Nasleđe (Jan 2022)
Between national memory and oblivion: Monuments to Heroes of the sword József Schweidel in Sombor and Karađorđe Petrović in Belgrade
Abstract
The removal of monuments from the public space - commemorating vožd Karađorđe Petrović and General József Schweidel in Belgrade and Sombor respectively - followed by the subsequent physical dematerialization of the sculptural solutions, for example the repurposing of the Sombor plinth, points to a civilizational practice known as damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) that has existed for millennia. The manifestation of this practice can serve as a basis for analysing Hungarian-Serbian relations in the period of the Great War and its immediate wake. At the dawn of the 20th century, a cult of memory came to be formed around the national hero József Schweidel, one of the Thirteen Martyrs of Arad, the story of whose suffering grew over time to become an important topos in Hungarian national ideology. General Schweidel was born in Sombor at the end of the 18th century, and it was for this reason that, in 1905, a monument was erected to commemorate him in front of Sombor's County Hall. The responsibility for the creation of this work was entrusted to the Hungarian sculptor Mátrai Lajos György. The erection of the Schweidel monument was preceded by a multi-stage process of mythologizing the hero-martyr who laid down his blood for the life of the Hungarian nation. The first of these stages was a concerted effort to gather the General's personal belongings, viewed as 'relics', with this being followed by the unveiling of a memorial plaque at the location where the General's house had once stood; all with the aim of establishing a memory of the national hero within the community from which he came. Simultaneous to this, a tender was announced for the erection of a monument to the leader of the First Serbian Uprising on the site of Belgrade's Kalemegdan Park, which was awarded to Paško Vučetić. After numerous vicissitudes, the sculptural ornamentation, with Karađorđe at the summit, would finally be inaugurated as part of the ceremony to welcome the return of the Serbian Army from the Balkan Wars in 1913. However, both monuments would prove to be short-lived. Karađorđe's monument was probably demolished by Austro-Hungarian soldiers in the first months of the occupation of Belgrade, most likely in the autumn of 1915, while Schweidel's monument was removed from the city area in 1920 and completely destroyed some time after 1925. The final collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the autumn of 1918 brought the realization of the concept of a Hungarian political nation to an abrupt halt, and opened the way for the rival ideological practice of creating and unveiling new, Yugoslav, symbols on the territory of former southern Hungary.
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