A newly finished villa stands on a corner plot, its gable carrying a moulded monogram in a cartouche and the saplings along the pavement only just planted. Whitewashed bollards mark out the unmade crossroads and every neighbouring house is single storey. This is the villa built for Ignác Orbán, the city's technical councillor, at the corner of Futoška and Cara Dušana, and the monogram in the gable is consistent with an owner's initials cut into his own house.
About this place
A corner villa where Cara Dušana meets Futoška, built in the late nineteenth century and associated with Ignác Orbán, given in later Serbian sources as Ignjacije Orban. Orbán was a senior municipal figure rather than a private engineer: the contemporary local press names Orbán Ignác as the city's műszaki tanácsos, its technical councillor, and between 1911 and 1917 he appears repeatedly on the city's sewers, waterworks, roads and tramway works. The original building was considerably more elaborate than what stands today. The Novi Sad historian Pavle Šosberger recorded that Ahmed-beg Zogu, later King Zog I of Albania, stayed in the villa, and a 2009 newspaper account resting on Šosberger places the house at this corner and has Zogu there on two occasions; local accounts usually put his wartime stay around 1916. The wider chronology fits, since Zogu allied himself with Austria-Hungary in 1916, took the rank of colonel and was invited to Vienna for Emperor Karl's coronation that December, though the scholarly source for that says nothing about a house in Novi Sad, so it corroborates the context and not the address. A major reconstruction in 1942 for an owner named Magdalena Lenard is reported, with a further alteration adding a floor afterwards; no building permit or other primary source has been found for it, so that stands as probable and unverified. The building on the site today is recorded as residential and its exterior is altered so heavily that the historic villa is hard to recognise. It does not appear in the City Institute's current list of individually registered immovable cultural properties under this address, which shows that it is not registered there as an individual monument rather than that it has no protection at all.