A sepia card captioned in Cyrillic and Latin as Berza. Newly planted saplings stand on the raw open forecourt and a few people walk across it under a heavy sky.
About this place
Trg galerija, the Square of the Galleries, lies a short walk south of the old town centre and takes its name from the three art institutions gathered around it. The block at number 1 was designed during 1926 for the Novi Sad produce and securities exchange and received its occupancy permit on 26 January 1927, with the building work carried out by the architect Filip Šmit; postcards of the following decade show the word БЕРЗА in large letters across its parapet. The Gallery of Matica Srpska moved into the former exchange in 1958 after an adaptation drawn by Ivan Zdravković, the Pavle Beljanski Memorial Collection opened next door at number 2 in 1961 in a building by Ivo Kurtović, and Filip Šmit's 1923 villa on the Vase Stajića corner became the Rajko Mamuzić gallery in 1974. Everything on the square is younger than the Habsburg city, and its postcards carry Serbian captions alone, Нови Сад and Берза, rather than the Hungarian and German ones printed for older streets.