The Destruction of Heritage and the Power of Student Protests
On November 1, 2024, in Novi Sad, a city in northern Serbia, the city’s main railway station’s concrete canopy collapsed and killed fifteen people. The reconstruction of the station had been completed in July that year. Vigils for the victims started soon after.[1] Although the Serbian President, Aleksandar Vučić, immediately shared with the media that the canopy had not been a part of the reconstruction, Zoran Đajić, the engineer who worked on the reconstruction of the railway station until 2022, promptly refuted Vučić’s statement.[2] In the aftermath of the November 22 students’ vigil at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, and in a direct response to the tragedy in Novi Sad, Serbia became engulfed in state-wide protests (Figure 1).[3]
Figure 1. Protests in Belgrade, Serbia. The general strike took place on January 24, 2025. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
The student-led protests are symptomatic of the discontent felt across the region, with solidarity rallies organized in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. The protests have expanded from the demands for justice for those killed in Novi Sad to demonstrations against corruption and governmental negligence. Students remain resolute in their claims that the protests are not political: their demands are for the government to lawfully execute its duties. In response, the government has organized counterdemonstrations that have attracted very few attendees, despite the regime’s standard practice of bussing paid supporters to show support for Aleksandar Vučić. In addition, the regime has consistently used practices of illegal arrests, detentions, and interrogations conducted by Secret Service agents, all the while pro-regime media resorted to insults directed at smearing the students. In an entirely manufactured series of events directed at international observers, several political figures have resigned, most notably the prime minister and the minister of transport, although both have firmly refused to accept any responsibility. Several lesser political figures—but no less corrupt, judging by the property they gained during their political mandates—have been arrested in yet another wave of actions intended to calm the protests (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Collapsed canopy of the Novi Sad Railway Station. November-December 2024. Courtesy of Wikimedia. This image was made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Contemporary Serbia is a country of opportunists in power. It is a country of extreme post-Yugoslav hyper-nationalism and the new generation’s vehement rejection of its consequences. The collapse of the canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad is both a symptom of the right-wing political discourse rejecting the Yugoslav modernist architectural past and a catalyst for activism and demands for change. The reasoning behind the reconstruction was not to extend the longevity of the building or protect its architectural heritage but for the station to be able to accommodate the new trains. The renovation did not honor the original designs, nor did it uphold the stability of the structure. The railway station was renovated only because of the expansion of the Budapest–Belgrade–Skopje–Athens railway project, funded by the China-CEE cooperation.[iv] To emphasize the problematic nature of the railway reconstruction and the collaboration between Serbia and Hungary, and Aleksandar Vučić and Viktor Orbán, the students have regularly blocked the main infrastructural thoroughfares.
From an architectural perspective, the public discourse in Serbia and throughout the former Yugoslav states has been defined by a dual rejection of the modernizing tenets and architecture of the Yugoslav era and present-day corruption, nepotism, and degeneration of the political space. This is evident in the haphazard expansions of the region’s capital cities and unregulated foreign investments in urban development projects. The contemporary failure to incorporate the Novi Sad Railway Station into the post-Yugoslav urban identity of the city is partly due to its highly stigmatized socialist past, the government’s neglect of the Yugoslav urban heritage writ large, and the ever-rising traditionalism of the right-wing post-communist states. The negation of the modernist heritage of the Yugoslav built environment has played a significant role in nationalist construction of post-communist nation-states. This essay assesses the current crisis in Serbia from the standpoint of architectural heritage as a symptom of the decades-long rule of the corrupt nationalist party elites (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Railway Station in Novi Sad, Serbia, before the collapse. Courtesy of Wikimedia. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Railway Station in Novi Sad
Completed in May 1964, the Novi Sad railway station was designed by the architect Imre Farkas as a monument to Yugoslav engineering achievements and the architecture of socialist modernism. Constructed over a period of eight months, the building stood as a signifier of state-socialist progress. A curtain glass wall and a striking concrete canopy suspended from the roof of the reinforced concrete structure were designed to face the square, while the interior was focused on the entrance hall: a double-height space intricately decorated. The architect divided the station building into four functional zones dedicated to the use of passengers and management.
Following the development of the General Urban Plan in 1950, the railway system in Novi Sad—originally dating back to 1883 and the Austro-Hungarian period—was moved out of the city center. Imre Farkas’ building was located at the city’s periphery, effectively creating a new urban focal point. Farkas designed the railway station to serve as a site of meeting and leisure, and the building, richly embellished in a mid-century modernist style, even housed a cinema for the entertainment of those waiting for connecting trains as well as all of the residents of Novi Sad. However, at the end of the past millennium and as the Yugoslav state ceased to exist, the railway station’s grandeur was remembered only by a few and predominantly by those working there.
A consortium of Chinese companies undertook the reconstruction of the railway station and its main building between 2021 and 2024. Serbian taxpayers covered the costs, and the project was continuously marred with accusations of corruption and misappropriation of funds. The three-year period saw the reconstruction of the interior of the station and its infrastructural segments. While briefly arguing that the Heritage Protection Institute of Novi Sad refused to issue the permit for the reconstruction of the canopy—the Railway Station is a protected monument—making it impossible for it to be a part of the reconstruction project, following the testimonies of the observers, official documents, and photographic evidence arguing to the contrary, the government conceded that the canopy had been tampered with.
“Heritage protection policies are mainly directed at identifying and preserving historical monuments, while those from the Socialist period stand in disarray and are largely neglected, in direct contrast to the nationalist monuments of the 1990s wars that are well maintained.”
Heritage, Nationalism, and Corruption
The focus on the Romanesque, Baroque, and Byzantine heritage of the successor states, particularly that linking the individual states with their pre-Yugoslav independence, regardless of how brief it might have been, has been notable. The local institutions’ interest in modernist structures that pepper the cities in the region is, at best, tangential. Heritage protection policies are mainly directed at identifying and preserving historical monuments, while those from the Socialist period stand in disarray and are largely neglected, in direct contrast to the nationalist monuments of the 1990s wars that are well maintained.
Much has been written about the heritage of Yugoslav modernism, and the discourse has settled predominantly on the concepts of “unwanted,” “neglected,” and “appropriated.” Through the examination of the urban legacies of Yugoslavia, scholars have shown how the heritagization processes embody the “mobilization and appropriation of memory or, to the contrary, processes of silencing, obfuscation or amnesia.”[v] While monuments such as those dedicated to World War II liberation have been protected in some republics—but stripped of their ideological messages, infrastructural architecture, the bus and railway stations built in the style of socialist modernism, which fail to evoke the pre-Yugoslav past that became a preferred idiom in the post-Socialist nation-building process, have almost exclusively been left to their own devices.
In Serbia, accusations of corruption and bribery, misappropriation of funds and power, and a series of elections plagued by allegations of fraud have defined political and public life since the late 1990s. Heritage protection problems have been linked to the continuous economic crisis and the lack of legal oversight of heritage institutions. This has been evident in the work of heritage protection institutions. They are examples of the government’s or ruling party’s functionaries’ interventions into the work of the Belgrade Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, most notably in the recent case of the Generalštab complex in Belgrade: the government of Serbia removed its protected status to open the doors for the construction of a residential-commercial complex on its site.
Protests
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the station in Novi Sad, the government vowed to bring the culprits to justice. The opposition parties and the public called for the resignation of the government officials in charge for the railways and transit and the city government of Novi Sad. Running on donations and occupying university buildings, the student protests are unaffiliated with the university or the opposition parties. The government deemed protests unconstitutional, but the students, and tens of thousands of their supporters from all walks of life persist. Blockading bridges and thoroughfares, striking and demonstrating, the students in Serbia are making their demands for the future without corruption, nationalism, or authoritarianism known. The widespread support is only growing, and with each day, the protests are joined by more teachers, professors, actors and writers, artists, engineers, and medical professionals, among many others. The protests have already spread over 240 towns and are showing no indications of stopping (Figure 4).
Figure 4. “Blood on your Hands.” Protest poster. 2024-2025. Courtesy of Wikimedia. This image was made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
The illegality of the ways in which the governing is conducted by President Vučić’s regime has been a growing concern for almost a decade. The President rules as an autocrat and is removing the last vestiges of democracy in Serbia. The built heritage and its mistreatment are yet another manifestation of the government’s mismanagement of public goods and misappropriation of funds. The protests in Serbia in the twenty-first century, however, have proven to be a powerful tool. Following the 2000 elections, which Slobodan Milošević, the creator of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, claimed to have won, the eruption of large-scale demonstrations when hundreds of thousands stormed the Parliament building and partly burned it. The mass-protests resulted in the arrest of Milošević in 2000 and his extradition to the Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to stand trial in June 2001. What happens now in Serbia remains to be seen. Undoubtedly, the collapse of the Novi Sad railway station set the stage for a revolution.
Citation
Citation: Maja Babić, “The Destruction of Heritage and the Power of Student Protests,” PLATFORM, March 31, 2025.
Notes
[1] The vigils took place daily. They started at the time of the tragedy and lasted for 14 minutes (each minute for one of the initial victims; one person died 17 days later).
[2] All sources originally in Serbian are translated by the author.
[3] I thank Tatjana Aleksić from the University of Michigan for her invaluable input on Serbian politics of the last 30 years and her generous comments on this essay.
[4] China-CEE cooperation is a project developed between China and the Central and Eastern European countries, which was initiated by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop and strengthen business relations and investments between China and the Central and Eastern European states. See more here.
[5] Gruia Bădescu, Britt Baillie, and Francesco Mazzucchelli, “Introduction: Heritage in ‘Conflict-Time’ and Nation-Building in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Transforming Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia: Synchronous Pasts, ed. Gruia Bădescu, Britt Baillie, and Francesco Mazzucchelli, 1-24 (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2021), 3.
