Religious identity as the state’s tool in modification of public space and its identity: the Yugoslav concept of the two squares in Maribor

Abstract

In 1934, after several years of struggle, the Orthodox community of Maribor was awarded a lot to construct a new sacral object on General Maister Square (then Yugoslavia Square) in Maribor, at the site of the recently removed monument dedicated to vice-admiral Wilhelm Tegetthoff. The square boasts a rich symbolic history, wherein the very names of the square have clearly indicated the identity of the city through time. The new government sought to modify public space in accordance with the new state – these spaces had to be given not only a Slovenian but also a Yugoslav outlook. The first modification was changing the square’s name to Yugoslavia Square, after which a Serbian Orthodox church was built in Serbian national architectural style by the architect Momir Korunović (1883–1969), who designed all three Serbian sacral objects in the province of Dravska Banovina (in Maribor, Ljubljana, and Celje). The Church of St. Lasarus was to be ideologically connected to the monument dedicated to King Aleksandar Karađorđević on Liberty Square, which would provide a clear Yugoslav identity to the city district. However, the construction of said monument was disabled by the beginning of the Second World War, while the church was destroyed by the Nazis in April 1941 and thus erased from local collective memory. Maribor was the northernmost city of Dravska Banovina and indeed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, yet its public space still failed to reflect a “Yugoslav identity” in the 1930s. Local residents primarily identified as Roman Catholic, while the city was politically predominantly ruled by the Slovenian People’s Party which imposed additional difficulties on the process of selecting the new church’s location. This paper will, accounting for the city’s religious and political climate, present Maribor as a place that obtained one of the biggest and most prominently representative Orthodox sacral objects, despite the fact the Orthodox religion was not dominant in the area. The focus will be on the question of the role and reflection of the unitarian-centralist politics of Belgrade through religion (Orthodox faith) on public space modification, what factors and agents design such space (and memory of such space) and in what way, by analysing commissions and art styles within the context of public spaces of Maister Square and Liberty Square in Maribor.