Cvetkova Pijaca

Cvetkova Pijaca or colloquially Cvetko (Serbian Cyrillic: Цветкова пијаца) is an open green market and an urban neighborhood of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Belgrade's municipality of Zvezdara.

Location

Cvetko is located along the Bulevar kralja Aleksandra, in the field south of Zvezdara hill, in the easternmost section of the former Vračar area (modern local community which covers the area of Cvetko is called Vračarsko polje, Vračar field). It is 3,5 kilometers south-east of downtown Belgrade (Terazije). It is centered on the green market and extends into the neighborhood of Konjarnik on the south and Lion on the west.

History & characteristics

In the 1930s, area of modern Cvetkova pijaca was the eastern edge of the city. Belgrade's entrepreneur Cvetko Jovanović owned kafana and neighboring lots, so the area gradually became known as Cvetkova mehana. Today, neighborhood is dominated by the open green market, Cvetkova pijaca (Serbian for Cvetko's market), one of major ones in Belgrade. After World War I, the section near Olimp was settled by the Kalmyks from the shores of the Caspian Sea, which fled Imperial Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. In Kozarčeva street, they built Buddhist temple, a Mongolian-type pagoda in 1929, which was leveled to the ground in 1944, during German occupation of Belgrade.

Other important nearby features are the sports center "Zvezdara" (popularly called Olimp, Olympus) and the theater "Zvezdara teatar". The population of the neighborhood was 4,843 by the 2002 census.