St Mark's is a modern building that chose to look old, and did so with conviction. Its architects took the medieval Serbian church of Gračanica as their model, translating a fourteenth-century plan of stepped domes and banded masonry into a scale suited to a capital city. The result is one of Belgrade's largest Orthodox churches and one of the clearest statements of the Serbo-Byzantine revival, a movement that used architecture to reconnect a young state with its medieval past. The film sets the exterior massing against its urban park setting, then works through the interior: the iconostasis, the marble surfaces, the light falling from the central dome, and the sarcophagus of Emperor Stefan Dušan, brought here from elsewhere. A clear, accessible title for sacred-heritage strands and architectural-history collections.
