A photographic postcard shows a stark, flat-roofed building of plain geometric massing, its ground floor let to a shop with lettered signage. A street lamp with a round globe stands at the corner, and a small handcart and a pedestrian cross the otherwise quiet street.
About this place
The Sokol hall was built between 1934 and 1936 to a design by Đorđe Tabaković, at the request of the Novi Sad chapter of the Sokol gymnastic movement, and counts among the most important modernist buildings of his career. It was dedicated as the King Alexander I National Home, the name printed across postcards of 1938, and it came about largely through the work of Ignjat Pavlas, head of the Bačka Sokol district, whose name the street now carries. Behind the brick and glass front lay a gymnasium, changing rooms with baths, a large hall for performances and assemblies, meeting rooms, a space set aside for a Sokol museum and a restaurant in the basement, with a sports ground laid out alongside at the same time. During the Hungarian occupation of 1941 to 1944 the cards relabel it Levente-otthon, the home of the Levente youth corps, and the building now holds the Youth Theatre, the oldest puppet theatre in Serbia.