Savinac

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Savinac (Serbian Cyrillic: Савинац) is an urban neighborhood of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Belgrade's municipality of Vračar.

[edit] Location

Savinac is located in the western part of the municipality, on the western slopes of the Vračar hill and stretches from the Slavija square to the Vračar plateau and the Temple of Saint Sava. The main streets in the neighborhood are Svetog Save, Makenzijeva and the Boulevard of the Liberation. Originally, the term stretched west of the boulevard (present Karađorđev Park), but today not many people consider that part of Belgrade as part of Vračar.

[edit] History

The neighborhood of Savinac entirely overlaps the neighborhood of Englezovac. Construction of the neighborhood began in 1880 when a Scottish businessman and Nazarene Francis Mackenzie bought a large piece of land nearby (which eventually became known as Englezovac, Serbian for Englishman's place), parcelled it out into lots for selling and donated a piece of land to the Serbian Orthodox Church for the construction of the Temple of Saint Sava. "The Society for the Embellishment of Vračar" suggested to Belgrade City Council to rename Englezovac to Savinac (Serbian for Sava’s place) on March 31, 1894. They stated that it is "a shame for the Serbian capital that a whole district is called Englezovac" and unconceivable that a national shrine (Temple of Saint Sava) lie on foreign property.

However, the large residential and park complex new name of Savinac was gradually dropped from public usage, and the only remainder of that name was the kafana Savinac which was closed in early 2000s. In the late 1980s, many books and articles on "Old Belgrade" became popular again and so the term Englezovac, at this time already unkown to majority of people, resurfaced, but not Savinac. However, just like Savinac, it didn't get the popular usage, and most of Belgraders still refer to this part of the city as Vračar.

Historically, Savinac represented geographical end of Belgrade, opposite to Kalemegdan, on Belgrade's central line Kalemegdan-Trg Republike-Terazije-Beograđanka-Slavija–Savinac, where central line, tram No 1 used to run, in the first half of the XX century.