Images3

Unveiling the monument to Svetozar Miletić

1 October 1939

A Woman Posing by the Svetozar Miletić Monument, Liberty Square

1940–1960

Floodlit Statue of a Striding Figure at Night, 1941

by April 1941 · postcard

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.