Old Post Office at Savski Trg Becomes Archaeology Museum

At the end of a tour of the construction site at Savski Trg, Culture Minister Nikola Selakovic handed Prime Minister Djuro Macut a replica of the Dupljaja cart, a Bronze Age figurine found near the village of Dupljaja in Banat, now part of the National Museum of Serbia’s collection. The gesture was as symbolic as it was practical: that very museum is opening a branch in the building the two men stood beside that Saturday, August 31, which for the first time in its history will have a roof dedicated entirely to archaeology.

The building is the former Post Office, put up in 1929 to a design by architect Momir Korunovic in the Serbo-Byzantine style. It was damaged in the 1944 bombing and rebuilt after the war, but in the spirit of European modernism rather than Korunovic’s original plan. The work now underway is restoring its distinctive 1930s look, alongside a completely new purpose: a net usable area of 8,800 square meters and a gross floor area of more than 11,000 square meters, for an investment worth nearly 3 billion dinars. Bojana Boric Breskovic, director of the National Museum of Serbia, joined Macut and Selakovic on the tour.

The prime minister called it one of the most significant construction projects in Belgrade’s cultural sector, a claim that is not hard to back up once you add up everything meant to fit under one roof.

“This is a major undertaking spanning more than 11,000 square meters. The impressive building will house two very important cultural institutions: the Archaeological Museum and two theater stages,” Djuro Macut said at the construction site.

Macut added that he expects that “within the next year we will have the old building complete, meaning the new look of something that will certainly be a symbol of Belgrade,” a more cautious formulation than the one offered by the culture minister. Selakovic announced that Belgrade will get its Archaeological Museum as early as spring 2027, and said he believes visitors to the World Specialized Exhibition EXPO 2027 will have time to see it, along with a show at one of the two new theater stages.

The Archaeological Museum of Serbia will operate as a branch of the National Museum and will hold archaeological exhibits exclusively, for the first time under its own roof, since Belgrade has never had one as a standalone institution. Alongside it, in the same building, two modern theater stages are opening as well, a combination Selakovic described as unprecedented.

“With the construction of this building, which will house the Archaeological Museum and two theater stages, Belgrade is getting a new cultural quarter,” Nikola Selakovic said.

That sentence has geography behind it. The renovation of Savski Trg began with the raising of the monument to Stefan Nemanja, continued with the redesign of the square itself, and in the meantime the former railway station building was turned into the Serbian History Museum. The old Post Office is the fourth and, so far, the last piece in that sequence, so the cultural quarter Selakovic is describing already exists on the ground, it had simply been incomplete until now.

The building is also part of the wider Belgrade Waterfront complex, a project whose construction, according to Selakovic, was announced twelve years ago by the prime minister of the time and current president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, during a parliamentary debate on the Belgrade Waterfront Law. Selakovic also thanked Finance Minister Sinisa Mali, Belgrade’s mayor at the time, for his contribution in bringing the works to this stage.

The timelines Macut and Selakovic gave that Saturday were not identical, a year of construction according to the prime minister versus spring 2027 according to the minister, but the gap is easy enough to explain: one is counting to the end of construction, the other to opening day. For a city that has waited decades for a museum of archaeology, both versions mean the deadline is finally on the horizon rather than lost in the fog.