to resemble the appearance of the Haghia Sophia in Istanbul, which hadn't been a requirement during the competition. The guidelines required an edifice in the Serbian tradition of the late medieval period under Stefan Lazar (i.e. the five-domed churches of the Morava monasteries). Nestorović's own competition entry, based on the most-acclaimed achievement of Serbian medieval architecture, the katholikon of the Gračanica monastery, had also circumvented competition guidelines. Most of the 22 participants had deliberately chosen Haghia Sophia as inspiration. Few entries used modern designs with expressionistic features. Thus Haghia Sophia was the chosen archetype even during the official contest. Most Serbian critics considered this unfitting, as it was not in the national tradition. The universal sacral expression of the Haghia Sophia did albeit fit requirements in the heterogeneous Yugoslav state, which consisted of many different religions and nationalities. After a criticism campaign started early 1932 in the newsletter Vreme, the most important art debate in the former Yugoslavia began to unfold. It led to the intervention of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, who approved the reworked plans of Nestoroviċ and Deroko. Nestorović's change of model from "Gracanica" to "Haghia Sophia" is attributed to the new demands of the king and the clerics. The architects had each to present a plaster model at 1:100 scale, that appeared on 6 and 7 January 1932 in the Politika newspaper. Later that year, a new design, the final model, was presented. Even after this had been adopted, the debate continued. Especially modern art-critics, analyzing the ideological circumstances of the 1930 debate, labelled its appearance clumsy, non-inventive or a reproduction. Ljubica Jelisavac, art historian and art critic from the University of Arts in Belgrade, noted that the criticism was primarily based on ideological differences between traditionalists and modernists. Thus the real architectural achievement of the building was left marginalized in the debate. It was not even a topic inside art critic and architecture circles, but it wasn't omitted, that the decision to follow a traditionalistic design programme has been partly detrimental for architectural tendencies in Serbia in the interwar period. Milica Ćeranić defended the architectural achievement and stylistical form. She stated that the well-proportioned and harmonic interior of the church is a result of a cohesion in designing the exterior and the interior. To achieve this, the architects used a rigorously centralized arrangement, which is especially known from early Christianity. The spheric and cubic elements