ABSTRACT
Despite its long history, Belgrade is a city that lacks urban continuity. A dramatic shift defining the beginning of the city’s modern era occurred with the end of Ottoman rule and the rise of national ideologies in the Balkans. Belgrade became the seat of the Serbian government after the national uprisings in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but her identity as the capital city has changed several times since then. This chapter aims to depict how the architectural and urban planning of Belgrade corresponded to the different ideological frameworks of the political entities of which it was the capital from 1830 until the beginning of World War II. The study will explore how the expansion of the city and the establishment of cultural institutions in the nineteenth century served the promotion of rising Serbian identity under late-Ottoman rule and how further transformations after 1878 supported identity-construction in the Kingdom of Serbia, within which the idea of nation coincided with the notion of ethnicity. The discussion will focus on the intensive architectural production of the interwar period which attempted to generate an image of Belgrade as the capital of the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – the country remembered for its ideology of a centralized Yugoslav-ness.
