Aleksandar Deroko: The Anythingarian
Aleksandar Deroko had a word for himself that no professional register quite captures: he called himself "an anythingarian" — all things in life were of interest to him. Architect, air force pilot, medievalist, painter, ethnographer of Belgrade's own street corners, he spent nine decades refusing to pick a single discipline, and Serbian architecture is still sorting through what he left behind in each of them.
From the Trenches to the Cockpit
Deroko was born on 4 September 1894 into a family with an unusually layered artistic pedigree: his ancestry traced back to a Venetian, Marco de Rocco, who had settled in Dubrovnik, his grandfather Jovan had worked as an art instructor in Belgrade, and his mother's side connected him to Jovan Đorđević, founder of the Serbian National Theatre, and to the writer Stevan Sremac. He had enrolled at the Technical Faculty of the University of Belgrade when the First World War broke out, and he volunteered for artillery service at once. He was transferred to a battalion in Skoplje before his prior interest in aeronautics got him reassigned to the newly formed Royal Serbian Air Force; he trained as a pilot in France in 1915 and flew on the Salonika front until the armistice — an experience that put the future architect of medieval fortresses in the air over the very landscape whose old towers and monasteries he would spend the rest of his life studying.
After the war, Deroko's architectural education became almost deliberately itinerant: he studied in Rome, Prague, and Brno before finally graduating from the University of Belgrade in 1926, and a French government scholarship then sent him to Paris for further study. Few Serbian architects of his generation moved through so many national schools of design before settling into practice, and the range shows in how promiscuously his later buildings borrow.
An Architecture of Symbols
What Deroko built, once he returned to Belgrade, resists the standard interwar categories of traditionalist versus modernist. Scholarship on his work describes his practice as one guided by "emotional creativity" rather than functional rationalism: he developed projects through sketches made in what one study calls a "strong emotional rush," building architectural narratives out of "symbols, parables, associations, rebuses, riddles" rather than pure structural logic. He rejected pure modernism as incompatible with cultural continuity, but he was not simply a revivalist either — he folded medieval Serbian-Byzantine forms, vernacular folk building, early Christian church plans, Italian Renaissance references, and up-to-date modern materials into the same practice, sometimes the same building, and marked his work with recurring symbolic details: decorative crosses worked into brickwork, wrought-iron ornament, polychromatic stone chosen for meaning as much as effect.
Between 1925 and 1960 he completed twenty-eight projects and left twenty-seven more as unrealized designs — eleven houses built against five unbuilt, six churches built against eleven that never left paper, nine monuments built against four unbuilt, two public buildings against seven unbuilt. That ratio, more unbuilt churches than built ones, says something about how ambitious and how often thwarted his religious commissions were, Saint Sava chief among them.
Saint Sava and the Interrupted Cathedral
Deroko's largest and most consequential project was the Cathedral of Saint Sava in Belgrade, on which he collaborated in 1932 with Bogdan Nestorović (some accounts credit Nikola Nestorović with the earlier design phase) after winning the competition to complete a monument that had been contemplated since the late nineteenth century. Construction began in 1935 on what would become one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world, centrally planned in a Serbian-Byzantine idiom that drew directly on the medieval buildings Deroko had spent his academic career surveying. The Second World War halted work on the building, and it would not be finished within Deroko's lifetime — his most significant design remained, for decades, an unrealized project in exactly the sense his other churches so often were.
His smaller completed religious and residential works show the same range: the Church of the Holy Transfiguration in Novo Sarajevo (1939–40), a dormitory for the Orthodox Theology Faculty in the same years, the French Renaissance–inspired Colonel Elezović House (1927), the modernist-with-folk-elements Villa of Obrad Simić (1931), and his own house at Topčider (1936), which he built from salvaged vernacular materials rather than new stock — a personal statement about where he thought architectural authenticity actually lived. His memorial architecture, nine completed projects including the Gazimestan Monument (1952–53) marking the site of the Battle of Kosovo and the Memorial Ossuary of Vidovdan Heroes in Sarajevo (1939), placed him at the center of how interwar and postwar Yugoslavia physically commemorated its own history.
The Scholar of Medieval Serbia
Deroko's parallel career, and arguably his more durable one, was as an academic historian of medieval architecture. He became a full professor at Belgrade's Architectural Faculty in the early 1930s, teaching medieval and Byzantine architecture, and was elected to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His research on old Serbian fortresses, monasteries, and vernacular buildings — published in works including his 1964 study of medieval castles on the Danube and his 1987 book on the area around Belgrade's Kalemegdan fortress — supported the interwar Yugoslav state's promotion of a shared cultural identity, though his personal commitment to documenting and preserving these buildings ran deeper than any state ideology could claim credit for. He also worked as a heritage conservator and left a body of architectural illustrations and personal postcards recording Belgrade's streets and monuments as he saw them change across his lifetime.
Why Aleksandar Is Called a Genius
The case for calling Deroko a genius rests less on any single masterpiece — his largest project, Saint Sava, was interrupted by war and finished by others long after his death — and more on the unusual completeness of his synthesis: an architect who was simultaneously the leading scholar of the medieval buildings he was drawing on, giving his revivalism a documentary precision that most contemporaries working in similar national-romantic idioms lacked. Scholars studying his output specifically push back against the "conservative" label often attached to him, arguing he was fundamentally avant-garde in method even when traditionalist in vocabulary — a "rebel who did not want to bow to any style of architecture." That is a real, specific claim about creative independence, not a vague honorific. The honest counter-case is substantial, though: nearly half his projects, including his most important church commissions, were never built, and his influence has traveled mainly through teaching and conservation scholarship rather than through a body of standing buildings that later architects visibly imitated. His genius, if the word applies, was more that of a synthesizer and a scholar-practitioner than an innovator whose forms were copied — a different, quieter kind of originality than the arch that gets photographed.
Legacy
Deroko died on 30 November 1988, having lived long enough to see the country he had helped visually define through two world wars and a shift in political systems. The Cathedral of Saint Sava, his career's central unfinished ambition, was eventually completed decades after his death, a monument that still carries his and Nestorović's Serbian-Byzantine design even as the building outlived every architect who worked on it. His academic writing on medieval Serbian fortresses and monasteries remains foundational reading for the field he helped establish within Yugoslav and Serbian architectural history.
Achievements
- Notable work: Church of Saint Sava
- Notable work: Church of the Holy Transfiguration
- Notable work: Kuća pukovnika Elezovića
