An Older and More Beautiful Belgrade

A Visual Chronicle of the Milošević Era
ISBN: 
978-963-386-630-6
cloth
$79.00 / €75.00/ £64.00
ISBN: 
978-963-386-632-0
paperback
$29.95 / €29.00/ £25.00
PDF version is freely available thanks to the libraries supporting CEU Press’s Opening the Future initiative.
Publication date: 
2023
226 pages
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This grand illustrated essay depicts the devolution of Serbia’s capital during the exceptionally difficult years of Slobodan Milošević’s rule. An interwoven fabric of facts, reflections, insights, and photographs presents Belgrade in a portrait as imaginative and unique as this city’s culture and life are. Integrating cultural anthropology, the history of art and architecture, urban studies and political commentary, Prodanović analyses changes to the city’s visual environment during the 1990s which reveal the impact of deeper social forces.

Many aspects of life are covered, some with great ingenuity: the transition from socialism to shopping centers, unregulated construction and modifications of buildings, the redesign of banknotes during hyperinflation, political campaigns and organized campaigns of defacement, beer labels, religious icons in shop windows, graffiti, kitsch, “celebrity charlatans” on TV, gangsters’ tombstones, boondoggles such as an international art center, and much more. All this information is presented with astute analysis from a local perspective and not a little humor.

Foreword by Milena Dragićević Šešić
Author’s Summary

1. NEW FORMS OF SACRILEGE
The Icon: Between the World and God
Differentiating Icon from Idol
Profane Icons: A Socialist Innovation
The Icon in Serbia’s Post-Socialist “Popular Awakening”
2. PATHOPOLIS
Money as an Image of the State
Belgrade as a Patchwork City
Urban Downfall in the Shadow of War
The City as a Forum
“Targeting” in the Urban Environment
We Won (1): Medals as Reflections of an Incoherent Ideology
New Houses for New People
Celebrity Charlatans
Interlude: How the Past Travels
Požeška Street as a Manifesto of “Anti-bureaucratic” Architecture
The Way Something Is Written Is as Important as the Content. Maybe Even More.
Interlude: The Fine Art of Image Destruction (Iconoclasm Revisited)
Elections in the Urban Landscape
Megalomaniacs
We Won (2): The Eternity Which Lasted a Few Months
3. NECROPOLIS
Princes, Living and Dead
Rulers' Graves
Subjects' Graves
“Hush Thou, Night...”

ADDENDUM 1: Millennium Bug in the Graveyard
ADDENDUM 2: Millennium Bug in Republic Square
Biographies
Index