The Church of Saint Sava Храм Светог Саве, Hram Svetog Save, ”The Temple of Saint Sava” is a Serbian Orthodox church in Belgrade. It is the fourth largest Eastern Orthodox church in the world and one of the largest churches in the world by gross volume.
The church is dedicated to Saint Sava, the first Serbian archbishop and the nation’s patron saint. It was symbolically built on the site where his relics are believed to have been burned on a pyre by the Ottoman Muslims in 1594, following a Serb uprising.
Construction of the church began in 1935 and was completed only in 2004, when the exterior was finished, and in 2020, when work on the interior was completed.
Inspired by the Hagia Sophia, in Constantinopolis of the Christian Byzantine empire,the Church of Saint Sava is one of Belgrade’s most recognizable landmarks and a major tourist attraction.
The church stands on the western promontory of the Vračar plateau, at an elevation of 134 m above sea level. The plateau is largely flat, except for the mound topped by the statue of Karađorđe. The base of the church is situated 18 m above Belgrade’s traditional geographic center, Terazije.
It is also 10 m higher than Tašmajdan Park, where the Church of Saint Mark, the second-largest church in Belgrade, is located. Rising 63 m above the confluence of the Sava and Danube, the church serves as a prominent natural viewpoint and one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks.
In 2021, the Vračar plateau was declared a protected heritage site as the “Saint Sava Plateau”. The official rationale cited the “symbolic, memorial, cultural-historical, architectural-urbanistic, and artistic values of the locality”, which commemorates two important events in Serbian history: the burning of Saint Sava’s relics in 1594 and the siege of Belgrade in 1806.
The church is a centrally planned edifice in the form of a Greek cross, measuring 91 m from east to west and 81 m from north to south.
The dome of the Church of Saint Sava is double-shelled dome at 27 m high, reaching an external height of 68.5 m and an internal height of 64.8 m, while the main gold-plated Serbian cross is an additional 10 m high and 5 m wide, bringing the total height of the Church of Saint Sava to 78.3 m.
The dome is the largest of any Eastern Orthodox church, with an inner diameter of 30.5 m and an outer diameter of 35.1 m. Among churches of other Christian denominations, only the domes of 5 other churches have larger inner diameters. The dome of Saint Sava is the fourth-tallest dome of Eastern Orthodox Christianity,
The façade, covering an area of 12,000 m2 was primarily executed in polished white Volakas marble from Greece, with approximately 3,000 tonnes of stone used in its construction. The cornices are made of red Balmoral granite from Finland and cover 120 m2 on the dome and semi-domes.
The interior has a surface area of 3,650 m2 on the ground floor, with three galleries covering 1,500 m2 on the first level and a 120 m2 gallery on the second level. The church can accommodate up to 7,000 faithful on the ground floor.
The naos (temple in Greek), or main worship space, measures 46 m by 46 m, while the square of the central space beneath the dome is 39.7 m wide and occupies 1,578 m2 The church has narthexes on three sides, two of which are 9 m deep and 31.7 m wide, with small chapels located within the northern and southern narthexes.
Galleries supported by arcades are situated above the narthexes and beneath three of the four semi-domes (the semi-dome above the altar does not contain a gallery), while the western gallery serves as the church choir. The basement, with a total surface area of 1,800 m2, contains a crypt, including the Crypt Church of Saint Lazar the Hieromartyr.
The total area of the mosaics covering the interior of the church amounts about 15,000 m2constituting the largest mosaic surface across the Christendom. The mosaics, containing around 5 million tesseras and designed by Russian iconographer and sculptor Nikolay Mukhin, follow the classical Palaeologan-era tradition of gold mosaics.
The main “iconostasion” (Greek εικονοστασιον: the carved wood or marble partition that separates the main church from the Holy Altar and bears the large icons). is constructed from iron trusses onto which slabs of Carrara marble are installed. The entire structure of the approximately 20 metre-wide iconostasion weighs 100 tonnes. It is decorated with a row of six mosaic icons and contains three doors, while episcopal seats are positioned on both sides of the iconostasion.
The heraldic symbols of the Nemanjić dynasty are a dominant motif, while floral ornamentation and anthropomorphic figures are inspired by the rich sculptural tradition of the Morava style. The capitals are made of Carrara marble, while the columns are made of green Baveno marble.
The wheel chandelier, one of the largest and heaviest in the world, is the church’s main circular lighting fixture, cast in bronze with a diameter of 20 m.
The church has 49 bells, four of which are free-swinging and located in the southwestern tower. The remaining 45 are part of a carillon, the only one in the Balkans, which regularly performs the Hymn of Saint Sava.
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