Belgrade Trip – Stari Dvor (Old Palace, City Hall)

This was a rather attractive building and it’s located opposite my hotel (more of which later on during the week, but I’m very much liking it) and it is known as locally as Stari Dvor, meaning Old Palace. It’s currently used as the City Hall for Belgrade, but it was also used as the Royal residence of the Serbian royal family between 1884 and 1922. The history of this city is brutal, Wikipedia notes (and I have no reason to disbelieve it) that “the city was battled over in 115 wars and razed to the ground 44 times”. That’s sub-optimal for the residents of Belgrade if I’m being honest.

And that brutality was evident on the night of 10 June 1903, when a group of military officers entered the building next to this palace and assassinated King Aleksandar Obrenović. and Queen Draga. They then disembowelled the royal couple, mutilated their bodies and threw them out of the window into piles of manure. That building was demolished soon after and it’s now a park next to Stari Dvor. I can see the park from my hotel room and it’s a little odd to think all of this went on relatively recently in the city’s history. The current structure has been much amended since it was first built between 1882 and 1884, not least as it was damaged in the First World War and the Second World War. It was used briefly as the city’s Ethnographic Museum, but has served as the City Hall since 1961.

Also of interest (well, to me anyway), in 1919 and 1920, several meetings of the Provisional National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were held here. This was the formal name at the time for the new country known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that was established in 1918. The building feels like something of a microcosm of the wider city, it has certainly been through a lot.