designing identities

Journal of Design History Advance Access published June 26, 2007Journal of Design History Vol. 20 No. 2 doi:10.1093/jdh/epm007

Designing IdentitiesReshaping the Balkans in the First Two Centuries: The Case of SerbiaBratislav Pantelic

It is not an easy task to imagine ones nation in the Balkans. The elusive and complex interrelation of ethnicities and shared traditions in this region are the result of centuries of mixing and blending in complex social and cultural processes. Nationalism imposed ethnic and religious denominators upon these vague cultural entities, writing ethnic and national histories, appropriating and inventing traditions to impart ethnic exclusivity. Imaginaries of cultural uniqueness have been developed by each of these groups and shaped according to a visual code believed to be innate or to echo ancient traditions. This article focuses on the Serbian situation. It looks at some representative examples of the visual arts, architecture and material culture to examine how national uniqueness has been visualized in the past two centuries and to understand how changing perceptions of national or ethnic designs have accompanied and accompany identity changes in this volatile region.Keywords: architecturedecorative artsnational identitynationalismSerbia south-eastern Europe

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The beginningsAn unsuspecting observer of the many political rallies during the crises of the 1990s in former Yugoslavia would have been perplexed at the mixture of iconographies: communist banners featuring the hammer and sickle, old Serbian standards with real or invented royalist insignia, ags of socialist Yugoslavia with the red star, all mixed together with pictures of Serb nationalist leader Slobodan Miloevic , Saint Sava, the twelfth-century founder of the Serbian church, and Draa Mihailovic , the leader of the royalist resistance in the Second World War. Among the plethora of conflicting, ideologically opposed symbols were reproductions of icons and images of places sacred to Serbdom, notably the medieval monasteries of Kosovo. Such conation of past identities sums up two centuries of the Serbs experience in their vain attempts to forge a viable identity. It all started when Herderian Romanticism and its messianic vision of the Volk ignited dreams of liberation and unity amongst the South Slavs divided between the Austrian

(later Austro-Hungarian) and Ottoman empires. Instead of binding them even more closely together, however, nationalism divided them. Defining a nation entailed construction of ethnic identities that would differentiate these communities that had lived side by side for centuries. But how does one delineate ethnic belonging if these groups share the same core cultural traditions and language? Linguistic variants, the dialects and subdialects of the common language, came with settlement patterns and migration; as myths, beliefs and customs, they reected regional specics that often overlapped political boundaries. It was upon such uid cultural entities, formed around kinship communities and often rather vague religious afliations, that the nation builders of the nineteenth century imposed ethnic denominators.1 The story of the nation, woven from episodes in history and legend and often blurring the distinction between fact and myth, provides a semblance of historical authenticity and is accepted as indisputable truth and testimony to cultural continuity. The national imaginary within is an equally dreamlike world that contains the entire body of real or invented 1

The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.

Bratislav Pantelic

traditions, ranging from religious beliefs and customs, dress, songs and cuisine, to ethical standards and moral values. To these ethnic attributes we should add ancient heroes, sacred places and monuments that testify to the glory of the nations past.2 These markers of cultural identity are shaped into a visual framework using a formal and symbolic language that is believed to be innate to the group or to echo ancient traditions, an aesthetic that reects afliation with broader cultural contexts with which the group may claim afnity or descent: it is a visual code that denes identity.3 For two centuries now, perceptions of nationhood in the Balkans have been in constant ux; over and over national histories have been written, traditions have been invented, languages and cultural legacies have been constructed. As the themes of linguistic, ethnic and cultural belonging mutated so did their visual expressions. They were designed and redesigned in a continuous process of assertion and denial: new identities overwrote previous ones, adding layer upon layer of memories and traditions to the imaginaries of national or ethnic uniqueness.

Writing the narrativeThe rst signicant remapping of traditional values began in the early eighteenth century among those Orthodox Slavs who had ed their Ottoman-ruled homeland and settled in Austrian Habsburg territory. For these rural kin communities, adaptation to a modern centralized state was a painful process that entailed relinquishing customary beliefs and lifestyle; for the clerical establishment, exposure to secularism meant ceding much of the control they had enjoyed in the Ottoman Empire. Eventually they adapted: the peasants became citizens; not long thereafter they were to become Serbs. It was in Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci), the seat of the Orthodox Church in the Austrian monarchy, that archaic Byzantine models in icon painting were replaced with the vibrant colours and formal abundance of the Baroque visual language. As the new aesthetic imbued traditional religious imagery with new life, Baroque and classicist designs transformed the church architecture. These developments gave rise to secular arts and literature that were to position the Orthodox Slavs within the intellectual framework of central Europe. When later in the century Dositej 2

Obradovi, the rational-minded advocate of the Enlightenment, contested the deep-rooted clericalism, he provoked an intellectual discourse that was to disrupt traditionalist values. New generations brought new challengesfrom Josephine anticlericalism to Romanticism and ideals of nation. The most contended issue that arose in the early nineteenth century was the linguistic reform of Vuk Karadic despite ; violent opposition from the conservative ecclesiastical establishment, his new Serbian language, constructed out of one of the Slavic dialects, set the groundwork for linguistic-based nationalism amongst the South Slavs of the Habsburg empire: the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.4 The story that these Romantics told was not unlike the narrative widely accepted today. At the centre of the narrative is the notion of perpetual victimization, starting with the loss of statehood after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and followed by ve centuries of suffering under the Turkish yoke. But this, we are told, did not subdue the Serbs. Throughout the Ottoman centuries, their identity was kept alive in Orthodox monasteries, those centres of learning where liturgies celebrating the holy kings and patriarchs of the medieval Nemanyid dynasty perpetuated collective memories of ancient glory.5 The Habsburg Serbs perceptions of their brethren under the Ottomans resonated well in this narrativein-the writing; they were the alter ego, primitive but pure, and a repository of archetypal myths and traditions that had only to be awoken. When in 1814 the language reformer Vuk Karadic published in Vienna a body of popular epics that he had collected amongst the Orthodox Slavs in the Ottoman provinces, they were embraced by the Romantics as the voice of the ages: the living memory of the nation passed down from time immemorial. In reality, the largely peasant Orthodox population in the Ottoman Empire had accommodated to Ottoman society and adopted Ottoman culture albeit transformed and ultimately perceived as indigenous or Orthodoxwhich they came to regard as their own perennial traditions. The church did survive the collapse of the medieval state; in fact the restored Serbian Patriarchate at Pec was even more powerful, with jurisdiction extending during the two centuries of its existence (15571766) to nearly all territories inhabited by the Christian Slavsa true Orthodox theocracy within an Islamic empire.


Designing Identities

Frescoes and icons painted in this period suggest a continuing veneration of the Nemanyid saints among the church elite, but that does not say much about the general population. Are we to assume as nationalist historiography would have us believe that such memories of the medieval past were sustained among the Orthodox population, and that they reected a widespread national sentiment maintained by the church?6 If we refer to the oral poetry collected by Vuk Karadic we shall notice that the , Nemanyid times, celebrated in the nationalist discourse as the high point of the Serbian achievement, are not as prominent as one would expect; it would appear that the common people, dispersed in selfsustaining kinship communities, did not relate to the medieval kings of some distant past. Their epics were not knightly romances of chivalry but tales of legendary or semi-legendary heroes endowed with supernatural powers and vengeful Christian saints with pagan attributes. Barely literate village priests who themselves did not understand the archaic Slavonic language of the very liturgy they celebrated let alone the faithfulwere hardly in a position to disseminate proto-Romantic ideas of medieval glory and lament lost statehood. It is even doubtful that they managed to preserve the Christian faith, whose vestiges had been merged with pre-Christian beliefs and rituals and sustained only through fasts and church holidays.7 When the Habsburg Serbs started arriving in the semi-independent Serbian principality, established in 1830 within the connes of the Ottoman Empire, they were not received with great enthusiasm. The Serbs from the principality displayed little understanding for their kinsfolk from across the Danube, whose sophisticated manners and Western dress were seen as a betrayal of tradition and customs; so they referred to them as the Germans. While many came for prot, some, such as Dositej Obradovic , were driven by a missionary zeal to promote ideas of civil liberties and rationalism. Such idealists saw themselves as the enlightened bearers of civilization whose mission was to educate their unfortunate brethren who had suffered under Ottoman rule for centuries. They wished to instil in them a sense of belonging, a national identity based on common language, religion and heritage. But this was easier said than done: all the two groups had in common was a vague sense of ethnic and religious afnity. 3

Indeed, this was a dramatic confrontation between two worlds, quite literally an encounter between liberal cultural nationalism and an archaic breed of ethno-religious patriotism. It is not difcult to appreciate the lack of interest of the Serbs from the principality in these inventions coming from the other side. When they had rebelled in 1804, their goals were not revolutionary: they had not demanded social reforms or national emancipation but protection from the excesses of the local Ottoman ofcials (dahis). Events, however, unfolded in unexpected ways and they ended up with a state of their own hopelessly entangled in the complex political and military confrontation of the great powers. Adding to the shock was the new visual language that the Habsburg Serbs brought with them. It provided a dramatic contrast to the rudimentary art that had been practised by self-trained iconographers during the Ottoman centuries almost without change from its Byzantine roots. It is hardly surprising then that the sophisticated Baroque and classicist imagery were not immediately appreciated by the Serbs in the principality; their taste was conditioned by the sacred meaning and familiarity of traditional icons and not by trends in aesthetics. The Serb elites in Habsburg Austria, on the other hand, had developed a rened taste in fashion and the arts; furniture and portraits painted by Viennese-trained artists in that prototypical middle-class style, the Biedermeier, were in particular demand among the wealthy mercantile classes. It was only a matter of time before such trends would be adopted in Serbia proper. Despite resistance from the overwhelmingly traditionalist rural population, who ridiculed the newcomers novel dress and sophistication in deportment, it took only one generation of city dwellers to shed their traditional Ottoman-style dress for waistcoats and crinolines and adopt urban lifestyle.


Designing the nationThe designing of the newly adopted Western identity was extended to the built environment; while urban planners remapped cities, cutting wide boulevards through the mazes of Turkish streets, architects introduced the full range of academic historicist idioms to replace the picturesque old Balkan architecture (as it came to be called to avoid the use of the

Bratislav Pantelic

terms Ottoman or Turkish). This involved the destruction of the previous identity: by the second half of the nineteenth century only one mosque out of thirty remained standing in Belgrade. Without the numerous minarets the skyline of the city assumed a more European appearance; it was now dominated by the bell tower of the new Baroque Cathedral. Such shifting of identities was a continuing process. It was not long before immersion into Western culture came to be perceived as a threat to the perennial cultural traditions and customs. Perhaps in a sense this was even true: this was a radical interruption of traditions. A much larger question would be what is the perennial tradition of a people, especially one whose cultural traditions were formed within the framework of three empires: the Byzantine, Habsburg and Ottoman? For the ideologues of nationalism there was no such dilemma. Once the national narrative was internalized, the Baroque bell towers that had once replaced the minarets no longer tted in the new imaginary. This was bluntly conveyed by the architect Andra Stevanovic when he described Belgrades cathedral as a Catholic-Jesuit Baroque monstrosity.8 The Serbs should not be looking to the West, he was implying, but to the East. As Russian inuence in the region was growing, identity formation was channelled towards a nationalism based on cultural afnity with Orthodox Slavdom and its Byzantine heritage. Religion now replaced language as a designator of ethnic uniqueness and a means of distinguishing the purportedly disparate Balkan groups. The equation of religion and ethnicity was extended to include the notion of natural disposition towards cultural traditions and visual styles. Consequently, a decree of 1862 required the Byzantine style to be used for designing new churches. Baroque and classicist forms were purged from the sacral; these foreign designs were now restricted to residential and public architecture. It is ironic that this Byzantine style was in fact an eclectic historicism promoted by Theophilus Hansen in Vienna. It was adopted by his Serbian students not so much for its resemblance to any specic monuments or architectural forms of Byzantine architecture as for its eastern quality; the aesthetic of the Rundbogenstil and the fusion of Romanesque, Oriental and Byzantine decorative schemes made the Hanzenatika sufciently distinct from the Baroque to create an illusion of cultural afnity with Orthodoxy and continuity with the national heritage.9 4

Indeed, a national heritage was imagined as the visual counterpart to the narrative-in-the-writing. Since the eighteenth century the medieval monasteries dispersed throughout the Ottoman Balkans had been built into the imaginary of the Habsburg Slavs as holy sites of Orthodoxy. Engravings showing vedutas of the revered ancient sites mapped the sacred and rooted it rmly into the popular imagination. As the idea of nation gained prominence in the nineteenth century, pious reverence was replaced by reverence for history, and the holy sites were transformed into monuments of national glory. Journalists, antiquarians and historians ventured deep into the Ottoman domain of Old Serbia (Kosovo). Their travelogues and reports charted the imagination of the budding national sentiment: they were symbolic maps of national memory that added these sacred places to the catalogues of the saintly kings and patriarchs. Anthropologists such as Jovan Cvijic , for their part, outlined ethnic spaces by mapping the racial features of the indigenous populations. The archaeological and ethnic topographies of Old Serbia centred on the myth of the Battle of Kosovo were thus implanted deep in the national imaginary. Little was actually known about these medieval monuments beyond the mythical. Publications were numerous, but these were legendary histories whose main purpose was not to provide accurate archaeological or architectural descriptions but to incite national sentiment. It was not until late in the century, after the Serbian principality gained full independence and was proclaimed a kingdom (in 1882), that archaeological research conducted by Mihailo Valtrovic and Dragutin Milutinovic brought to light some stylistic features of this architecture. These two scholars identied, although somewhat vaguely, an architecture of highly distinctive features. The prime example of this idiom, which was to be named Morava by the French scholar Gabriel Millet, is the church of Ravanica Monastery founded by Prince Lazar, the ill-fated hero of the Battle of Kosovo.10 This regional architecture, noted for its excessively ornamented polychrome exteriors, dominated the architectural scene of the northern Serbian principalities during the last century of independencebefore they succumbed to the Ottomans in the mid-fteenth century. The discovery of the Morava idiom was followed by the demise of the Hanzenatika, which was now deemed an articial eclecticism of foreign origin. The



Morava style was swiftly incorporated in the national imaginary as an indigenous idiom singular to the Serbs. A decorative design derived from these monuments was included in the curricula of the Department of Architecture and the Department of Ornamental Design (Ornamentika), both at the Technical School in Belgrade. The latter programme was led by Branko Tanazevic , an architect who did much of the research and endeavoured to promote the idiom in public architecture. But how did he apply this medieval idiom in contemporary design? In his most prominent work, the Telephone Exchange in Belgrade (designed in 1906), Tanazevic inter spersed motifs and devices from the repertory of the Secession with stylized elements adapted from churches of the Morava group: blind arcades, rosettes, interlace patterns and pilaster strips, with alternating red-and-white-coloured bands that emulate the composite building technique [1]. For many, this was the ultimate evidence of rediscovered roots. While it may have had special symbolic value for its association with the Battle of Kosovo and its hero Prince Lazar, the Morava design also appealed to those revivalists who advocated a return to the pure and uncorrupted art of the peasants and shepherds. The actual medieval monuments of the Morava group occasionally lack the sophistication of some of the earlier architecture of the region. The occasionally crude construction and carvings have something of a rustic appeal that suggests genuinely vernacular creations. If we add to this the carpet-like profusion of patterns and intense colours we

Fig 1. Branko Tanazevic , The Telephone Exchange, Belgrade, 1906. Photograph by the author

have a design that, although historicist, ts in the national imaginary as a product of the indigenous ethnic community.11 Indeed, folklore was seen as the most substantial evidence of national existence since Vuk Karadic published his epic poems. As Karadic had uncovered the original voice of the people, so it was the task of patriotic designers to discover that original design principle that arose from the collective unconscious of the Serbian people. One such designer was Dragutin Inkiostri, who employed designs from a miscellany of overlapping regional traditions, from Croatia to Bulgaria, which he believed reected the primeval traditions of the Slavs. These indigenous forms, as he elaborated with great passion in his writings, would inspire the creation of a new national design, free from the restrictions imposed by foreign academic styles, and a rebirth of Serbian art.12 Inkiostris endeavour to introduce vernacular motifs in architectural and interior design echoes contemporary trends in east and central Europe.13 One example of his national style is the interior decoration of the house of the geographer and anthropologist Jovan Cvijic . Here, Inkiostri com bined Secessionist designs with motifs taken from rugs, embroidery and attire from the southern regions of Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria. The furniture is inspired by carved ornaments from traditional household objects and musical instruments; the upholstery and cushions are made from Pirot rugs, a Balkan variant of Anatolian kilims [2]. On the walls and ceiling Inkiostri interspersed geometric and oral ornaments with black, red and white Pirot-style and related vernacular motifs; the occasional patriotic device, such as the stylized double-headed eagle and cross on the chandelier and the ceiling, the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Serbia, is there to assure us of the national quality of his design [3]. If we look further at the national designs created in these years we notice that they usually follow a generic Secessionist formula. Vladislav Titelbahs illustration for an epic poem features a set of symbolic motifs borrowed from the international repository of allegories [4]. A female personication of Serbia atop a cloudscape bears in one hand a large shield inscribed with the national insignia and in the other brandishes a sword. It does not require great erudition to grasp the meaning: it symbolizes the battles that were to be fought for the liberation of the Serbs who still remained within the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian 5


Bratislav Pantelic Fig 2. Dragutin Inkiostri, drawing room, house of Jovan Cvijic , Belgrade, 1908. Reproduced with permission of the City Museum of Belgrade


Fig 3. Dragutin Inkiostri, ceiling with chandelier, house of Jovan Cvijic , Belgrade, 1908. Reproduced with permission of the City Museum of Belgrade

empires. Rather than the female gure, a hybrid of Britannia and Marianne probably invented by the artist for this occasion, it is the distinctively stylized Cyrillic lettering and the interlace pattern of the ornamented initial that are immediately recognizable as national. They were purportedly inspired by the 6

Miroslav Gospel, a twelfth-century Slavonic manuscript written in the Cyrillic script. Neither is true, but it went well with the national imaginary that perceived this gospel book as testimony to the Serbs literacy and cultural continuity since the Middle Ages. In the 1920s, a local lithographer from Belgrade devised a typographic style he called the Miroslav that has since become the favourite typeface in patriotic publications. There is irony in the fact that the lettering was in fact not based on the Miroslav Gospel but adapted from standard Russian typography. But this was not seen as a problem: the label, it appears, was sufcient to denote its national character and the Miroslav typeface was added to the repository of indigenous designs along with the historicist Morava and actual vernacular traditions. Such a fusion of folklore, history and religion reects the communitarian ideal of the national imaginary where peasants and kings stand as equals. It nds expression in a design for a patriotic society where leaders of the popular insurrection against the Ottomans, singers of epic poetry and medieval Nemanyid kings and patriarchs are brought together in a setting that combines vernacular and historicist idioms [5]. This sort of folklorism red the imagination of the Croatian and Slovenian enthusiasts of Slav unity. From the perspective of todays nationalism, and especially in view of the recent Yugoslav wars, it



Fig 4. Vladislav Titelbah, illustration for the cover of Ustanak na Dahije [Rebellion Against the Dahis], 1890. Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Serbia

Fig 5. orde Milovanovic , Diploma of the Society of Saint Sava, 1927. Reproduced with permission of the City Museum of Belgrade

sounds remarkable that a Slovene, Jernej Kopitar, provided the initial impulse for the rise of Serbian nationalism. It was he who encouraged Vuk Karadic to construct a new vernacular language out of a Slavic dialect and to collect and publish oral epic poetry. Equally remarkable was the Croatian PanSlavists acceptance of the new language that Karadic called Serbian. The paths of development of the Yugoslav nationalisms were indeed multifarious and complex. Just as they had adopted the language, these proponents of unitary Slavic culture appropriated the Serbian epic narrative as the most forceful and ancient of the South Slavic traditions and a repository of primeval Slavic heritage. When artists around the Croatian sculptor Ivan Metrovic organized into art societies (Lada in 1905 and the Medulic Society in 1908), they were motivated by discovery of a primitive heroic impulse in their own roots: spontaneous, inherently free and just, the Slavs were destined for a greatness that only had to be aroused by an equally 7

heroic inspiration. This messianic and visionary idealism was expressed in the epic pathos of Metrovics sculptures dedicated to the Battle of Kosovo, the central theme of the Pan-Slavic vision and of the Serbian epic narrative.14 This, however, was not just innocent idealism. Awoken by the call of their race, the rugged and primeval bodies of such legendary heroes from the Serbian epic imaginary as Prince Marko and Milo Obilic, the former a medieval noble who assumed superhuman abilities in the popular imagination and the latter a knight whom the epic tradition credits with slaying Sultan Murad I at the Battle of Kosovo, emerge from their millennial sleep to lead the Slavs into new victories in the impending wars of liberation. Indeed, soldiers who fought in the successive wars against the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires identied with these precedents. Serbias military successes and valour in the two Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913) and then in the First World War encouraged the Slavs of Austria-Hungary to support openly these wars of lib-

Bratislav Pantelic

eration, which they imagined would lead to the fullment of their dreams of unity. A series of exhibitions of Yugoslav art were organized in European capitals to promote, mainly through the symbolism of Kosovo and the Serbian epic tradition, the poetry and idealism of the Yugoslav race, as a British ofcial saw Metrovics heroic and awe inspiring gures in 1919 at an exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum; for him these inherent Slavic qualities were a counterpose to the heritage of German materialism.15 Metrovic was indeed central to the South Slav ideal: international success, particularly at the 1911 International Art Exhibition in Rome where he and the other artistsmainly Croats from the Austro-Hungarian Empiredeantly chose to exhibit in the pavilion of the Kingdom of Serbia, established him as the Prophet of Yugoslavism. Josef Strzygowski understood the mobilizing power of Metrovics art; his fears that it would spell trouble for the Habsburg empire proved to be prophetic. Austria-Hungary crumbled and so did the Ottoman Empire. The Pan-Slavic ideals became reality: the South Slavs united in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). Upon unication in 1918, King Aleksandar adopted Metrovics vision to promote a monumental visual expression of the new unitary state. Looking at these works today does not, however, inspire the awe they were intended to and undoubtedly have done; rather, the rustic appearance and primeval power of these gures, meant to embody the forces of nature and history, appear to overwhelm humanity itself for the sake of grands idaux. It is tempting to compare Metrovics superhu man Slavic race with Pan-Germanic racial visions. Whether or not these sculptures can be compared to those of Arno Breker or Josef Thorak is less of an issue than the obvious afnity in their ideological provenance. Indeed, although Pan-Slavism may be seen as an idealistic attempt to unite people based on common traditions and language, it also contained the seed of a messianic racial ideology. Metrovics design for a monument dedicated to the Battle of Kosovo is imbued with such meaning. Rather than following the principles of his teacher Otto Wagner, Metrovic adhered to the tendency towards monu mental structures overowing with massive sculptures and sculpted ornaments found in the works of Franz Metzner. Metrovics Slavic heroes nd parallels in the Teutonic knights that Metzner sculpted for Bruno 8

Schmitzs colossal Monument to the Battle of the Nations, the Vlkerschlachtdenkmal, built to celebrate the centenary of the 1813 Battle of Leipzig. It is this kind of ideal that Metrovic pursued in his Kosovo Temple. He envisioned an immense structure replete with sculptures of intertwining bodies of epic heroes, sphinxes and caryatids, all exaggerated in scale and proportion. The Kosovo Temple, as its German counterpart, can but cause wariness amongst viewers today, not for its ostentatious monumentalism, but for its meaning: this was not meant to be a monument to an ideal as much as a shrine to a race. Such racial fantasies came to an end with unication and the temple, intended to be built on the site of the Battle of Kosovo, was never carried beyond the planning stage; perhaps for the best.16 The ideals of a unitary culture were pursued in socialist Yugoslavia, established after the Second World War by Josip Broz Tito, leader of the communist resistance. Titos views in some ways were not very different from King Aleksandars. It was thus possible for him to overlook Metrovic s growing religious sentimentalism and personal reservations towards communist ideology. Metrovic left for America, but his visionary ideals were pursued in socialist Yugoslavia, albeit with some alterations: the communists would accept the messianic narrative if they were the messiah. Therefore, the adapted narrative described Titos guerilla ghters within the same imaginary as the mythical heroes of Slavdom; their revolution and struggle against the Nazis were absorbed as an integral part of the Yugoslav peoples heroism and eternal resistance to foreign invaders. Uniquely among socialist countries, Yugoslavia was almost untouched by the revolutionary optimism of the Soviet imaginary and had no equivalent to Stalins historicist monumental designs. After the split with the Comintern in 1948, a moderate version of modernism was to become a trademark of socialist Yugoslavia.17 This was certainly not a reection of Titos personal taste; on the contrary, his disagreements with the proponents of modernism were common knowledge.18 In view of his preference for the products and aesthetic of folk art, it comes as no surprise that he was partial to the academic descriptive realism that had persisted since the nineteenth century in the form of ethnographic narratives and genre scenes (which had also been adapted to the imagery of socialist realism), but also as historical



images, such as Uro Predics Maiden of Kosovo where traditional folk costume and jewellery imbues this historical scene with a vernacular avour [6]. Both such autographic images of Balkan life and history that convey ethnic pride, moral integrity and heroism of the Volk and Metrovic s epic messianism were carried into mainstream academic modernism. For example, Petar Lubardas rugged expressionist forms in glaring colours evoke visions of primeval heroism and the uncontrollable stamina of the Balkan peoples. In his Gusle Player, a blind bard of epic poetry accompanied by his primitive instrument seems as if verses from the mythical depths of time immemorial are gushing forth from his gaping mouth [7].19 Folklore is a persistent theme in the self-perceptions of identity that mutated according to the changing ideological structures, from Serbian to Pan-Slavic and Yugoslav. In its modernist guise, cleansed of religious and ethnic connotations, folklorism could t into an image of modernity and prosperity. The new Yugoslav and socialist identity required the redesigning of the urban landscape along modernist lines and the mass production of standard housing equipped with modern-style furniture and appliances.20 The showcase of such ideals was New Belgrade, built on marshland by youth work brigades as a display of the new collective spirit of the working class. A locally assembled diminutive people s car, the Zastava 750, made under license from the Italian company Fiat, and its successor, the Yugo, along with locally designed fashion clothing, contributed to the image of a modern lifestyle that was in sharp contrast to the dismal image of the Soviet bloc. Even

the coarseness that was so often associated with the primeval and uncorrupted spirit of the common people, such as in Lubardas vision, was rendered clean in the colourful naive art of peasant artists that was internationally promoted in the 1970s to demonstrate the optimism of socialist Yugoslavias peasantry. 21 This image of modern folklorism was constructed through the promotion of folk dance ensembles and products of traditional arts and crafts mainly by the Narodna Radinost (Folk Arts and Crafts), a state-run cooperative that marketed an assortment of handicrafts, including Pirot rugs from Serbia, coffee sets from Bosnia, wood carvings from Croatia, and a selection of products such as crockery, musical instruments, filigree jewellery, lace and embroidery from all regions of Yugoslavia. In particular, there was demand for knitwear made by local village women in Sirogojno, a reconstructed ethnic village on Mount Zlatibor in Serbia. These products were admired for their colourful designs and unrened texture, which created a sense of authentically indigenous products. Just as naive art was promoted to the status of high art and exhibited in art galleries, Sirogojno knitwear was displayed in fashion shows alongside designer clothing.


Fig 6. Uro Predic , The Maiden of Kosovo, oil on canvas, 1919. Reproduced with permission of the City Museum of Belgrade

Fig 7. Petar Lubarda, The Gusle Player, oil on canvas, 1952. Reproduced with permission of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade

9

Bratislav Pantelic

The elusive identityThe unlikely combination of modernity and a polished folklorism could not, however, forge a unitary identity that would simply brush aside traditional identity structures. Yugoslav identity thus came to be conated with socialist ideology. When communism collapsed it became obsolete, creating an identity vacuum that opened doors to ethnic and religious nationalisms. But the building blocks of identity reconstruction had already been fashioned in the rst Yugoslav state. The kingdom of the South Slavs was not a model democratic country; nor was it, despite considerable efforts, a truly multicultural society. Once disenchantment with the unitary state set in, artists from the Pan-Slavic circle turned from extolling the Serbian past to discovering their own. The Serbs for their part had been largely unresponsive to the idealistic vision of Pan-Slavism and had little interest in cultural traditions other than their own. It is not an easy task to imagine ones nation in the Balkans. The ethnic and cultural topography of the region is dened by complex interrelations of elusive ethnicities, overlapping traditions and a shared historical fate. Croatia, whose statehood tradition stretches all the way back to the eleventh century, was, after a short period of independence, absorbed into the Hungarian kingdom. Similarly, the somewhat more clearly outlined Serbian principalities emerged from Byzantine dominion in the early thirteenth century only to be engulfed by the expanding Ottoman domain two centuries later. These brief interludes in the South Slavs long history of obscurity within the Byzantine, Habsburg and Ottoman empires were expanded in the national narratives into glorious kingdoms arbitrarily encompassing territories according to political imagination and the mutations of the nationalist discourse. In reality, these two groups have difculties even distinguishing between themselves; their national and ethnic identities are just as much the product of imagination as their nationally specic cultures. Nationalist theories tend to assimilate callously, disregarding layers of regional cultural traditions that are the result of centuries of mixing and blending in complex social and cultural processes. The same is true of the equally preposterous notion of a visual language or aesthetic principle that would somehow be inherent to only one group. 10

So what remains of that national or ethnic-specic design in Serbia? Inkiostris passionate dedication to folklore did not result in a rebirth of authentic Serbian art (or Yugoslav, as he labelled it after the Yugoslav kingdom was formed). The designs he promoted as national were nothing more than a blend of local vernaculars interspersed with generic n de sicle ornamental devices [8]. The same is true of Tanazevics Morava decorative design and the many other historicist and vernacular revivals. However much these designers and artists strove to dene a national style, all they could come up with was a local variant of an international idiom. The Hanzenatika historicist fantasy and Metrovics Slavic symbolism lack even regional refer ences; they are national only in the label.


The power of illusionIf we were to ask the question of how these visual languages of diverse origins came to be accepted as representative of nation or ethnicity we would be entering the uncharted domains of the irrational. Identication of the source of this phenomenon would require an investigation of the militant and oppressive discourse that dominated the intellectual scene for most of the time period under consideration. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the militancy intensied. It was then that the inuential Andra Stevanovic attacked foreign academic styles and demanded the use of Serbian historical and vernacular models; these in his belief represented innate spiritual values of the nation.22 His words resounded strongly. They came not long after Valtrovic and Milutinovic had identied the Morava idiom. The discovery of an indigenous style was a powerful incentive in the increasing militancy that heralded the impending wars. The two Balkan Wars and the battles of the First World War stretched the national imaginary to the limits, evoking memories of mythical battles for mythical ethnic spaces that needed to be liberated: Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo.23 These were not lonely voices. The goal of most cultural and intellectual activity was reduced to explications of nationalist policies.24 Such parochialism had a devastating effect on the creative output of artists, designers and architects. In the nineteenth century, many of them were educated in Western academies, often in Vienna and Munich, to which they went driven by the sense that they were on patriotic missions


Fig 8. Dragutin Inkiostri, wall decoration, house of Jovan Cvijic , Belgrade, 1908. Reproduced with permission of the City Museum of Belgrade

to acquire knowledge. Very few stayed abroad: after completing their studies they returned to government positions and squandered their talents on uninventive public projects and tedious patriotic debates. This indeed was not an atmosphere conducive to creativity and innovation: mainstream trends in the visual arts and design, from various academic historicisms to incarnations of the Secession in vernacular guise, were mere simulations of styles; they were removed from their theoretical framework and adapted to the vacuous discourse that dominated the intellectual scene. Nationalism even penetrated the modernist and avant-garde scenes of interwar Belgrade and Zagreb. One such case is the Zenit movement founded in 1921 by Ljubomir Micic, who promoted an extrava gant concept of the barbaric creativity and genius of the Slavs, which would supplant Western culture 11

in the impending war of civilizations. This cultural radicalism was in fact a restatement of Russian Slavophile theories expressed through the visual languages and discourses of Dada and Futurism. Ironically, it draws from the same imaginary as mainstream culture, whose conservative values Micic and his associ ates believed they were challenging.25 Modernism in the Balkans is a trompe lil of modernity, an illusion that conceals social underdevelopment and deep-set traditionalism. Despite all its shortcomings the art scene in socialist Yugoslavia did make signicant progress. The proscription of ethnic and religious nationalism and refutation of the equally doctrinaire socialist realism in the years following Titos split with Stalin was a liberating moment.26 Yet underneath the veneer of the academic modernist visual languages was that persistent traditionalist underpinning and parochialism centred on the local milieu and perceptions of the indigenous. When notions of modernity were actually expressed, as they were by some independent movements and occasional brilliant individuals, they were tolerated as the escapist resorts of the elite few and kept at safe distance from mainstream culture.27 The profusion of images described at the beginning of this article was a pageant of traditionalism and patriarchy. It was the summation of all past identities. This imagery, drawn from the various imaginaries of the past, announced yet another identity change: from the unitary Yugoslav and socialist to religious-based ethnic identities. Shifting from Marxism to Orthodoxy and from proletariat to nation hardly required a leap of faith; both were communitarian populist ideologies with closely related and overlapping mythological matrices. Folklore remained the dominant theme, but this was not the polished folklorism of Titos Yugoslavia. It was a strain of conservative Slavophilism developed by migr Russian clerics in the 1930s and reiterated by Serbian bishops as an ethnic ontology named Svetosavlje (St Savaism) after Saint Sava. In this bewildering mixture of theological mysticism and organicist history, Orthodox Christianity is described as the spiritual essence and true identity of the Serbs. It is hardly surprising that the visual expression of this Svetosavlje identity is formed by the Byzantine aesthetic. The scintillating gold of icons and the irrational spatial setting known as inverted perspective are seen as a visual code that denes cultural belonging. Indeed, icons evolved from their traditional


Bratislav Pantelic

role as objects of private devotionclosely related to the celebration of the family patron saint, the slava into markers of collective identity. In this transformation, the Baroque-derived visual language, traditional since the eighteenth century, was discarded in favour of simulated medieval visual models; this, according to the ideologues of Svetosavlje, was the authentic style of the Serbs. Indeed, the ethereal two-dimensional saints hovering in surreal gold settings were more consistent with the Serbs new spiritual identity. The Byzantine aesthetic was not restricted to icons; it appeared on a range of products, from calendars to slivovitz decantersand even Easter eggs, the other signicant artefacts of religious folklore that underwent a transformation from colourful symbols of a church holiday into markers of ethnic identity. This sombre religious imagery has displaced the vibrant colours and lively vernacular designs of folk arts and crafts and assumed the most prominent place in the national imaginary as perceptions of the indigenous. When new identities are constructed, however, they do not forfeit earlier ones. Thus, a profusion of symbols drawn from past imaginaries, including monasteries, saints, military heroes and emblems of church and state were adapted to the Byzantine aesthetic and branded as ethnic [9]. This dysfunctional agglomeration of myths and history, folklore and religion is yet another triumph of parochialism. Sustained by a folkloric religion, the Svetosavlje identity perpetuates the same cultural inertia and self-isolation that has plagued Balkan mainstream culture since the Slavs started to emerge as Serbs and Croats in the early nineteenth century (and most recently as Bosniaks, Macedonians and Montenegrins). However much identity structures changed and new narratives were written and imaginaries developed over these past two centuries, the traditionalist underpinning remained. These identities, as we have seen in the case of Serbia, are in fact nothing but illusions, chimeras of collective desires, as are their visual expressions: the visual languages and designs that were grafted onto these collective self-perceptions of uniqueness. As visual codes that dene identity, they were just as much illusions as the identities they were meant to convey.Bratislav Pantelic Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences . Sabanci University, Istanbul E-mail: [email protected]


Fig 9. Shop window in Belgrade. Photograph by the author If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending email responses to the editorial board and other readers.

NotesAcknowledgments: I would like to express my appreciation to Gordon Dobie for his help and suggestions. My thanks also go to Hlya Canbakal. 1 It is not uncommon to nd in scholarly literature, as in the nationalist discourse, views that todays nations are in one way or another comparable or traceable to pre-modern ethnic groups. For a critical summary of such perennial theories, see Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, Routledge, New York and London, 1998, pp. 14598. Adrian Hastings, for example, argues for the development of ethnic or even national sentiment in some parts of Europe in the Middle Ages; thus in the Balkans, according to this author, the Serbs and Croats had assumed distinct identities in the later medieval period. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1997, pp. 12447. The mlange of isolated rural communities that formed the medieval and postmedieval Balkans does not, however, in any way correspond to

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Designing Identitiesthe large ethnic groups that emerged in the nineteenth century and that we more or less encounter today (as nations). It is unlikely that these disconnected communities could have developed identities other than those shaped by kinship loyalties, regional and local customs and traditions; when they did extend beyond the local milieu they referred to the shared pool of traditions such as language, social organization and remnants of ancient beliefs that subsisted as part of religion and custom. But these transcended political and religious boundaries: Catholic and Orthodox Slavs (and later Muslim) would have had some sense of mutual afnity (not necessarily loyalty) based on this shared heritage. (See below, notes 2 and 6.) 2 These traditions were often extracted from a common pool of traditions and assigned to the cultural heritage of one or another ethnic group. Such appropriated traditions correspond in part to Hobsbawms denition of invented traditions. Eric Hobsbawm, Introduction: Inventing Traditions, in Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1983, pp. 114. They were not necessarily invented or revived; living traditions were often transformed (spontaneously, at the popular level) to accommodate changes in perceptions of identity. Examples discussed in this article include the icon and the Byzantine style, the national heritage and the epic narrative, all of which mutated from their original contexts into markers of collective identity. 3 Benedict Andersons printed vernaculars may have been the initial medium for the spread of national narratives, but only amongst the elites. It was through such familiar visual styles that these narratives and their imaginaries were widely disseminated among the population. Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn., Verso, London, 1991. 4 For Vuk Karadic, see Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanovic Karadic 17871864: Literacy, Literature, and National Independence in Serbia, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970. 5 For the medieval history of the Balkans, see John V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1987. On the Battle of Kosovo, Thomas Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo 1389, East European Monographs 278, Columbia University Press, Boulder and New York, 1990. 6 This nationalist claim has been accepted by some historians. Arguing against Benedict Andersons view that nations were not possible before the advent of print capitalism Adrian Hastings maintains that the church and the popular epic poetry sustained Serbian national consciousness throughout the Middle Ages. Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, p. 135. Even the modernist Eric Hobsbawm complies with the perennialist argument. Although it could easily t into his notion of invented traditions Hobsbawm accepts the contention that in Serbia memories of a medieval kingdom were preserved in this popular lore and by the church, in the daily liturgy which celebrated the saintly Nemanyid kings. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1990, pp. 756. It should be noted, however, that much of this poetry consists of fragments compiled from disparate sources of unknown age and provenance. Even as we know them today, from a nineteenth-century redaction, there is hardly anything that would indicate ethnic (let alone national) consciousness. In fact it was only after their publication in Vienna that these epics were transformed from popular lore into a powerful tool in the construction of national memory. From there, they were transmitted back to the population in the Serbian principality as part of the national narrative. 7 For the history of the Balkans under Ottoman and Habsburg rule, see L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 with a New Introduction by Traian Stoianovich, New York University Press, New York, 2000. 8 This was stated in a public lecture at the university in 1890. Two articles appeared in the same year where he expounded his views on national art and architecture: Andra Stevanovic, Umetnost i arhitektura [Art and Architecture], parts 1 and 2, Srpski tehniki list, no. 10, 1890, pp. 15963 and nos. 1112, c pp. 17982. 9 The different strains of historicist architecture in Serbia and their relation to national ideology are discussed in Bratislav Pantelic, Nationalism and Architecture. The Creation of a National Style in Serbian Architecture and its Political Implications, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 56, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1641. 10 Gabriel Millet published the rst systematic survey of Serbian medieval architecture where he identied three major schools of architecture: the Raka, the Serbo-Byzantine and the Morava. Gabriel Millet, L Ancien art serbe: Les glises, Boccard, Paris, 1919. These three medieval idioms have inspired all church architecture in Serbia since the late nineteenth century. 11 Tanazevics inclusion of a historicist idiom within a Secessionist framework nds parallels in the work in Hungary of dn Lechner, who oscillated between historicist eclectic fantasies and a panoply of motifs purportedly derived from Magyar ethnic traditions (for example, his Postal Savings Bank of 1901 in Budapest). For Tanazevic and the spread of the Morava decorative design, see Pantelic, Nationalism and Architecture, pp. 2930. For the Hungarian Secession, see Jeremy Howard, Art Nouveau: International and National Style in Europe, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996, pp. 10810. 12 Dragutin Inkiostri Medenjak, Preporodaj srpske umetnosti [The Rebirth of Serbian Art], Zadubina Ilije Kolarca, Belgrade, 1907. 13 Such as Duan Jurkovics Czecho-Slovak national style, Stanisaw Witkiewiczs Zakopane style in Poland (see David Crowley, Finding Poland in the Margins: The Case of the Zakopane Style, Journal of Design History, 2001, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 105-16), or that of Ion Mincu, the originator of the national style in Romania. Analogies are to be found in Hungary where nationalists such as Kroly Ks found inspiration in the traditional architecture of Transylvania, the imagined original homeland of the Magyars. Along similar lines was the Finnish nationalists discovery of the wooden architecture and folk arts of Karelia which they associated, very much like the Serbs, with their national epic, the Kalevala. For these national styles, see Howard, Art Nouveau, pp. 10322, 12336, 16083. See also the essays in Michelle Facos & Sharon L. Hirsh (eds.), Art, Culture, and National Identity in Fin-de-Sicle Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2003. For a survey of Inkiostris work, see Sonja Vuleevic, Dragutin Inkiostri Medenjak: pionir jugoslovenskog dizajna [Dragutin Inkiostri Medenjak: The Pioneer of Yugoslav Design], Muzej primenjene umetnosti, Belgrade, 1998. Inkiostris attempts to promote vernacular motifs in architectural design, however, met with great opposition from architects who were more inclined towards international historicist styles. In church architecture it


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Bratislav Pantelic is a historicism of academic neo-Byzantine provenance, such as Aleksandr Pomerantsevs St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Soa, which nds closest parallels in Serbia. 14 For a summary treatment of the ideological and political impact of these art movements, see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1984, pp. 2038. 15 As stated by Lord Robert Cecil, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs at the opening of the exhibition. Quoted from Branka Maga, The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing, Against the Current, no. 48, 1994. 16 The Kosovo Temple is summarily treated in surveys of Yugoslav art and in some popular monographs on Metrovic. For a brief analysis of this monument in the context of national ideologies, see Banac, The National Question, op. cit., pp. 2045. 17 Despite erce opposition from proponents of socialist realism, modernism prevailed: abstract art ofcially represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. For the ideological debates surrounding modernism, see Lidija Merenik, Ideoloki modeli: Srpsko slikarstvo 19451968 [Ideological Models: Serbian Painting 19451968], Beopolis and Remont, Belgrade, 2001. 18 Ibid., pp. 989. 19 For these two artists, see Stanislav ivkovic, Petar Lubarda, SANU, Belgrade, 1981 and Miodrag Jovanovic, Uro Predic, Galerija Matice srpske, Novi Sad & Zlatna grana, Sombor, 1998. 20 This entailed the establishing of industrial design: in 1948 the old School of Arts and Crafts evolved into the Academy of Applied Arts; it was followed by the founding of the Museum of Applied Arts two years later. 21 A popular survey of this art in English is Neboja Tomaevic, Naive Painters of Yugoslavia, Hippocrene Books, New York, 1978. 22 Curiously, Stevanovics own architectural designs display the full range of academic idioms from neoclassical to neoRenaissance and little if any trace of a national design. For his views on national art, see above note 8. 23 It was not a gure of speech when in 1906 the dean of Belgrades Technical School argued that design was an important tool in the contemporary cultural battle that was being fought between nations and that researching and preserving medieval culture and popular taste would strengthen the resistance of the people in that battle. Quoted from Duica ivanovic, Poceci proucavanja vizantijske arhitekture u Srbiji [The Beginning of Research of Byzantine Architecture in Serbia], in Proceedings of the Second Conference Ni i Vizantija, Mia Rakocija (ed.), Ni, 2005, pp. 4001. 24 In Serbia, as elsewhere in the Balkans, opposition to ofcial academic styles and calls for a return to archetypal cultural models lack the utopian and revolutionary ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris or even the religious and moralistic outlook of the Cambridge Camden Society and Augustus Pugin. Rather than being in opposition to the institutional framework and the nationalist mainstream, intellectuals and artists in the Balkans were usually part of it. In this respect, perhaps, the Serbian situation could be compared with the nationalist discourse in Germany and August Reichensperger. Parallels can be found also in neighbouring Hungary where harking back to the rural simplicity of the ethnic past was motivated by a desire to resist foreign inuence. For Hungary, see above, note 12 and for Germany, Michael J. Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival: August Reichensperger, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, and New York, 1993. 25 For the manifesto of the movement, see Ljubomir Micic, Delo Zenitizma [The Purpose of Zenithism], Zenit, vol. 1, no. 8, 1921, p. 2. 26 Although it may be true that ofcial endorsement of formalism was in fact an efcient way of preventing social and political commentary, freedom to pursue individual artistic invention was not challenged. 27 The advent of modernism in the 1930s opened up the Yugoslav cultural scene to international developments and prospects for a unitary culture. Among the avant-gardes that appeared Belgrades Surrealist movement (active from the 1920s) is notable for its authentic alternative to mainstream cultural models. But it was only in the second Yugoslavia that the alternative art scene diversied into a variety of original trends. For a critical survey of the avant-garde scene in Yugoslavia, see Dubravka uric & Miko uvakovic (eds.), Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and PostAvant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 19181991, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003. Modernism in the architecture of Belgrade is discussed by Ljiljana Blagojevic, Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture. 19191941, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003.


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