Public spaces are not neutral backdrops to our daily lives. Street names, squares, monuments, the names and faces we pass by every day, reflect who we are as a society, what we value, and which stories we choose to remember. In her compelling essay City of Women, Rebecca Solnit wrote about how names subtly perpetuate the gendering of a city (New York City, in her case). Powerful rich men from both myth and history are easy to find in most of the world’s cities — towering over major squares and intersections, their names carved into stone, granted the biggest boulevards, and written in the largest fonts on Google Maps. Women, on the other hand, mostly remain anonymous or tucked away in darker corners and dead-end streets. Belgrade is no exception.
If you happen to find yourself in Manjež Park, in the very center of our capital, and you’re not otherwise distracted, you’re likely to notice a number of brass and bronze busts spread around, some of whom you might even recognize. There is Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Josip Slavenski, and many other composers, perhaps telling you that the Faculty of Music is nearby. Standing among these famous men is just one female figure — a crouching nude by the Yugoslav modernist sculptor Risto Stijović. She, of course, doesn’t have a name.
There are only a few monuments dedicated to real women in Belgrade. One is found in the Pioneers Park, just a short walk away from Manjež. Nadežda Petrović, the Serbian expressionist painter and photography pioneer, has been standing tall in the Pioneers Park since 1989, sculpted by Angelina Gatalica. Nadežda, of course, is also the only woman found on Serbian currency, the 200 dinar note. Most people are familiar with her name and likeness, but they don’t know much about her art — the reason she is remembered is that she served as a volunteer nurse in the Balkan Wars and World War I. Our statues, monuments, and street names tend to be focused on stories of conflict, military expansion, and national pride. What you are unlikely to find out from official monuments and street names is the fact that the Pioneers Park was a gathering place for anti-war activists, most of whom were women, in the beginning of the 1990s. In late 1991 and early 1992, over 70,000 candles were lit there as a symbolic gesture of mourning for all of the victims of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. The women who led this and many other anti-war interventions in Belgrade, like the author Biljana Jovanović or the ballet dancer Jelena Šantić, remain without a monument.
Apart from Nadežda Petrović, other notable statues dedicated to and representing women from history include the poet Desanka Maksimović in Tašmajdan Park and the novelist Isidora Sekulić in the diplomatic neighborhood of Topčider. While three examples hardly make a pattern, there is a striking difference between the way these statues are placed compared to the many monuments to men: all life-size and on ground-level, these notable women meet our gaze and stand (or sit, as Desanka does in the midst of a flowerbed) among us as equals. The same cannot be said for the larger-than-life statues of Nikola Pašić (towering over a square that bears his name), Knez Mihailo (on horseback, his name bestowed upon the most famous pedestrian street in the city), or Vasa Čarapić (eternally windswept and drawing his sword on a pedestal near his very own street in the city center). As for the women, they are only put on pedestals when they represent ideas — Glory, Freedom, Victory, and the like, abstract nouns that tend to be grammatically feminine in our gender-sensitive language. But this isn’t a local curiosity — going back to Rebecca Solnit for a moment, even the Statue of Liberty, the biggest statue and the symbol of New York City, “is a no one”.
To learn more about the women who shaped Belgrade’s history and spirit, get the digital edition of City Less Ordinary.
Author: Dunja Karanović
Photographs: Anja Mihić
