Knez Mihailova Street

Introduction

Knez Mihailova is Belgrade's main street, about a kilometre long, running from Terazije northwest through Republic Square to Kalemegdan Park and the fortress. The street was not grown but planned. Emilijan Josimovic's 1867 regulation scheme pulled a string of alleys into a single proper street, with work beginning in spring 1869; in 1870, two years after the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenovic III, the city officially named it after him, replacing the Ottoman-era name Delijska, the only street name in Belgrade surviving from that period. It follows the central grid of Roman Singidunum and corresponds to one of the settlement's main access roads, the cardo. The black granite paving slabs came from Jablanica and were laid when the street became a pedestrian zone on 20 October 1987; the same works planted an oak avenue down the middle, installed vintage-style candelabra, and set a white Venac marble drinking fountain sculpted by Aleksandar Deroko in memory of the old Delijska fountain that stood elsewhere, described as a monument to the old fountain. When the old pavement was lifted, a plaque to the youth work brigades who rebuilt the street in 1949 was found, and the two plaques now stand side by side. The buildings cluster between the late 1870s and the 1920s. The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, built 1923-24 in Academism with Secession elements to a 1912 scheme, fronts a pyramidal sculpture marking Belgrade's geographic coordinates and altitude, which has also attracted Freemason speculation. The Srpska Kruna hotel of 1869, Romanticism and then the most modern hotel in the city, is now the Belgrade City Library. The Grcka Kraljica coffee shop of 1835, originally the Despotov Han inn, is among the oldest preserved buildings on the street. The Hajduk Veljko tavern is worth a mention: in 1896 this was where Belgraders first heard a phonograph, and in 1906 it became the city's first cinema. The Instituto Cervantes, the Goethe-Institut and the Institut francais also sit here. In 1964 the street became the first protected spatial cultural-historical unit in Belgrade, and in 1979 it was raised to a national Spatial Cultural-Historical Unit of Exceptional Importance. Come in the evening. Belgrade's korzo tradition is precisely to walk the street, be seen, exchange news and watch the fashions. Rather than ticking off individual facades, walk it once in the raking light of dusk and then turn into Kalemegdan for the sunset. One mistranslation worth correcting: the western end of the street is Republic Square, Trg Republike, not 'Terazije Square' as some sources render it.

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