marked a climax in neo-Byzantine tendencies in Serbia which saw also the rising of Monastery Gračanica as the ultimate achievement of the late Byzantine architecture and an acclaimed model for the building of the new church on Vračar, even so it was not requested. It was coincidental that the call for entries was listed on 3 November 1926 in Politika and the competition should be held on 30 April 1927, several months prior to the International Congress of Byzantine Studies 10–14 December 1927. Discourses in the Serbo-Byzantine movement derived not directly from the sphere of architecture, but established here from studies in humanities, which retrospectively sought to highlight the importance of the Byzantine commonwealth to the Serbian cultural tradition. The main proponents came from Russia. With an important Russian émigré community, Belgrade had become after World War I a center of this tendency. Russian émigré architects had become the main architects for public buildings during the reign of the Yugoslav king Aleksandar I, they were located atop the hierarchy and were preferably engaged for building representative government edifices. The competition itself was not successful, no first-prize winner was announced. None of the entries sufficed the public and professional opinion. Most entries had even not fulfilled the guidelines, most proposed designs were based on models of the Gračanica Monastery as the main representative of national Serbian medieval architecture or even the Haghia Sophia. It is believed that the Jury had recommended the two models. As with the Katholikon of Gračanica, its design was regarded the highpoint of the national architecture, and the competition manifested as the initial point in an evolving discourse about architecture and national identity in Serbian art. Gračanica, even not belonging to the group of memorial monasteries whose royal founders build them as burial places, became a chosen inspiration for the architects. They saw it as a modern source of inspiration in the quest for a true national style. The second competition saw 22 (24?) entries from major architects in the country. All final proposals had to be submitted before May 1927. Besides Bogdan Nestorović and Aleksandar Deroko, entries came from Dragiša Brašovan, Milan Zloković, Milutin Borisavljević, Branko Krstić and Petar Krstić, Žarko Tatić, Aleksej Papkov, Miladin Prljević, Branče Marinković and Žikica Piperski, Aleksander Vasić and others. The commission had Patriarch Dimitrije, Jovan Cvijić, Andra Stevanović and Bogdan Popović, Pera Popović and Momir Korunović. The commission declined to