Church of St. George the Great Martyr - Smederevo

The Church of the Holy Martyr George, with its five domes, dominates the main town square in Smederevo and together with the buildings of the Court and the Municipal House, it forms an exceptional architectural unit of the former capital of Despot Lazarevic.

It was built from 1850 to 1854 and was modeled after the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Monastery of Manasi. It is one of the four largest Orthodox churches in Serbia by size.

Swap invaders badly damaged it twice. The first time was in 1915, but it was restored in 1922 at the initiative of the Circle of Sisters. As Swabian vandals destroyed the old iconostasis, the Board of Directors of the Smederevo Church Municipality concluded in 1935 a Treaty on the Painting of the Temple and the Making of Iconostasis with Andrei Bicenko, an academic painter of Russian descent who fled to Russia at the time after the coup. Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Bicenko completed the job by combining the traditions of the old and the new homeland.

For the second time, the shrine was damaged in an explosion of ammunition at the nearby Smederevo fortress on June 5, 1941. The consequences of the explosion are still visible. Namely, due to the strong detonation, the land beneath the church, which was otherwise wetland, gave way in some places, making the church floor extremely uneven.

The vault of the church bears six huge marble-lined columns with Byzantine capitals connected by arches. The facade of the church is dominated by Serbian medieval tradition, but it also has elements of Baroque and Islam.

An inseparable part of the church unit is a magnificent monument erected in the porte by the heroes of Smederevo who died in the First World War.