Belgrade

Belgrade

Author: David A. Norris

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0195376080

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Perched above the confluence of two great rivers, the Sava and Danube, Belgrade has been home to many civilizations: Celts, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgars, Magyars, Ottomans and Serbs. A Turkish fortress, the focus for a Serbian principality, an intellectual and artistic center, the city grew until it became capital of Yugoslavia. Now it is one of the largest cities in south-eastern Europe and capital of the Republic of Serbia. Despite many challenges, Belgrade has resisted assimilation and created a unique cultural identity out of its many contrasting sides, sometimes with surprising consequences.


Belgrade A Cultural History

Belgrade A Cultural History

Author: David A Norris

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-11-26

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0199888493

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Perched above the confluence of two great rivers, the Sava and Danube, Belgrade has been home to many civilizations: Celts, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgars, Magyars, Ottomans and Serbs. A Turkish fortress, the focus for a Serbian principality, an intellectual and artistic center, the city grew until it became capital of Yugoslavia. Now it is one of the largest cities in south-eastern Europe and capital of the Republic of Serbia. Despite many challenges, Belgrade has resisted assimilation and created a unique cultural identity out of its many contrasting sides, sometimes with surprising consequences.


Metropolitan Belgrade

Metropolitan Belgrade

Author: Jovana Babović

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0822983397

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Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society. As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade’s middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the capital’s middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.


A Cultural History of Serbia

A Cultural History of Serbia

Author: David A. Norris

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-05

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0429797974

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This volume focuses on Serbia’s need to manage change while preserving community identities, a narrative that avoids the common depiction of Serbian culture as a hostile struggle between modernizers supporting foreign models and traditionalists advocating forms of national cultural patrimony. Traditions only function if they are allowed to bend to the necessary modifications demanded by a community’s changing historical circumstances. Tradition and change are two sides of the same coin which Serbia, in its many different incarnations, has experienced over the centuries, protecting its national heritage while borrowing and adapting intellectual and other trends from Byzantine, Ottoman and Western sources. Outside influences have been imposed as a direct result of foreign rule or through more friendly channels of communication, leading to a complex relationship between autochthonous and alien elements in Serbian society and culture. This book argues that the division between the national and international frameworks has often been a false dichotomy, with outside features embedded in domestic symbolic capital and Serbian culture simultaneously determined on local, national, regional and global levels. David A. Norris’s approach offers a new perspective to students, academics and general readers interested in the history of Serbia’s participation in the broad networks of cultural exchange.


Designing Tito's Capital

Designing Tito's Capital

Author: Brigitte Le Normand

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2014-07-21

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0822979543

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The devastation of World War II left the Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade in ruins. Communist Party leader Josip Broz Tito saw this as a golden opportunity to recreate the city through his own vision of socialism. In Designing Tito's Capital, Brigitte Le Normand analyzes the unprecedented planning process called for by the new leader, and the determination of planners to create an urban environment that would benefit all citizens. Led first by architect Nikola Dobrovic and later by Milos Somborski, planners blended the predominant school of European modernism and the socialist principles of efficient construction and space usage to produce a model for housing, green space, and working environments for the masses. A major influence was modernist Le Corbusier and his Athens Charter published in 1943, which called for the total reconstruction of European cities, transforming them into compact and verdant vertical cities unfettered by slumlords, private interests, and traffic congestion. As Yugoslavia transitioned toward self-management and market socialism, the functionalist district of New Belgrade and its modern living were lauded as the model city of socialist man. The glow of the utopian ideal would fade by the 1960s, when market socialism had raised expectations for living standards and the government was eager for inhabitants to finance their own housing. By 1972, a new master plan emerged under Aleksandar Dordevic, fashioned with the assistance of American experts. Espousing current theories about systems and rational process planning and using cutting edge computer technology, the new plan left behind the dream for a functionalist Belgrade and instead focused on managing growth trends. While the public resisted aspects of the new planning approach that seemed contrary to socialist values, it embraced the idea of a decentralized city connected by mass transit. Through extensive archival research and personal interviews with participants in the planning process, Le Normand's comprehensive study documents the evolution of 'New Belgrade' and its adoption and ultimate rejection of modernist principles, while also situating it within larger continental and global contexts of politics, economics, and urban planning.


The Danube

The Danube

Author: Andrew Beattie

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0199768358

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A detailed history of the Danube river.


Serbia - Culture Smart!

Serbia - Culture Smart!

Author: Lara Zmukic

Publisher: Kuperard

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1857336550

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Serbia, a landlocked country at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, covers the southern part of the Pannonian plain and the central part of the Balkans. The dominant power in the former Yugoslavia, it has had a bad press in the West. However, the truth is much more nuanced and interesting than that portrayed by the media. Serbia is a country with wonderful scenery, architectural riches, and a vibrant arts scene, waiting to be discovered by Westerners. Serbs are proud, passionate, and generous people with an independent streak. They have always had to fight for survival, first against the Ottoman Turks and then against the Habsburg Empire. Following the First World War, they took the lead in forming independent Yugoslavia. They resisted Hitler heroically. Under Tito's rule Yugoslavia steered an independent course. After his death the multinational state disintegrated amid bitter conflict. The war over the secession of the province of Kosovo saw Serbia bombed by NATO forces for two and a half months. The Serbian people's reaction to their hardline Communist regime was the Bulldozer Revolution—a campaign of civil resistance that returned the country to democracy in 2000. Against this turbulent backdrop, the visitor to Serbia needs to be well informed and sensitive to people's feelings. Culture Smart! Serbia introduces you to a diverse, complex, and dynamic society. It offers background information on Serbian history and customs, and essential advice on what to expect and how to behave in different circumstances. If you show interest and respect, you will receive a warm welcome and lasting loyalty in return.


Serbia

Serbia

Author: Laurence Mitchell

Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 1841624632

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One of the most misunderstood corners of Europe, Serbia is a spirited and fascinating country. Belgrade and second city Novi Sad are lively, cosmopolitan and welcoming, while rural Serbia, with its hidden monasteries and breathtaking countryside, is an undiscovered gem. This edition of the guide features the burgeoning music festival scene, bird-watching, wine-tasting and Serbia's growing litany of sporting stars such as Novak Djokovic. This edition includes a new section on the Danube cycling route with details on where to stop, where to shop and sights to see on the way. Updated throughout, the listings include boutique hotels, eco-lodges and backpacker hostels to cater for all budgets. The guide goes into greater depth than its competitors with more detail on the history, politics, culture and sights and more detailed reviews of hotels and restaurants.


Serbia's Great War, 1914-1918

Serbia's Great War, 1914-1918

Author: Andrej Mitrović

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9781557534767

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Mitrovic's volume fills the gap in Balkan history by presenting an in-depth look at Serbia and its role in WWI. The Serbian experience was in fact of major significance in this war. In the interlocking development of the wartime continent, Serbia's plight is part of a European jigsaw. Also, the First World War was crucial as a stage in the construction of Serbian national mythology in the twentieth century.


After Yugoslavia

After Yugoslavia

Author: Radmila Gorup

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2013-06-12

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0804787344

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The book brings together many of the best known commentators and scholars who write about former Yugoslavia. The essays focus on the post-Yugoslav cultural transition and try to answer questions about what has been gained and what has been lost since the dissolution of the common country. Most of the contributions can be seen as current attempts to make sense of the past and help cultures in transition, as well as to report on them. The volume is a mixture of personal essays and scholarly articles and that combination of genres makes the book both moving and informative. Its importance is unique. While many studies dwell on the causes of the demise of Yugoslavia, this collection touches upon these causes but goes beyond them to identify Yugoslavia's legacy in a comprehensive way. It brings topics and writers, usually treated separately, into fruitful dialog with one another.