Legacy of the Triad: Architecture in Medieval Serbia between Style and Ideology in the Work of Aleksandar Deroko

Abstract

Despite criticism that has been leveled against Gabriel Millet's well-known tripartite subdivision of architecture of medieval Serbia into three distinct 'schools', its scholarly authority still remains largely unchallenged. Yet what is believed to have stemmed from Millet's ingenious research was inextricably linked with the ideological project of Serbian national emancipation during the first decades of the twentieth century. His stylistic triad of L'école de Rascie, L'école de la Serbie byzantine and L'école de la Morava had an unexpectedly vivid and profound afterlife in the entirely new context of socialist Yugoslavia — in terms of both scholarship and ideological resonance. Its main proponent was Serbian architectural historian Aleksandar Deroko, whose book entitled Monumental and Decorative Architecture in Medieval Serbia apparently only reiterated the existing subdivision of medieval architecture by simply amending the 'schools' into 'groups'. Nevertheless, a closer insight into three successive editions of the book issued in 1953, 1962 and 1985 reveals a series of Deroko's encounters with the Milletian framework, suggesting that his enterprise can be seen as instrumental the ideological re-appropriation of medieval heritage in the context of the national question in Yugoslavia.