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Designing Identities
Designing Identities
doi:10.1093/jdh/epm007
Designing Identities
Reshaping the Balkans in the First Two Centuries: The Case of Serbia
Bratislav Pantelic
The beginnings
An 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
The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.
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.
Bratislav Pantelic
Designing Identities
Bratislav Pantelic
Designing Identities
Bratislav Pantelic
Fig 2. Dragutin Inkiostri, drawing
room, house of Jovan Cvijic,
Belgrade, 1908. Reproduced with
permission of the City Museum of
Belgrade
Designing Identities
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 aweinspiring 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 superhuman 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 monumental 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
Designing Identities
Bratislav Pantelic
The 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.
Designing Identities
Bratislav Pantelic
Notes
Acknowledgments: 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
Bratislav Pantelic
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Sabanci University, Istanbul
E-mail: pantelic@sabanciuniv.edu
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Designing Identities
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.
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.
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Bratislav Pantelic
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.
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