House of the Veljković family
The house of the Veljković family is located in Belgrade at 21 Birčaninova Street and has the status of a cultural monument.
The property of the house
The house of the Veljković family is one of the few Belgrade residential buildings of the upper bourgeoisie, which has been preserved unchanged from the time before the First World War . It is well known for its architecture and interior design, as well as the rich collection of pictures and sculptures, the private library and the collection of weapons and everyday objects, and last but not least, its well-known owner family.
Today, surrounded by the diverse architecture of the urban ambience, it is considered an example of the presentation of "old Belgrade". The house of the Veljković family was declared a cultural monument by the Association of Historic European Houses in 2009 because of the small number of preserved Belgrade houses belonging to respected families and preserved in their characteristic form .
architecture
The original plans of the original building have not been preserved, just like the name of the architect and contractor have not been passed down. The owner's sheet indicates that the first owner of the property with buildings, the innkeeper Marko Čolić, sold it to the telegraph operator from Smederevo, Kosta Lazarević, in 1866. The next owners became in 1873, the manufacturer Franjo Všetački and his wife Ruža. They built the new (current) house on the existing property, which was bought by Stojan Veljković in 1883. It was built of brick in lime mortar, with massive walls and architrave and partially bridged with Prussian flat arches. On the outside it has identically shaped facades, which are simply solved in the spirit of the architecture of academicism, with a repertoire of vaulted decorative elements. The disposition of the property is simple and functional. The layout of the rooms on the ground floor and on the first floor is identical. On the ground floor there is a representative staircase with wrought iron railing and an entrance area that leads into three successively connected salons and two smaller rooms. One of the rooms served as a bathroom - cloakroom and the toilet had its own space. In addition to the main entrance, the ground floor also has a side entrance, which leads to the covered outside hallway with massive columns and a decorative wooden canopy. From there you got into the carriages or vehicles. In the courtyard, next to the family house, there was a one-story outbuilding that was used as a horse stable. On the first floor there were rooms for the staff. When the carriages were later replaced by vehicles, this horse stable was converted into a garage. The main access to the yard was from Birčaninova Street and the entrance from Kralja Milutina Street. In 1931 an exhibition pavilion was built in the spacious courtyard of the cultural monument plot according to the design of the architect Vojislav Djokić and the engineer Aleksandar Gavrilović. It was conceived in the spirit of modernism and specially designed for the exhibition of art paintings and sculptures, with an area of approx. 255 m². The pavilion had a glass roof, central heating, a special system for setting up the pictures and bases for the sculptures.
The importance of family personalities
While studying the history of the society of Serbia and the bourgeois elite of Belgrade at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, it was found that there were well-known politicians, lawyers and officers in the Veljković family who were involved with their education, political and military Performances as well as the cultural engagements exerted an influence on the socio-political and cultural-artistic life of Serbia. The progenitor, Jovan Veljković, was the son of Veljko Miljković, the prince of Paraćin and one of the leaders of the First Serbian Uprising under Karađorđe . In 1832, after consultation with Miloš Obrenović , Jovan triggered an uprising in the subordinate administrative unit of Paraćin, after which six more subordinate administrative units were returned to Serbia, in accordance with the Bucharest Peace Treaty of 1812. When he was older, he took part in barricade battles against the occupiers during the bombing of Belgrade by the Ottoman fortress garrison in 1862. After Aleksandar Karađorđević came to power , he was appointed Minister of Finance. In his private life he was an arms collector and a subscriber to the first issues of the Belgrade newspaper. His older son, Jevrem, adjutant to Prince Mihailo , graduated from military school in Prussia and was involved in the “United Youth of Serbia” during the war; he was also a great lover of literature. He continued his father's tradition and interest in the weapon collection and literature. The younger son, Stojan, did his doctorate in law in Heidelberg and then continued his education at the universities in Berlin and Paris. He was Minister of Justice, President of the Court of Cassation and together with the diplomat and leader of the Liberals, Jovan Ristić , author of the 1869 Constitution. At the Belgrade University he taught Roman law and criminal law. As Minister of Justice, he passed the Agrarian Law, which gave the farmers of the newly liberated areas economic independence. The high level of education at prestigious European universities was also characteristic of the coming generations of the Veljković family. Stojan had two sons: Jovan and Vojislav. Jovan graduated from the military academy, was adjutant to King Milan I and soldier in the First World War. The younger, Vojislav, "the father of the golden Yugoslav dinar," received an excellent doctorate in law from the Sorbonne, for which he was awarded a gold medal. He was professor of administrative law at Lykeion, Serbia's delegate to the First Hague Conference and secretary to King Aleksandar Obrenović . After the First World War, in 1919, during the reign of the regent Alexandar I , he became Minister of Finance. Vojislav Veljković managed to implement a currency reform in the newly created SHS state , which was characterized by monetary instability and currency chaos. The Ministry of Finance, under his leadership, introduced a new banknote, the Yugoslav dinar . Through his involvement in the field of monetary policy and the state treasury, he participated in the adoption of the labor law of the Volksbank of the Kingdom of SHS in 1920. After a great professional success, he retired from political life in the same year 1920 and devoted himself to the collection of works of art and the work of the Serbian literary journal as its founder. Inspired by the Palazzo Medici, he built the building of the cooperative in the Belgrade suburb of Vračar , where the Serbian bank was located (today the Turkish embassy), in whose garden he had a studio for the painter Beta Vukanović, whom he valued. In this house, at 21 Birčaninova Street, he held meetings of eminent writers, artists and personalities from political life, such as: Jovan Cvijić , Jaša Predanović , Ljuba Stojanović , Ivan Ribar , Paja Jovanović , Uroš Predić and many others. Stojan J. Veljković was an industrialist and, together with his brother Vojislav, director of a steam mill and a brewery.
Today's successors
Today's successors are: Bogdan V. Veljković, who graduated from Harvard University, is now President for the Return of Nationalized Property, and his sister Katarina Veličković, a graduate professor of Russian literature.
The family heritage
For decades, the Veljković family's house has kept the rich family heritage that the descendants cared for: old weapons, military atlases, old editions of books and magazines, furniture and objects of applied art. The most important and numerous part of the family collection was made up of the works of art painting, around 250 domestic and foreign masters of academic realism: Rista and Beta Vukanović , Veljko Stanojević, Dragutin Glišić, Ljuba Ivanović , Uroš Predić , Paja Jovanović , Marko Murat , and von the foreign masters about 30 authors of French, English, Scottish, Italian and Japanese origin, valued members of the Association of French Artists, who exhibited their works in exhibitions in the Paris Salon in the years between the two world wars and in which the family Veljković bought pictures. The collection comprised Serbian and foreign artists from an era that was unique in Belgrade because of the highlighted authors, the number and the value of the works, even compared to the large collections in museums (21 sculptures by Michelangelo) . For these reasons, the Veljković family built a modern exhibition pavilion in the courtyard of their house, which at the time of its construction was the first private museum in the Balkans. It was closed at the beginning of the Second World War, and after the war Моše Pijade opened his studio here, followed by the sculptor Sreten Stojanović . After the nationalization of the pavilion, the bronze casts from the collection were given to the painting academy, and over time the space lost the meaning of its original existence. The house of the Veljković family, on the corner of two streets Birčaninova and Kralja Milutina, is an example of the development of urban architecture in the 19th century and the adoption of the European stylistic patterns that helped capture the development and modernization of Serbian society Transition of two centuries, are important. This house has been declared a cultural monument because of its cultural-historical and architectural values as well as the values of urban planning (decision of the institute no. 63/5 of April 30, 1967). It could be visited on the occasion of Monument Day 2015.
Individual evidence
- ^ Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the City of Belgrade
- ↑ POLITIKA online, The Veljković House - The Story of a Family
- ↑ House of Veljkovic, on www.tob.co.rs ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 44 ° 48 '7.6 " N , 20 ° 27" 49.3 " E