Novo groblje, Belgrade

New Cemetery

Church of St. Nicholas at the cemetery
Details
Established	1886
Location	Zvezdara, Belgrade
Country	Serbia
Type	Christian

The New Cemetery (Serbian: Novo groblje/Ново гробље) is a cemetery complex in Belgrade, Serbia. It is located in Ruzveltova street in Zvezdara municipality. The cemetery was built in 1886 as the third Christian cemetery in Belgrade.

Except for the graves of ordinary citizens, the cemetery complex also includes special parts: military graves from Serbian-Ottoman War (1876-1877), Serbo-Bulgarian War, Balkan Wars and World Wars, the Alley of the Greats and Alley of Distinguished Citizens, where some of the most important persons of Serbian history are buried.

As the city expanded, Belgrade’s old cemetery at Tašmajdan became inadequate. One the one side, it became too small for the function of the city’s main graveyard. On the other, once projected to be on the outskirts of the city, as Belgrade grew, Tašmajdan practically became downtown and close to the Royal court. As the city was in the financial crisis at the time and wasn’t able to buy such a large lot for the new cemetery, mayor of Belgrade Vladan Đorđević donated a patch of his land to the city for the purpose of establishing a new cemetery. In the next decades, the area, including the graveyard itself was known as the Vladanovac, after the mayor, but gradually was replaced with the name New Cemetery.

New cemetery was charted into the city plans in 1884. First burials were held in 1886, but reinterment of the remains from the Tašmajdan dragged on in the several decades, being finished only in 1927. The newly developed cemetery had no chapel or church, so by the endowment of Draginja and Stanojlo Petrović, a church dedicated to Saint Nicholas, projected by the architect Svetozar Ivačković was built in 1893. First memorial monument was built in 1907, when remains of the Serbian soldiers who died in wars against the Turks and Bulgarians in the 19th century were reinterred from the Tašmajdan. During the bombardment of Belgrade in the World War I, cemetery was damaged in 1915. In 1931 Valery Vladimirovich Stashevsky projected Iverskaya chapel, a replica of the original chapel which existed in the Moscow Kremlin which the Bolsheviks demolished that same year (it was rebuilt in 1994-95).In the Interbellum, seven military graveyards were also formed so as The Monument and Memorial Ossuary to the Defenders of Belgrade 1914-1918.