Kalmyk Buddhist Temple in Belgrade
The Kalmyk Buddhist Temple ( Serbian Калмички будистички храм у Београду / Kalmički budistički hram u Beogradu ) in Belgrade , also known as the House of the Kalmyks , was a foundation of the Kalmyks from 1929 to 1944 and was considered one of the first Buddhist temples in Europe outside Russia ). The temple formed the first Buddhist community in Serbia and Yugoslavia .
history
After the communist October Revolution and the subsequent civil war in Russia, numerous Russian emigrants came to Serbia, mainly from the ranks of the White Guards . Among them were a few hundred Kalmyks, who mainly settled in what was then a Belgrade suburb, Mali Mokri Lug , and were initially referred to by the local population as Chinese .
With the Kalmyks came some Buddhist priests who held their prayer in private rooms. In 1928 the Kalmyk Colony Association was founded and construction of the first Buddhist temple in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia began. The building land for this was a gift from the Belgrade industrialist Miloš Jaćimović.
Since Buddhism was not recognized by the state in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 Yugoslavia), the Kalmyk Colony requested u. a. for the help of the Serbian Orthodox Church . Their benevolent response and the forwarding of Kalmuck concerns to the responsible minister enabled the Kalmyks to gain state recognition and permission to build a Buddhist temple.
The temple was completed in 1929 and dedicated on December 12 of the same year. A collaboration with the British Maha Bodhi Society soon followed . In 1934 Japan donated a bronze statue of Buddha through its ambassador in Bucharest . After 1935 the temple received financial support from the city of Belgrade. Financial support was frozen in 1942 during the German occupation of Serbia. With the advance of the Red Army in 1944, the Kalmyks first fled to Germany and later emigrated to the USA. With that, the first Buddhist community in Belgrade ceased to exist. The temple, which was partially destroyed by the chaos of war, was first used for cultural purposes in post-war Yugoslavia, only to be demolished in 1950, where a factory was finally built.
The Kalmyk Buddhist Temple is the only one of its kind in Belgrade to this day.