Virtual Exhibition / First Belgrade Municipality Building
Monday-Monday / AUGUST 22 – SEPTEMBER 17, 2022 / SASA Gallery of Science and Technology
n the year of 1839, the first mayor of Belgrade enters the scene. Son of the legendary Dragon from Avala, Duke Ilija Carapic, didn’t stay long in the mayor’s chair, but, throughout the year of his mandate, Belgrade became legal entity with its own administrative, judicial, and police duty bodies. Duke Ilija was the commander-in-chief in his town, assuming numerous duties that would belong to the president of the municipality today. But his rather autocratic model of city government did not last long. When Belgrade became the capital two years later, the city administration was separated from the municipality and the court.
The contemporaries of his father, Vasa, after whom the street that today connects Trg republike with Studenski trg, is still named, could hardly have imagined at the time of the bloody uprisings how much the landscape and life of their town would change by the end of the 19th century. While other cities of Europe, in the explosion of enlightened thought, grew and developed creatively, the white city at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, overwhelmed by all the misfortunes that plagued the Balkans for centuries, could not see them off. In the turbulent history of this city, there were few opportunities for the smooth development of the current capital. However, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the spirit of revolution was felt throughout the Turkish Empire. Pressured by the awakened interest of the European superpowers, and the newly discovered spite of the Christian paradise, the Ottomans are slowly but surely loosening their grip on the Balkans. A turning point in the history of Belgrade took place in 1829, when the Russian army broke through the Danube all the way to the Jedren. That same year, on September 2, peace was concluded at the Sultan’s request. Serbia became a European country, with its own dynasty, under Turkish sovereignty and Russian protection in the same area where the old Serbian despotism ended.
