Church of Saint Sava

Saint Sava was born Rastko, a Serbian prince and son of Stefan Nemanja, who ruled from 1166 to 1196. He took monastic vows under the name Sava at Mount Athos, where the Byzantine emperor granted him and his father the monastery of Hilandar, then returned to Serbia, organised the Serbian Church and was consecrated its first archbishop. He died in 1236, was later canonised, and became the patron saint of the Serbs and of Serbian schools.

In 1594 the Serbs of Banat rose against Ottoman rule during the Long Turkish War, fought along the Austrian and Ottoman border in the Balkans. The rebels briefly held several towns before the rising was suppressed, and in the character of a holy war they carried battle flags bearing the icon of Saint Sava; those flags had been consecrated by the Serbian Patriarch Jovan, whom the Ottoman government later hanged in Istanbul. The Ottoman Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha ordered the sarcophagus and relics of Saint Sava brought from the Mileševa Monastery to Belgrade under military convoy, which killed people along the road so that the rebels in the forests would hear of it. In retaliation against the rebels the Ottomans burned the relics publicly on a pyre on 27 April 1595 and scattered the ashes. The exact place has never been established with certainty, though it is thought to have been on the Vračar plateau.

Early in 1894 it was proposed that 27 April be kept as the three hundredth anniversary of the burning, and doubt at once arose over whether the relics had been destroyed in 1594 or in 1595. Old Serbian chronicles were cited for the later date, the Church accepted it, and Metropolitan Mihailo declared 1895 the jubilee year, in which the Society for the Construction of the Church of Saint Sava on Vračar was founded. Fixing the spot proved harder than fixing the date, because the name Vračar then covered a far wider stretch of ground than the district does now. Of the sites argued for, the hill called Čupina umka on Tašmajdan is the one most modern historians take to be the true place, but the Vračar plateau had the widest public support and was chosen. Most of the land came from Francis Mackenzie, a Scottish missionary who had bought and developed that quarter of the city, and whom the Serbian Orthodox Church accused of spreading the Nazarene faith; in May 1894 the municipal board renamed his district, until then called Englezovac after him, Svetosavski kraj.

A small church was put up on the site in a week and consecrated on 27 April 1895 in the presence of King Alexander. Money came slowly: the National Assembly promised 100,000 dinars and delayed paying it, and Metropolitan Mihailo's public appeals brought in less than was hoped. By a decree of King Alexander Obrenović in 1900 the planned church was declared a national edifice. In 1903 Alexander Obrenović and Queen Draga were killed in the May Coup and Peter I Karađorđević came to the throne. The temporary church was moved in 1905 to clear the site, and a design competition followed in 1906; the Imperial Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, authorised to judge it, rejected all five entries as insufficient, holding that given the importance the programme assigned to the church it could recommend none of them for execution.

The project drew a rival. In 1905 the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović proposed instead a Yugoslavist Vidovdan Temple at Gazimestan in Kosovo, in which all three tribes, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, would be represented; a scale model was shown at Serbia's pavilion at the international art exhibition of 1911 and the full-scale model in London in 1915. The Balkan Wars and the First World War stopped all building work. The Society resumed in 1919 under Patriarch Dimitrije, and with Serbia now part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes the memorial church became a more ambitious proposition.

A second competition was announced in 1926, covering buildings for the Patriarchate, the Orthodox seminary and the Ministry of Religion as well as the church, and requiring a design in the Serbo-Byzantine manner of the fourteenth century; the guidelines stated that the building should be "the greatest and most monumental building in the country, and have ultimate artistic importance". Twenty-two entries came in by May 1927, among them designs by Bogdan Nestorović and Aleksandar Deroko, most of them modelled on the Gračanica Monastery. The committee, which included Dimitrije and Jovan Cvijić, awarded neither the first nor the third prize on the ground that no entry met the terms, and gave second place to Nestorović.

The project then lay dormant until 1930, when the Society asked the University of Belgrade's faculty of architecture to delegate two specialists to work up Nestorović's design; of the two proposed, Deroko alone joined him. Under the chairmanship of Patriarch Varnava the Society fixed Hagia Sophia as the basis of the design, and the plans the two men published in Politika on 1 and 2 January 1932 no longer referred to the Morava churches or to Gračanica at all. The building grew with the ambition: from the 60 by 60 metres first specified it reached 80 by 90 metres, and the size, height and weight of its dome were meant to exceed those of Hagia Sophia. The choice was attacked in public. The art historian Kosta Strajnić and his supporters called for a "Yugoslav, not Serbian Pantheon" and rejected a Byzantine design as speaking for only one of the three tribes; Meštrović backed him and pressed for a new Yugoslav style. King Alexander Karađorđević supported no solution publicly but privately favoured Meštrović's temple, and when the Belgrade architects and engineers demanded a fresh competition in February 1932 he vetoed the Society's decision, lifting the veto only after Varnava came to see him. The Nestorović and Deroko scheme was confirmed as final in 1932, with Vojislav Zađina as engineer.

Forty years after the first initiative, building began on 10 May 1935 to the design of Deroko and Nestorović, at a ceremony led by Gavrilo Dožić, Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral and later Patriarch Gavrilo V. By September 1938 the walls stood eight to nine metres high, and on 10 May 1939 Gavrilo, by then patriarch, consecrated the foundations and laid a charter in the altar. Work continued until the German invasion of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, by which point the foundations were finished and the walls had been raised to heights of seven and eleven metres. Patriarch Gavrilo was taken to the Dachau concentration camp.

The occupying German army used the unfinished shell as a car park; in 1944 the Red Army and the Partisans used it for the same purpose, and the Yugoslav People's Army did so afterwards, before building firms turned it into a store. The Germans destroyed the project documentation during the occupation, all but the concept design that Deroko kept, and granite slabs cut for the church were taken in 1948 for the Tomb of the People's Heroes at Kalemegdan.

After the war the site stayed closed under the dominant Communist ideology of socialist Yugoslavia, and the Society, which had ceased to function during the war, was wound up in 1948. The Communist authorities identified as atheists and refused the Serbian Orthodox Church's request to continue building. In 1953 the state secretariat of internal affairs ruled that all its property, the unfinished church included, was general public property; the ruling was never served on any church body, most likely to prevent an appeal against it, and in 1962 the federal religious commission confirmed that the property could not be returned. The unfinished structure served as a playground and was used by circus troupes. Patriarch German pressed the case for decades, sending his vicar bishop to the mayor of Belgrade every month and submitting 88 requests to government bodies, many addressed to Josip Broz Tito, who never replied personally; all were refused. At Rakovica monastery on 28 April 1966 Dragi Stamenković, president of Serbia's Executive Council, offered to roof the existing walls at public expense and fit out the interior as a museum of Saint Sava or a gallery of frescoes, but the Church would consent only to a temporary church museum and returned to its demand that building resume. Permission came at last from Dušan Čkrebić, president of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, who called German and members of the Holy Synod to a meeting on 19 June 1984 and told them work could go on provided nothing was announced publicly. The ban had come from the top of the Communist Party as a political stance that no state body had ever enacted or printed in the official gazette, so neither a repeal nor new legislation was required to lift it.

On 12 May 1985 a liturgy was held inside the unfinished walls, marking three hundred and ninety years since the burning of the relics and fifty years since building had begun. Patriarch German led a procession to the site carrying a wooden cross he had brought from Jerusalem, the bells of every Belgrade church rang, and he served the liturgy with twenty bishops before a crowd put at about ninety thousand by some accounts and at a hundred thousand by others, afterwards setting a charter and a stone brought from Hilandar into the altar wall. On 25 June 1985 the assembly transferred the church and the building plot to the Serbian Orthodox Church without payment. Branko Pešić was appointed as the new architect and revised the Deroko and Nestorović design to make better use of new materials and techniques; work resumed on 12 August 1985.

The central dome, weighing 4,000 tonnes, was assembled on the ground complete with its copper sheathing and its cross and then raised onto the vaulted arches by hydraulic machines built for the purpose; accounts of the lift give its duration as twenty days and as forty. It was completed on 26 June 1989, two days before the commemoration of the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. The pendentive was then lifted the same way, which finished the structural work. From the beginning of 1991 the pace fell away and five years later work stopped altogether, in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the wars that followed and the economic collapse brought on by international sanctions against Serbia.

Building resumed after the change of government in 2000, and in 2001 and 2002 the Crypt Church of Saint Lazar was established in the basement, together with the crypt in which Serbian patriarchs are buried. The exterior, including the façade and the installation of the bells, was finished in 2004, and mosaic work in the interior ran from 2016 to 2020. About 100 million euros went on the construction and decoration, of which 43 million came from the Serbian government and 10 million was donated by the Russian government, the rest raised privately. President Vladimir Putin visited in January 2019, said Russia would pay for part of the remaining mosaic work and symbolically laid a stone into the mosaic of the Mandylion; he was invited to the consecration then set for the end of 2020, a ceremony that did not take place because of the covid-19 pandemic.

After Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque in July 2020, Patriarch Irinej and the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, said in August that they wished the church on Vračar to take its place symbolically as a new Hagia Sophia. In 2021 the whole plateau around it was placed under state protection as a spatial cultural and historical entity, the Saint Sava Plateau, the rationale citing the "symbolic, memorial, cultural-historical, architectural-urbanistic, and artistic values of the locality" and its commemoration of the burning of the relics and of the siege of Belgrade in 1806. The church, intended as the seat of the eparchy and the principal cathedral of the Serbian Orthodox Church, has held the funerals of the prime minister of Serbia Zoran Đinđić on 15 March 2003, of Patriarch Pavle on 19 November 2009 and of Patriarch Irinej on 21 November 2020. Irinej is buried there.