How a lady called Jelisaveta beautified our Belgrade Jelisaveta Načić was such a good architect that we would speak of her even if hadn’t been a woman and hadn’t been the first. But she was – the first female architect in Serbia, who left behind for us the King Petar I Primary School, the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky, Kalemegdan’s Small Staircase etc. J elisaveta Načić was out of the ordinary as a person, a free of spirit with a strong character. An unusual fact for the time in which she
was unrestrained, didn’t accept rigid- ities and sought the most optimal solutions. at’s how she adapted to her own needs the strict academi- cism that was characteristic of pub- lic buildings of the late 19 th and ear- ly 20 th centuries. Terazije without the Victor Although the planned pro- ject was not implemented in full and a fountain was not installed as conceived by Jelisaveta and Ivan Meštović, topped by the Herald of Freedom, which is the original name of the Victor statue, the Terazije of the interwar years was, judging by the postcards and photos from that time, fantastic and remained in the memories of Belgraders as the most beautiful part of the city. e Victor nevertheless was awaited by a differ- ent destiny. He is today a symbol of Belgrade and I must mention that, thanks to the renovation carried out this year by the Institute for the Pro- tection of Cultural Monuments of the City of Belgrade, he will continue to watch over the Belgrade Fortress and the city for a long time to come. Cultural assets e King Peter the First Pri- mary School, the Marko Marković Bookshop House, the St. Alexan- der Nevsky Church and the Work- ers’ Apartments were all classified as cultural assets, which is enough to conclude the greatness of the wealth that she left to the city during the rel- atively short period of her creative work. With the outbreak of World War I, she was sent to the Nežider concentration camp, ushering in a new and completely different chap- ter of Jelisaveta’s life, one in which she no longer created in Belgrade. Bojana Ibrajter Gazibara is an art historian and senior preservation expert at the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the City of Belgrade. She is engaged in the research, study, valuations and presentations of Belgrade architecture. She is also providing professional guided tours, but also through the educating of young people within the scope of the project BeoKul GradskaTura.
was born and raised (very late 19 th century Serbia, when less than seven per cent of women had mastered ba- sic literacy), is that she even decided to continue her education after com- pleting primary school. Only to enrol in a university faculty that had un- til then been reserved exclusively for men and to graduate in 1900 from the newly established Department of Architecture at the Faculty of Tech- nical Sciences of the Great School. First lady architect She spent two years working as a technical trainee at the Ministry of Construction, but she still didn’t have the right to seek employment as an architect within the Ministry even after she passed the state ex- am in 1902. She nonetheless spent her working life in the civil service, within the Engineering-Architectural Department of the Belgrade Munic- ipality. Jobs in the civil service had previously been intended for men, and men who’d served in the army, so her employment actually paved the way for other women. From school to church I admire her personality. She was courageous, powerful, talented and true to herself. She belonged to a dif- ferent age from the one in which she lived. In construction, she followed tendencies of style and concept. At the same time, it seems to me, she
Jelisaveta’s employment in the civil service actually paved the way for other women je prokrčila put drugim ženama Zaposlenjem u državnoj službi Jelisaveta
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