Architectural Metamorphoses of National Memory: 'Lazarica' in Dalmatian Kosovo, 1889-1939

Abstract

In 1889, on the occasion of celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Kosovo Battle (Vidovdan), the local Serbian Orthodox community of Habsburg Dalmatia built a church dedicated to Saint Lazar. While the church’s architectural features corresponded to local architectural tradition equally shared by the Catholics and Orthodox, its memorial function, centred around Vidovdan, was predominantly related to Serbs. When in 1935 the church’s bell cote was replaced by a new, “SerboByzantine” bell tower, this was not merely an architectural manifestation of a newly invigorated, exclusively Serbian memory of Vidovdan, but also a vivid mark of a new political order in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Apart from the novelty of “Serbo-Byzantine” references, the new structure referred to an ongoing scholarly reinterpretation of local architectural heritage, employing its imagery that had been considered genuinely Croatian. The transformed architecture of the “Dalmatian Lazarica” simultaneously re-Serbianized the memory of Vidovdan and nationalized both the history and identity of Dalmatian Kosovo on the eve of its inclusion into the Banovina of Croatia in 1939.