The site was chosen before the building was ever imagined. On the Vračar plateau, according to tradition, Ottoman forces burned the relics of Saint Sava, founder of the independent Serbian church; centuries later, Serbia decided to answer that act with the largest church it could build. Begun in the twentieth century and interrupted repeatedly by war and by political circumstance, the Temple of Saint Sava takes Hagia Sophia as its distant model: a vast central dome, raised in one piece and lifted into position in a feat of engineering, above a white marble mass visible across the city. The film covers the construction saga, the acoustics and scale of the interior, and above all the recently completed mosaic decoration, one of the most ambitious such programmes attempted in modern times. A flagship title for sacred-heritage strands and capital-city portraits.
