Sava Square: Belgrade’s new front door

About Sava Square: Belgrade’s new front door

By the ULTIMATE Belgrade Editorial Team

Where Belgrade’s first trains departed in 1884, a traffic-choked junction has become one of the city’s great public spaces: a green, pedestrian square in front of the old Main Station, watched over by the 23-metre monument to Stefan Nemanja and ringed by restored landmarks.

The back story

In the 1870s the low ground beside the Sava below the old town was still marshland. When Serbia decided to build its first railway, this was where the station would go, and the marsh was drained and filled with earth dug from the gully at Prokop, on the hill above. The Main Station, designed by Dragutin Milutinović, was not even finished when the first train left on 1 September 1884, carrying King Milan and Queen Natalija to Vienna, and the square in front of it was born.

Around it grew Savamala, the busiest business quarter of the young capital, full of merchants, shipping agents and inns for travellers. Its grandest buildings still stand: the Belgrade Cooperative, built in 1905 to 1907 by Andra Stevanović and Nikola Nestorović, and Hotel Bristol on the corner of Karađorđeva Street, built by Nestorović in 1912 and for decades the first hotel that new arrivals saw as they stepped out of the station.

For more than a century Sava Square was where Belgrade met the world, and where the world first saw Belgrade.

A century of comings and goings

In 1929 a new Post Office by Momir Korunović, the architect sometimes called the ‘Serbian Gaudí’, rose on the corner of the square, a fantasy in the Serbo-Byzantine style. It was badly damaged in the bombing of 1944 and rebuilt in 1947 with its ornament stripped away, as the plain block that Belgraders knew for seventy years.

As the city grew, the square was swallowed by traffic. Trams, buses and cars poured through it, the bus station spread across the old Park Bristol in 1984, and the space in front of the station became one of the busiest and least lovely junctions in Belgrade. For generations of travellers from across Yugoslavia and Europe, this was the first sight of the capital.

A new square

Everything changed when the trains left. On 30 June 2018 the last train pulled out of the Main Station, and services moved to Belgrade Centre at Prokop. With Belgrade Waterfront rising along the river, the square was rebuilt in 2020 and 2021 as a pedestrian plaza of about 20,000 square metres, with more than 300 trees, lawns and paths where the traffic used to be.

At its centre stands the monument to Stefan Nemanja, founder of the medieval Serbian state and father of Saint Sava. Chosen in an international competition in 2018, the bronze by the Russian sculptor Aleksandr Rukavishnikov is 23 metres tall, with Nemanja standing on a broken Byzantine helmet that also serves as the monument’s base. It was cast in Russia, brought to Belgrade in pieces and unveiled on Saint Sava’s Day, 27 January 2021.

What comes next

The square is still changing. The old Main Station is being restored as the new home of the Serbian Historical Museum, due to open early in 2027, and the Old Post Office is being rebuilt to Korunović’s original design as a cultural centre. Park Bristol is being remade above a new underground car park, and in time Sava Square will be the meeting point of Belgrade’s first two metro lines.

For visitors

Sava Square is a five-minute walk from the Sava Promenade and Belgrade Waterfront and about fifteen minutes on foot from Republic Square. Come in the evening, when the monument is lit, then walk up Karađorđeva Street past Hotel Bristol and the Belgrade Cooperative into the bars and galleries of Savamala.

Sava Square through the years

From the City of Belgrade, Belgrade Waterfront and contemporary reports.

Listings, fees and opening hours change, so please contact Sava Square: Belgrade’s new front door directly before you visit.