Re-animation of Byzantium: the case of the chapel of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Belgrade

Abstract

At the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, the city of Belgrade decided to build a chapel that would provide a space for the saying of prayers for the ill within the larger complex of the State Hospital in Belgrade. According to the proposal, the chapel would be unique in that it was to have four altars, one for each faith: Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish and Islamic. The city selected Dragomir Tadić (1893-1976) as architect. Undoubtedly driven by the competing challenges of building a chapel for four different religious communities while creating a visually, unified form, Tadić chose a stylistic amalgam of modernism and late neoclassical. Following the war, the communist administration turned its upper part into the city mortuary. In 1989 the chapel was returned to the Serbian Orthodox Church. During the 2000s, the Serbian Orthodox Church and municipal authorities undertook a program of renovation that would involve the integration of Serbo-Byzantine elements into the existing structure. The redesigned building became a hybrid, combining a Byzantine-styled cupola with the pre-existing classical portico. I argue that the renovation of the chapel of Saints Cosmas and Damian and the intention to make the building more easily recognizable as an Eastern Orthodox church, is an example of a revival of the assertion of national identity in architecture and the construction of national history through architecture.