ABSTRACT
This chapter relativizes the understanding of delay and time, as a matter of fact. It examines the distance between center and periphery, questioning it from a geopolitical standpoint: the use of tradition, as a continuity of architectural reference and inspiration, during the communist regimes in two Balkan countries, namely Romania and Yugoslavia. For the margins, and non-margins, of Europe, reinterpreting tradition was a manner of being modern, whatever the successive meanings this adjective borrowed during the elaboration of the Nation-State ideology. “Rediscovering” their specificities, while meeting the expectations of the “civilized” centers, which encouraged these peripheries to embrace artistic narratives nurtured by historicist examples, was modern in the nineteenth century as a proof of cultural affirmation. Yugoslavia was not only swept along by the momentum of post-war modernism, but in many ways Yugoslav architects were leading architectural developments partly due to, as Kulic among others has argued, their unique position of mediation between western trajectories and a socialist ideological agenda.
