elements.Footnote 61 Apparently, some were Romanesque in character while others were broadly Byzantine in inspiration. In fact, this particular mixture of different medievalising motives was not a mere architectural whim. In a context where the ‘question of style played a persuasive role in anticipating an image of the majestic capital’,Footnote 62 the ideological economy of this strange stylistic concoction was far from being apolitical. In Yugoslav interwar architecture, the Romanesque Style was commonly associated with Catholics (Croats and Slovenes), while the Byzantine Style was routinely linked to Serbs as Christian Orthodox. This is the reason why the mixture of different ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Romanesque’ elements functioned exactly the way Yugoslav syncretism operated. This visual idiom did not only symbolise the historical role of Yugoslavs, commonly perceived as a bridge between two great European cultures,Footnote 63 but also a unity of the nation which would, and indeed should, represent a coherent, monolithic whole, albeit made of different facets (Figure 3).
Figure 3. South pier of the Bridge of King Alexander I. Photograph by author.
Such a politics of identity distinguished the state's representative culture. For instance, the official coat of arms, composed of the traditional symbols of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was conceived according to a syncretic paradigm, along with the Yugoslav hymn, compiled as a combination of three national anthems. The use of both Latin and Cyrillic scripts was advisable and the official state language, which was oddly authorised by the 1921 and 1931 constitutions as ‘Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian’, followed the same composite logic. Even the king's three sons were given typical Serbian, Croatian and Slovene personal names (Peter, Tomislav and Andrej) to symbolise the three Yugoslav ‘tribes’ and their indissoluble unity.
In the early 1930s, after reintroducing parliamentary system of government, the syncretic paradigm of national identity gained special prominence. Many political slogans about ‘merging three tribes and their traditions’ constantly reiterated the same ideological precept while addressing the meaning of the bridge.Footnote 64 Not unlike the bridge's overall symbolism, the conceptual duality of the ‘Romanesque-Byzantine’ architectural style underlined the ambivalence of Yugoslavism in its referring to a single national idea and particular national identities at the same time.
Questions about which kind of stone would be suitable for the construction shed another light on the bridge's meanings. Not only did the mechanical quality and aesthetic appearance of the stone matter, but also the geographical location of a quarry. Among several possibilities, which included rocks taken from quarries in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, the limestone from Bele Vode near Kruševac some 200 km south of Belgrade was considered the best building material.Footnote 65 The decision was made in spite of the opinions of the special State Committee which was set up by the Ministry of Construction in order to resolve the question. ‘Our assessment of the stone from Bele Vode’, wrote its president, architect Petar Bajalović, ‘is that its delicate and pale colour [not only] contradicts a rather powerful and robust character of the bridge portals’, but also the requested air pollution tolerance characteristics.Footnote 66 Instead of using darker and more resistant material, such as the coarse-grained, dun gabbro from Jablanica in Bosnia, which was recommended by the majority of the Committee members, the final decision fell on the yellowish limestone from Serbia. It seems that the arguments concerning the ‘national’ origins of the rock finally overrode both structural and aesthetic criteria.
However, there was more to the ideological relevance of the bridge and its ‘Romanesque-Byzantine’ decoration and the materialisation. For the faux-medieval style also functioned in the context of the bridge exuding an aura of modernity, which closely corresponded to the symbolic representation of Yugoslavia as a progressive, modern country. Many contemporaries emphasised a sharp contrast between the eclectic historicism of the stone piers and the cutting-edge design of the suspended iron bridge, which also functioned as a powerful rhetorical device. For example, the Serbian painter and professor Branko Popović criticised the ‘filigree patterns of the Romanesque-Byzantine Style grafted on such a mighty piece of engineering’.Footnote 67 The architectural historian Djurdje Bošković took a similar stance towards what he ironically called the ‘Iron-Byzantine Style’, pinpointing the aesthetic-ethical dichotomy of the ‘puny, pale, frail and degenerate Byzantine ornaments’ and the ‘massive, great and powerful construction which rests upon them’.Footnote 68 While some civil engineers widely shared the same interpretive trope,Footnote 69 the most prolific and popular among mainstream Belgrade architects, Dragiša Brašovan, spoke about the ‘sheer nonsense of having a modern construction supported by the medieval-styled piers’.Footnote 70
But it was exactly this nonsense which was crucial for the perception of the bridge and the power of its ideological messages. On the one hand, the historicist architecture reinforced a principal idea of Yugoslavism – regardless of its different variants – which was to imagine a national identity anchored in a deep, medieval past. In this view, the bridge referred to the coveted, shared past of the nation symbolised by the Romanesque and Byzantine architecture. Apart from representing a symbiosis of modernism and monumentalism typical of the European architecture in the 1930s, the stylistic merging obviously referred to the Yugoslav political and cultural ‘re-unification’. Nevertheless, it also underlined the intrinsic difference of particular national histories and identities, consequently provoking a sense of uncertainty and anxiety in the context where contemporaneous artistic conventions attributed cultural values to certain styles and forms.
The dialectical coupling of the medievalist architectural forms and modern iron construction had another, equally generative, role in the identity formation process, as many contemporaries pointed out. The bridge was to represent the Yugoslav project as the embodiment of modernity and progress, which was conditioned on resolving the deadlocks of the past. In this perspective, having the medieval-styled piers which lay beneath the modern iron superstructure was to visualise the nation's ‘pedagogical’ layer both as a condition of its ‘performative’ modernity – to use Homi K. Bhabha's terms – and the experience which needed to be transcended rather than simply negated.Footnote 71 In line with the Benjaminian notion of architectural modernity as a ‘drastic change in the structure of experience’,Footnote 72 the bridge visualised a temporal rupture of the old-new nation and operated as a visual trope of Yugoslav universalism.
Winged Horsemen, Multiple Identities
In late 1933, the city authorities came up with a new idea for decorating the iron bridge, aiming to embellish the modern, iron construction in order both to harmonise with the historical urban core and to become more explicit in terms of their ideological statement.Footnote 73 The task was given to one of the most celebrated sculptors of the time, Ivan Meštrović, who proposed an arresting, rather provocative idea of how to reimagine the identity of the bridge. The choice of the artist was certainly not an accident. While in his early years Meštrović established himself as a kind of Yugoslav prophet due to his famous Vidovdan Temple (or Kosovo Temple, 1908–13), the most fundamental artwork associated with the Yugoslav nation-building project.Footnote 74 But his enthusiasm for the Yugoslav idea, which reached its peak on the eve of the First World War, faded as the Belgrade regime displayed rigidity in establishing a blatantly authoritarian, centralised rule and pro-Serbian politics.Footnote 75 However, he kept close ties with the royal family and several Belgrade politicians who continued to support his monumental projects.
As a hallmark of the bridge Meštrović proposed four colossal sculptures to be erected directly onto the ‘Romanesque-Byzantine’ piers, two on each river bank. The 10-metre-high statues represented four historical characters sitting on winged horses, highly elevated over the bridge by the slender double-columned, 22-metre-high pedestals.Footnote 76 The statues were arranged in pairs. On the east bank would stand two famous medieval rulers who epitomised the glorious days of the Croatian and Serbian past: King Tomislav, the first Croatian king (910–28), and Emperor Dušan, the most celebrated Serbian ruler (1331–55). The west bank was reserved for two ‘Yugoslav’ rulers, one from medieval, another from recent history: Bosnian King Tvrtko I Kotromanić (1353–91) and King Alexander's father, Peter I Karadjordjević (1904–21), the last ruler of the Kingdom of Serbia who became the first king of the new South Slavic state in 1918. Four years later, Meštrović's student, Antun Augustinčić, erected a similarly idiosyncratic arrangement on a medieval bridge in Skopje, with grand equestrian statues of the Karadjordjević kings.Footnote 77 Seen in a wider European context of the 1930s, however, these cases did not represent a curiosity. Among other examples of the sculptural decoration of bridges aiming to convey particular ideological messages, the most notable one was a project for the Nibelungen Bridge in Linz (1938), embellished with gigantic statues of German mythical heroes.Footnote 78
Meštrović's idea, supported by the king who personally monitored and verified the plans and stressed both the aesthetics and political symbolism of the bridge,Footnote 79 challenged the austerity of the iron construction and the symbolism of national uniformity.Footnote 80 According to the design, the idea of the first pair of sculptures (King Peter paired with his historical ‘predecessor’, King Tvrtko, whom some historians considered the very first ‘Yugoslav’ king) closely corresponded to the major tenets of primordial Yugoslavism. These historical characters personified two Yugoslavias – the first one from the Middle Ages and the recently ‘re-united’ one – which Meštrović complemented by the second pair of sculptures on the opposite river bank, whose meaning was rather different. These were the figural representations of Emperor Dušan and King Tomislav, the most illustrious Serbian and Croatian medieval rulers, paired to represent the shared but separated national histories. Meštrović's identity-rendering of the bridge was rather ambiguous because it reinforced the particularities of Serbs and Croats simultaneously, referring to a Serbo-Croatian unity but also to their separate histories (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Ivan Meštrović's sketch of two equestrian statues. Ivan Ćurčin, ed., Meštrović (Zagreb: Nova Evropa, 1933), CXV.
Meštrović placed what he impartially called the four ‘heroes of the national past’Footnote 81 onto high-reaching, paired slender columns, topped with single medievalising imposts deliberately styled to match the eclecticism of Krasnov's already constructed piers.Footnote 82 The consequently created architectural-sculptural whole contributed to the semiotic complexity of the entire construction. For, the proposed sculptural arrangement did not just negotiate Yugoslav primordialism and syncretism but opened up the Pandora's Box of clandestine Serbian and Croatian nationalisms. Although the subtle nationalist readings of the bridge had already been evoked in the public discourse – as, for example, when the contemporaries spoke of linking the administratively non-existing ‘Serbia’ with the rest of the countryFootnote 83 – Meštrović's own interpretation remained most controversial. He declared that the ‘bridge will connect the territories of our two principal regions, Serbia and Croatia’,Footnote 84 assuming that the predominantly Catholic Zemun belonged to a ‘Croatian’ part of the country. This statement filled the Belgrade public discourse with consternation and alarm. The act of territorial division of the recently united country, even if only rhetorical, was comprehended not simply as a personal commitment, but also in the context of the ongoing Serbo-Croatian political arguments. In the mid-1930s, the tensions associated with territorial disputes had shown no signs of abating until Banovina Croatia, an autonomous province with Zagreb as its capital, was established in 1939.Footnote 85 In this respect, the overall meaning of the bridge, as reflected in the mirror of Meštrović's designs and explanations, simultaneously encouraged and challenged two – both competing and complementary – visions of Yugoslavism, as well as Serbian and Croatian nationalism. In a certain way, the sculpted historical characters can be comprehended as part of the continuous and ongoing discursive battle over territories pertaining to either the Serbian or Croatian nation. Nevertheless, at that time the battle was only symbolic, fought in the background of Yugoslavism which often – the case of the Zemun Bridge being no exception here – operated as a mask for competing national interests and aims.
Raging Reactions: Aesthetics or Politics?
Having been published in the press, Meštrović's design promptly ignited a storm of protests in the capital. It was not only the visual unorthodoxy of the eccentric project, with its grotesque winged figures and gargantuan columns, but also the artist's own comments that provoked outrage in Belgrade, primarily due to Serbian nationalist perspectives. Although the manifest target of criticism was the government, because it commissioned both Krasnov and Meštrović without organising public and free competition, there was a range of other issues which soon became central to the polemic. Among the first to react was the Belgrade branch of the Yugoslav Association of Fine Arts, which excoriated the visual appearance of the bridge's decoration and denounced its authors. The president of the Association, Brašovan, had nothing but scorn for the piers and sculptures, stressing that they represented an eyesore, because the decoration, which was not in accordance with academic postulates, debased the modern iron construction.Footnote 86 One of the former devotees of Meštrović's pre-war works, the professor Branko Popović, took a paternalistic approach, giving lessons in morals to the artist and concluding that his design was both ‘anti sculptural’ and ‘anti architectonic’.Footnote 87 The Association, Yugoslav by name only, consequently adopted a special resolution addressed to the highest state officials, calling for a ban on erecting what they termed an ‘artistic fiasco’.Footnote 88
At the same time, the Belgrade branch of the Association of Yugoslav Engineers and Architects took a similar initiative.Footnote 89 Their action was indicative of the same attitudes that characterised the artists’ guild, but they acted more methodically and productively. The first meeting was dominated by the ubiquitous Brašovan, who abhorred Meštrović's idea by calling it ‘too capricious’. He did his best to inculcate a sense of imminent danger as regards the ‘architectural decoration of the bridge’ which, by its sheer colossal size, would visually threaten and discredit the urban surroundings. On the same occasion, the dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences disdained the project by calling it ‘monstrous’.Footnote 90 Nonetheless, at the Association's yearly congress, held in Zagreb two months later in May 1934, the question of the Zemun Bridge was not even mentioned, let alone discussed.Footnote 91 The ensuing polemics resulted in a series of newspaper articles and interviews, only a few of which were written in Meštrović's favour, including the artist's own response.Footnote 92
The protest meetings of Belgrade artists, architects and engineers also tackled the question of foreigners employed by the government, who had held important positions in various professional fields since the early 1920s. The Belgrade artists which, almost without dissent, supported modernism, targeted primarily Russian émigrés, the sturdiest proponents of rigid academic historicism.Footnote 93 The engineers and architects, on the other hand, strongly disapproved of foreign skilled professionals and were ‘determined to continue and adopt more severe measures’, pursuing what had already been known as a ‘battle against foreigners’.Footnote 94 Their principal aim was to ‘get rid of numerous foreign engineers who had seriously threatened’ the accomplishment of ‘both professional and national objectives’.Footnote 95 This battle against foreigners was in fact a broader social and ideological phenomenon occurring in other ex-Habsburg multinational borderlands, as shown by Marco Bresciani in the case of Trieste, where the ‘offensive against foreigners’ took place in the 1920s.Footnote 96 Similarly to Italian fascism's stance towards the Habsburg imperial legacy,Footnote 97 the Yugoslav regime relied on the division of the society into ‘us’ and ‘them’; the bridge served as a catalyst for this polarisation. But the sharp discontinuities between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Yugoslavia, the basis of many subsequent national historiographies, should be critically reexamined, because the Habsburg imperial legacy, as Claire Morelon has shown, largely shaped the cultural, social, economic and juridical life of all successor states.Footnote 98
In interwar Yugoslavia, however, there were not monolithic attitudes toward foreigners but a more diverse range of viewpoints across various national camps. While the Zagreb Section of the Association of Yugoslav Engineers and Architects unabashedly criticised the lenient approach towards ‘imported’ skilled labour, their Belgrade compatriots’ stance on the issue was much more nuanced. Some of them supported the official state policy which granted foreign nationals the unconditional right of employment;Footnote 99 others tended to hamper the employment of foreigners altogether. There were also voices, mainly Serbian, which called for more stringent laws and a special treatment for Russian architects and civil engineers who, as part of more than 70,000 exiles, had flooded Yugoslavia escaping the Communist terror in the early 1920s.Footnote 100 From their standpoint, the Russians were Slavic brothers who should be treated differently from ‘those who had tortured and harassed us through centuries’ – namely, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Italians.Footnote 101
In the interwar period, the Russian émigrés in Yugoslavia were important both practically and ideologically. Apart from providing skilled labour, the ‘Russian presence also served as a tool for promoting multiculturalism’, Tanja D. Conley has argued, stressing that the Russians acted as ‘a tool for emphasizing the pan-Slavic brotherhood’.Footnote 102 However, they were highly instrumental in helping not only to shape a useful image of Serbian national identity (versus Croatian), but also to challenge the boundaries of Yugoslavism. The Serbs shared the same language with the Croats, which the proponents of Yugoslavism believed to represent a nation's more organic bond than religion. On the other hand, the more conservative Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church readily separated themselves from the Catholic Croats. They felt an intrinsic closeness with the Orthodox Russians, pointing to a shared religious and cultural background, including the ostensibly intrinsic skill of governing the state, which they considered a more fundamental sign of identity than the language. This parallelism between Serbs and Russians, which was often portrayed as an ‘Orthodox brotherhood’,Footnote 103 discursively justified Serbian exclusive claim to statecraft, which was one of the bones of contention between two major Yugoslav ethnic groups.
The fact that the Russian émigrés, employed in different ministries – the former tsarist architect Nikolay Krasnov being the most striking exampleFootnote 104 – were directly engaged in the construction of numerous historicist governmental buildings, banate seats and royal edifices is very indicative. The Russians virtually rebuilt Belgrade as the centre of political power, filling it with buildings fashioned exclusively in what was understood as the ‘Russian-Imperial Style’, symbolically supporting the matrix of identity politics in interwar Yugoslavia.Footnote 105 The pompous architectural transformation of Belgrade and the grandiloquent style of governmental buildings executed by imperial Russian architects shone the spotlight on the assumed identity not only of Belgrade as the capital of a centralised state, but also of the Serbs which should, and indeed did, again become an imperial nation.Footnote 106 This age-old trope of Serbian nationalism, veiled under the rhetoric of Yugoslavism, gives yet another clue as to how the public perception of the Zemun Bridge was locked in a power struggle between the competing forces of Serb centralism and Yugoslav federalism that deeply marked the 1930s.
However, the ‘battle against foreigners’ was only a side issue to a problem concerned with national sentiments of the bridge's principal decorator. And this seems to be a basic reason for raging reactions against his project. Meštrović, the once ardent supporter of South Slavic unification, acquired an infamous reputation of being a national renegade because he had been openly critical of the Serbian centralising tendencies in Yugoslavia. His idea to install the gigantic sculpture of the medieval Croatian ruler at the political and symbolic heart of a country in which Croatian ‘historical rights’ had no legitimacy whatsoever was considered anathema to the Serbian traditionalists. Yet the public outrage should not be understood only in terms of ‘grumbling about the sculptures of Tvrtko and Tomislav’, as Meštrović wrote in his memoirs,Footnote 107 suggesting that it seemed irreverent to have the statues of the famous Croatian ruler and the Catholic Bosnian king erected in the centre of Belgrade. What infuriated the Serbian faction over the competing meanings of the bridge (and indeed the national project it symbolised) was Meštrović's own interpretation in which Zemun and Srem were called Croatian territories (as a matter of fact, the town had been in Croatia-Slavonia within the Habsburg Empire). This message of the sculptural decoration became more transparent when the Minister of Construction, the Croat Stjepan Srkulj, publicly announced his fondness for the design. The pro-regime press in Belgrade suggested that the minister upheld the idea not because of aesthetic but political reasons, which further drew attention to the ideological divide between the Serbian and Croatian sides.Footnote 108 The verbal belligerence and hostilities from the Serbian intellectual elite intensified in early 1934, when the sculptor started working on the gigantic Monument of the Unknown Yugoslav Soldier (1934–8) on Avala near Belgrade, itself an interesting example of interplay between various paradigms of Yugoslav identity.Footnote 109 A number of professional institutions from the capital carefully orchestrated assaults, primarily targeting not Meštrović's art but what they tendentiously called a disregard for Serbian traditions and history.Footnote 110 Meštrović's sculptural interpretation of national history, which astutely combined Primordialism, Syncretism and Universalism, had already been faced with severe criticism – firstly when the Serbian conservatives vehemently criticised his Vidovdan Temple, and secondly, when he sculpted a colossal male figure for a monument-fountain to commemorate Serbian victories in the Balkan Wars in 1913. The nudity of the sculpture, appropriately named the ‘Victor’, was condemned by the Belgrade public. It was only in 1928 that the sculpture was installed, not at the previously planned spot in Belgrade downtown but on Kalemegdan fortress, facing the confluence of the Sava and the Danube.Footnote 111
Attacks on the bridge's equestrian statues culminated in late November 1934, only a week before the ceremonial opening of the bridge. After the tragic death of Meštrović's ardent supporter, King Alexander I, a month before, nobody was certain whether the horsemen would be erected at all. The Serbian poet and essayist Rade Drainac was given a surprisingly large space in several consecutive issues of the Belgrade newspaper Pravda to denounce Meštrović's ‘despicable project’.Footnote 112 The intended target was not only the work but the artist himself. Drainac alluded to Meštrović's peasant background, calling him a ‘farmer turned gentleman’ and tarnished his reputation and credentials. He described Meštrović as being avaricious, calling him a ‘crafty worshiper of the golden calf’.Footnote 113 The sculptor responded somewhat sanctimoniously and asked why was it that among many public works in the country only his were so mercilessly execrated.
‘How is it possible that architects and artists’, wondered Meštrović, ‘only now became aware of the unsightly bridge, whose piers do not harmonize with the iron construction, only now when my “horsemen” are called into question? . . . I am asking both Associations where they were then, when this and many other questions were being discussed; [I wonder] why they did not feel competent then and why they have only now, all of a sudden, become so quick to react and judge?’
He blamed the Belgrade professional guilds of artists and engineers for being corrupted and dishonest, calling them a ‘self-serving clique’ who behaved ‘more demagogically than professionally’.Footnote 114
On the contrary, there were some Zagreb-based intellectuals who put up a sturdy defence of Meštrović and his design. But they were voices in the wilderness. These few champions of the sculptor's work shed another light on the ideological, not only professional motivation that stood behind the synchronised actions from Belgrade. One of these pro-Meštrović supporters was the Serbian poet, scholar and publicist Milan Ćurčin, who published an apologia for the artist and his work in Nova Evropa under the title ‘Public clamour over Meštrović again’. He denounced what he saw as unprincipled arguments of the belligerent attackers, which were more ad hominem than factual.Footnote 115 The most compelling counter argument to the Belgrade critics came from Ivo Franić Požežanin, the director of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb – and also a declared pro-Yugoslav and strong opponent of Croatian nationalismFootnote 116– who tried to provide learned evidence in support of the equestrian statues.Footnote 117
In Belgrade, there was also a reaction against attacks on Meštrović, but it went in a different direction. Rather than defending the artist, the respondents wanted to protect the principles of professionalism. The polemic started when the painters Mihajlo Petrov and Jovan Bijelić used the opportunity not only to complain about Meštrović and Krasnov's untouchable status as privileged artists,Footnote 118 but also to draw attention to the aesthetic misery of Belgrade architecture and urbanism. They openly accused their colleagues of hypocrisy because they raised their voice only when the final decoration for the already decorated bridge was being conferred on Meštrović.Footnote 119 The staunchest defender of professionalism was again Bošković, an avid pro-Yugoslav and anti-nationalist, who denounced the duplicity of Krasnov and Meštrović's critics.Footnote 120 He shrewdly noticed that they vehemently attacked Meštrović's design for the sake of retaining modern purism epitomised by the iron bridge, while simultaneously pleading for a ridiculous idea of complementing it with an ‘architectural-sculptural decoration’ which, paradoxically, had already been materialised in its most flamboyant form by Meštrović's design. Undoubtedly, there was something more than a sheer matter of aesthetic dissatisfaction that sparked impetuous criticism levelled by the Belgrade artists and architects.
Epilogue: The Lions of Emperor Dušan
In March 1933, not long before the ‘Romanesque Byzantine’ supports had been completed, the newspapers announced that the bridge would be soon decorated with four massive, 5-metre-long lions.Footnote 121 Initial sketches had already been done by Krasnov in 1931,Footnote 122 but a year later the Ministry of Construction decided to organise a limited competition, where several Yugoslav sculptors were invited to submit their designs.Footnote 123 Although this project eventually failed to materialise, like the equally ill-fated sculptures of Meštrović's horsemen which, after the king's death, lost their main patron, it spurred similar controversy. Unlike the complex symbolism of Meštrović's idea, which referred simultaneously to different visions of Yugoslavism, the lions should only ‘personify power and serve as immortal guardians of the bridge’.Footnote 124 Nonetheless, even this prosaic and universal symbolism soon became entangled with national meanings.
After the announcement of the project, Belgrade newspapers ignited a polemic between those who abstained from ascribing a particularly national meaning to the planned gigantic stone lions, others who considered them to be a telling symbol of the ‘greatness and power of the [medieval Serbian] Nemanjić dynasty’, as well as those who interpreted the lions as the ominous tokens of foreign, adverse imperialism that once menaced the newly united nation.Footnote 125 Among the latter was Ilija Trifunović-Birčanin, the prominent Serbian nationalist, leader of the paramilitary Chetnik Association.Footnote 126 He thought that if one put the lions on the bridge, it would be not only historically inaccurate – because the lion had never been a Serbian national symbol – but also morally inappropriate.Footnote 127 The reaction against Birčanin's remarks was equally impassioned and equally nationalistic, including a range of dubious questions – for example, whether the emperor Dušan's coat of arms had a lion incorporated in it and what sort of lion it was; if Nemanjić's imperial leonine regalia included ‘authentically Serbian’ motives; why the Serbian folk epic poetry mentioned the same creatures and in which context, etc.Footnote 128
There were, however, a couple of alternative designs, but they all arose from the same ideological background. One of these was the idea of creating a sculptural representation of four unnamed but presumably still living ‘Serbian military commanders and royal adjutants’, who were praised for their courage in the Great War.Footnote 129 Others suggested installing four sculptures representing great epochs in Belgrade military history: ‘a Roman legionary, an emperor Dušan's mercenary, a warrior-liberator from the first Serbian uprising against the Ottomans (1804–13), as well as a soldier from the Great War’.Footnote 130 The idea of the mounted heroes reflected hackneyed phrases about the cardinal Serbian role in the South Slavic ‘liberation and unification’, which was interpreted as a long historical process which eventually ended in 1918.Footnote 131 In the perspective of both ‘imperial lions’ and imagined ‘historical heroes’, the bridge and its decoration became a metaphor of a Yugoslavia in which national unity was accomplished by Serbian military expansion, a country in which Serbs should have a leading role. Contrary to this Serbian-centred vision of Yugoslavism, Meštrović's four horse-riding kings taken from Serbian, Croatian and Yugoslav pasts embodied a more inclusive, and ideologically more elastic concept of national identity.
The Zemun Bridge, with its shifting identities and constantly changing visual iconography, is a telling example of the complex interplay between different visions of Yugoslavism, underpinned by both political and professional agendas. Over the course of five years, between 1929 and 1934, as the construction of the bridge advanced, different proposals for its final appearance were unfolded. These proposals provoked reactions that corresponded both to the perceptions and roles of various groups in Yugoslavia – Serbs and Croats, architects and engineers, natives and foreigners. With the Marseille regicide in October 1934, the tables were beginning to turn: the officially constructed symbolism of the bridge was challenged and a sense of exclusively Serbian credit for creating a unified and free South Slavic country became a more prominent discourse about the bridge.
In mid-December that year, when the bridge was ceremonially opened in the midst of national mourning for the king, neither the horsemen nor the lions, nor any statues whatsoever, were erected to decorate the bare iron construction. On this occasion, several opening speeches delivered by state officials further reinforced a particularly Serbian version of the Yugoslav national ‘liberation and unification’ narrative. The symbolic role of the bridge was exclusively seen in terms of stressing the Serbian national continuity, as a testimony to historical development from the medieval empire and the great, ‘immortal Karadjordje, to the final act achieved by his great-grandson, the Triumphant King Alexander I’.Footnote 132 Under these circumstances, the meaning of the structure that had just spanned the Sava River and connected two parts of Greater Belgrade seemed to have been resolved and the question of installing Meštrović's sculptures seemed all but incomprehensible. This was exactly the moment when the ‘government officials found themselves admitting once again that no one quite knew what Yugoslavism meant’,Footnote 133 which eventually led to the ‘breakdown of national Yugoslavism’.Footnote 134 The subtle and thoughtful synthesis of Yugoslav primordialism and syncretism, which distinguished both Krasnov and Meštrović's designs, lost its raison d’être, despite Meštrović's determination to have his great idea materialised.Footnote 135
The Bridge of King Alexander I was mined on 9 April 1941 by the Yugoslav Army in desperate attempts to forestall the rapid advancement of the Wehmacht forces. Three days later, the Germans arrived in the city which they had already heavily bombarded. The Sava River became the state border again, separating the Military Commander in Serbia and the newly established Independent State of Croatia, two of Europe's new political entities of dubious sovereignty, but of an unquestionable nationalistic legitimacy.
If examined more carefully, the Zemun Bridge becomes a graphic reminder of the power of architecture and art in 1930s Europe – a material testimony of the rivalries, tensions and discontents that existed between different visions of national identity in a country seeking a cohesive national narrative. More specifically, the bridge's relevance for a history of national ideas lies in the fact that it represents outstanding material evidence of the negotiation between competing and complementary national ideologies. If seen not merely as a piece of architecture, art or engineering, but rather as an ideological narrative, a landmark both of Belgrade's urban and political landscape, the Zemun Bridge is a particularly vivid example of the elusive, complex and controversial processes of imagining the Yugoslav nation in the unsettling political context of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia of the early 1930s. The bridge remains an object of considerably more relevance for historical scholarship because it powerfully discloses the ideological ambiguities of the Yugoslavism of the 1930s. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to a wider context of a 1930s Europe rapidly turning away from democracy, ultimately showing that politics and power were everywhere, not just in the words and actions of political elites.
