ABSTRACT
The city offers a unique window into historical rupture and change: a place where history’s cast of characters demolish, ignore, or radically reconfigure the past. At the same time a metropolis serves as a kind of layered exhibition, where historical periods and forms are embraced and preserved, where they linger in the back alleys or grace the main streets and squares – in the form of buildings, monuments, street signs, or local markets and establishments. In the Balkans, as in East Central Europe, urban change has long reflected the complex process of untangling national from imperial forms; in complex and contested ways the city has been marked as the domain of the nation. This was arguably a far more painful process in large swaths of the Balkans than for other parts of Eastern Europe, where Austro-German, Italian, or Russian imperial buildings and urban establishments were sufficiently, and even generically, “European” enough to be appropriated and integrated into nationalizing cityscapes. In the Balkans, in contrast, the post-Ottoman process of “Europeanization” of the cityscape required the razing of a plethora of cultural and architectural forms in the quest to define nations in opposition to the “Oriental” past.
