The news that the building of the Association of Writers in France 7 will be reconstructed, even though they did not receive it from the Ministry of Culture, writers consider it a victory for twenty years of efforts to keep their roof and walls from collapsing.
The Writers' Association of Serbia received confirmation (on March 31) from the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the City of Belgrade that "the implementation of the project Reconstruction of the roof and part of the facade of the building is planned until the end of 2025".
This is extremely good news, because first of all it means that the UKS building in France 7 in Belgrade, which is a cultural monument, will not collapse and injure anyone.
A small victory
The Association of Writers of Serbia is the oldest artistic, guild and professional organization in the Balkans. This year marks (it would be more accurate to say: it plans to mark because they did not receive money from the Ministry of Culture) a great jubilee - 120 years since its founding. For the last twenty years, the authorities have been warning that staying in their building, where, among other things, 250 forums and literary evenings are held annually, is not safe.
"We perceive the news about the start of the building renovation as a small victory," says Miloš Janković, president of the Association of Writers, for the "Vremena" portal.
The Minister of Culture, Nikola Selaković, told Janković in a telephone conversation on December 20 last year that the Government's approval of 30 million dinars is expected for the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, as the contractor, for the first phase of rehabilitation and reconstruction of the building. But since then, they have not received any official confirmation about it.
"Until this letter from the Institute, that's why we consider it official, even though it didn't come from the Ministry," says Miloš Jovanović.
Owner and user of the building
The Ministry of Culture stopped communicating with the Writers' Association at the exact time when the writers supported the students in the blockade.
So, the UKS is from the correspondence of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the City of Belgrade. found out that at the end of 2024, the Ministry of Culture concluded an Agreement with the Institute on co-financing the project Reconstruction of the roof and part of the facade in France 7, that the funds were transferred to the City Secretariat for Culture, and that the procedure to transfer them to the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the City of Belgrade is underway.
This transfer from the republican budget to the city budget is a consequence, conditionally speaking, of the existence of two owners of the building.
Namely, the owner of the building is the Republic of Serbia, considering that the building is a cultural monument, and the user is the City of Belgrade.
Miloš Janković reminds that "in 1945, Mitra Mitrović, the Minister of Education at the time, decided that the money from the lease of the building be given to the Association in order to use it for building maintenance, but in 2002 it was taken from us, and since then the lease of the space used by the Writers' Club restaurant belongs to the City."
Janković says that "unfortunately, even the previous authorities did not take care of the building, not only the current one", and he cites Goran Vesić's decision from 2021, when he was deputy mayor, to set aside 30 million for the rehabilitation of the building over the course of three years as the only bright moment.
"However, when Aleksandar Šapić came to power, that decision was annulled," says Jovanović.
Guarantee
He adds that the fact that the money will be transferred to the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments so that it can start work "does not mean that the money will be used for that purpose, but for now we have no reason to doubt it." He also says that "regardless of whether we agree or not with the way he leads the country's culture, Minister Nikola Selaković is the first of his predecessors who had an ear for our building."
In the letter from the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, it is written that "as the first phase of the implementation of the works, the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the roof, roof structure and part of the facade in the area of the roof is planned. The deterioration of the roof, roof covering and roof sheeting contributed to a large extent to the general devastation of the facade of the building, because their damage allowed the penetration of storm water into the ceiling space and seepage through the ceiling structure into the space of the building itself. These works would stop the further deterioration of the facade, which would renovation was carried out as part of the second phase. Also, the preparation of all the necessary documentation is underway - documentation for obtaining permits for the execution of works, documentation for the implementation of the public procurement procedure for the selection of the Contractor, documentation for the implementation of the public procurement procedure for the selection of the Contractor and Expert supervision."
The building in France 7, where the Association of Writers of Serbia is located, was built in 1886 and was the family home of Milan Piroćanc, the president of the then government and the then Serbian Progressive Party.
Then there was the Embassy of Turkey (Ottoman Empire), during the Great War it housed high-ranking Austro-Hungarian officers, after that it was the Embassy of the USA, from 1937 to 1941 the seat of the Auto-moto club of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and during the Second World War Gestapo officers lived there.
From 1945, it became the seat of the former Union of Writers of Yugoslavia (president Ivo Andrić) and the Association of Writers of Serbia (president Isidora Sekulić).
Today, this building houses all three representative cultural associations for the field of literature - UKS, the Serbian Literature Society and the Association of Literary Translators of Serbia.
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