Description of the attraction
The Church of St. Sava in Belgrade is considered one of the largest Orthodox cathedrals in the world and the largest in Belgrade. It was built on the site where in 1595 the Ottoman governor Sinan Pasha burned the relics of the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church in order to outrage his memory, the Serbian people and all Christian teachings. This happened on Mount Vrachar.
Saint Sava was the son of the founder of the Serbian state Stefan Nemanja, the first archbishop of Serbia. From a young age, the son of the ruler chose the spiritual path for himself, and his father came to it closer to old age, abdicated the throne, took monastic vows and, together with his son, founded the Khilandar monastery. After the death of his father, Saint Sava at the beginning of the 13th century made a lot of efforts to consolidate Christianity on Serbian soil and founded churches, monasteries and schools. After his death in 1235, the relics of the archbishop were transferred to the Mileshevo monastery, from where, more than three hundred years later, they were brought to Belgrade by order of Sinan Pasha.
The first temple on the site of the current one was built in 1835; it was a small church that did not correspond much to the scale of the personality of the first patriarch of Serbia. Therefore, at the end of the 19th century, the Society for the Construction of the Church of St. Sava was created in Serbia, which held a competition for the development of the project - five competitive works were evaluated by a special commission in St. Petersburg, but none were selected. After the First World War, preparations for the construction of the temple resumed, and in 1926 another competition was announced, in which the Byzantine-style project of Bogdan Nestorovich and Alexander Derok won. The project was carried out in the likeness of the St. Sophia Cathedral of Constantinople, and work on the implementation of this project began in 1935 and was completed only in 2004. A big break arose in connection with the Second World War, after which work resumed only in 1984.
The height of the Church of St. Sava is 70 meters, which is 15 meters higher than the sample - the Cathedral of St. Sophia. The area of the temple exceeds 7, 5 thousand square meters. meters. In size, the Cathedral of St. Sava is second only to the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The temple is called a symbol of the steadfastness of the Serbian people.
