The bronze is Meštrović's Svetozar Miletić, a bearded figure in a long overcoat with his fist raised, on a plain block plinth in a grass plot with concrete kerbing. The figure was taken down and hidden through the occupation and only came back to the square late in 1944, so this is either the two years after it was first set up in 1939 or some time after the autumn of 1944. Two single-deck buses of the same pattern are drawn up on the roadway, and a shop fascia across the way is too small in this print to read a letter of.
About this place
The monument to Svetozar Miletić (1826-1901), mayor of Novi Sad and the foremost leader of the Serbs in the Habsburg monarchy, stands on Trg slobode in front of the Town Hall. The decision to raise it was taken in 1926, the centenary of Miletić's birth. Ivan Meštrović's bronze, five metres high on a pedestal of two, shows Miletić bareheaded in a cape, right arm raised. It was unveiled on 1 October 1939, when the square was called Trg oslobođenja: Aleksandar Moč, president of Matica srpska and of the monument committee, opened the ceremony, and the prime minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia unveiled the figure. Taken off the square during the Second World War, it was put back in the autumn of 1944 at the urging of the historian Vasa Stajić, and in 1951 the sculptor Pavle Radovanović cut its inscription into a new pedestal. This archive's photographs show the unveiling crowd, the floodlit figure on a card dated 29 April 1941, and a woman posing before it.
- Date
- 1940–1960
- Coordinates
- 45.25508, 19.84493
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 2580 × 2962 px
Open on the full map ›