![]() ![]() However, aside from the unwillingness to restore royal glitz there were many direct interventions in removal of monuments, such as the one to Princess Zorka – the first one dedicated to a woman in Belgrade’s history – and the one to Sima Igumanov at Terazije. Apart from ideology the reason for this treatment of buildings lost in the war was to a significant extent based on the precarious state of Yugoslav society: the war destroyed the Yugoslav economy and left hundreds of thousands homeless making restoration of grand monuments low on the priority list. Much of the removal of remnants of bourgeois past was done by the Nazi and Allied bombs, which ripped through the old Royal Court, the National Library and many of Belgrade’s most beautiful pre-war buildings such as the Korunović-designed post office and Sephardic Synagogue, and it was a simple decision for them not be restored and replace them with wither with modernist buildings more attuned to tastes of the new government or restore them without many ornaments. ![]() Unsurprisingly, removal of monuments to the recent past happened most immediately after the Partizans took power in 1945 and it was aimed at the memorials celebrating bourgeois Yugoslavia and the Karađorđević dynasty, whose scion, Petar II, was hoping to be restored as king of Yugoslavia while spending the war in London where he escaped in 1941. As a city which went through significant turmoils in its modern, post-Ottoman history – from brutal occupations in WWI and WWII to major political changes in 1903, after WWII and in 2000 – Belgrade has had its fair share of monument destructions, however mostly at the hands of its occupiers.
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