Despot Stefan Lazarević

Despot Stefan Lazarević was the son of Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, to whom the Hungarian king granted Belgrade as a vassal ruler, making it the capital of Serbia.

A monument to this historical figure was erected in 1982 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia at Kalemegdan Fortress in Belgrade, where the ruler's court once stood. The sculpture, created in a modernist manner, was crafted by sculptor Nebojša Milić. However, this did not prevent the new political elite—emerging from the wars of the 1990s—from imposing yet another monument in 2021, in a boulevard that had, since 1946, been named 29th November Boulevard, commemorating the date when Socialist Yugoslavia was constituted in the partisan movement in 1943 on a free temporarily territory. Following the collapse of socialism, the boulevard was renamed in 2004 after the despot.

What is truly intriguing is the mise-en-scène in which the monument has been placed. It stands with its back turned to a street plaque honoring Đuro Strugar, a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and a leader of the National Liberation Struggle in Belgrade (since 1997, the street has been renamed Carigradska), while facing a socialist-era building housing the new Urban Planning Institute of modern socialist Belgrade (built in 1970, designed by architect Branislav Jovin). It also looks toward a mural created for the seventieth anniversary of Belgrade’s liberation from fascism by the KURS association—a mural that was painted over in 2024, only to be replaced by an ideologically sanitised and politically compliant visual representation of the event.

The monument to Despot Stefan is part of the nationalist fervor of the Serbian Progressive Party (Srpska napredna stranka), which has ensured the proliferation of local-patriotic symbols and landmarks, including a similarly styled yet even more grandiose monument to Stefan Nemanja, inaugurated in January of the same year.