ecclesiastic and administrative central functions there were had gathered in the area where Reykjavik emerged from the beginning of the twentieth century. The Hague, before the nation, and Berne, for the nation, were chosen by deliberation: the Hague because of its insignificance as a neutral meeting place of the Estates-General of the United Provinces,* Berne as the most central of the major cantonal cities, ethnically – straddling the border between French and German speakers – as well as geographically.
As its full Dutch name – ’s-Gravenhage (the Count’s Wood) – indicates, the Hague has an aristocratic origin as the seat of the medieval counts of Holland and during the federal republic also of the stadhouder (commander-in-chief), when there was one. The Estates gathered in its Ridderzaal (Knights’ Hall), where Parliament now assembles. Berne had been a small oligarchic city republic before becoming, in 1831, the capital of the strong canton of Berne and, in 1848, the permanent seat of the Federal Assembly of the Swiss nation-state. A modest assembly house was built in the 1850s in a square dominated by a casino.* In the 1890s the latter was replaced by a new parliament building, gradually accompanied around the quiet Bundesplatz by the National Bank, the Kantonalbank and the Crédit Suisse.
Balkan Ruptures
The ancient cities of Athens and Sofia (originally Roman Serdica) had shrunk radically and were no longer even regionally dominant, but were soon chosen by the new states: Athens for historical reasons – although the new Bavarian authorities originally planned to demolish the Parthenon and install a new royal palace there† – and Sofia in a complex geopolitical game with several somewhat larger Bulgarian cities.31 To Greek nationalists, Athens was for many decades a provisional capital, a kind of Bonn to the prosperous diaspora while Constantinople was still Ottoman.
Athens and Sofia also exemplify the limitations of the sovereignty of the new Balkan states. Greece and Bulgaria both owed their statehood to foreign armies and navies: the former to an alliance of Britain, France and Russia, the latter to Russia. Greece not only got an absolutist Bavarian king – as neutral between the three big powers – but also a Bavarian administration, and Athens got German architects.32 All this generated two revolutions in Athens, in 1843 and in 1862, leading to a national constitution and a new dynasty. The square in front of the Bavarian Royal Palace became Syntagma (Constitution) Square. From 1909 until its demise, the monarchy had to keep up with a more laid-back mansion, first intended for the crown prince of the new dynasty; the palace was, after lengthy renovation, taken over by Parliament in 1934. As far as I know, this is only the second example in the world of a single building representing the change from royal absolutism to parliamentarism.*
Sofia too got a German king, Alexander von Battenberg – of the family later known in Britain as Mountbatten – and a heavy input of Viennese architecture. It is one of the two European capitals whose main street is named after a foreign prince – the other is Oslo, still paying homage to the ex-Napoleonic marshal who was elected king of Sweden and who, under the name of Karl Johan, conquered Norway in 1814. Sofia dedicates its principal avenue to the Tsar Osvoboditel (the Tsar Liberator), meaning Alexander II of Russia, who conquered Bulgaria for the Bulgarians. The Tsar himself stands in a semi-circle in front of the national parliament at one end of the avenue. He is still there, and also remained during Communist times. The first monument erected in ex-Ottoman Sofia was to a national independence hero, though, Vasil Levski.33
In the Balkans, the national was first of all anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim. The national was largely centred around Orthodox churches, for which grand new cathedrals were built – in Belgrade, in Habsburgian Baroque, already in the 1830s after Ottoman recognition of Serbian autonomy;† in Athens, Bucharest and Sofia in neo-Byzantine splendour. Another priority building was a royal palace, at a time when royalty was still more anti-Ottoman than national. More genuinely national was the Bucharest Academy, where Romanian was first taught and which soon turned into a university.‡ Serbian Belgrade built its parliament on the former site of the main mosque,34 and in Sofia the main mosque was turned first into a Russian military hospital, then a national library and finally a national museum.35 The Muslim population fled en masse after the defeat of the Ottoman troops. Another thrust was de-Orientalization and Europeanization, for which architects and city planners were invited from Germany, Austria and sometimes France (especially to Bucharest) and other parts of Western Europe, from Italy in the case of Tirana.
For these reasons, the Balkan national capitals do not share the urbanistic continuity of the rest of Europe. Indeed, their rupture with the previous layout of space and architecture is unique in modern times, without any equivalent among the capitals of the ex-colonial zone, among the capital changes of those of reactive modernization, nor among any of the later Communist capitals (except for American-bombed-out Pyongyang). The avidly imported European ideas of public space – wide streets and open places, grid planning and exterior-oriented (instead of inward-turned) residential and public buildings – clashed totally with the Ottoman tradition. Even the architecture of the buildings of Ottoman power was seen as unattractive. Only as a temporary stopgap could the Bulgarian king think of living in the konak of the Ottoman governor, and Romanian Bucharest had no use for the fortified caravanserais which had been the landmarks among the vineyards and gardens of the semi-rural city.
Though facilitated by the massive flight of the ‘Turks’, the whole cities were, of course, not transformed over a decade or two. But certain central areas were, in a dramatic way. In Athens three new avenues were laid out in the centre, with the ‘academic trilogy’ of impressive neoclassical buildings along one of them: University Street, for the university, the Academy and the National Library, designed by the Danish architect Hans Christian Hansen and his brother Theophil. Bucharest gave priority to building and widening a set of boulevards, which after the 1877 war (which won Romania total independence) were all named after events or heroes of the war, fronted by Calea Victoriei with a triumphal arch.36 I have already mentioned Sofia’s Tsar Liberator Avenue. Poor Belgrade changed more slowly, but the street joining it with the road to Istanbul became the main boulevard. Zagreb and Ljubljana were never under Ottoman rule and could therefore follow the European mainstream of continuist change. Tirana became the permanent capital of Albania only in 1925, fifteen years after a proclamation of independence during the first Balkan War, as a small town of 10,000. It was not purged of mosques and Muslims like the other Balkan capitals of the time, but came under strong influence from Italy and Fascism in the 1930s.
Ethnic Change in the East-Central Strip
The ethnic national character of the East-Central European capitals had luckily been decided before the nation-state came onto the top of the agenda. By and large it was decided by immigration from the countryside, driven by rural proletarianization, urban industrialization and rail transport. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnic city government and impact was a hot issue in almost all the future national capitals of East-Central Europe. Only three or four among twenty future capitals had by the mid-nineteenth century an ethnic majority from their coming nation: Warsaw, Ljubljana, Zagreb and perhaps tiny Tirana. Helsinki was mainly Swedish-speaking, Tallinn (known as Reval) and Riga were German-dominated, Vilnius was Jewish (and Polish), Minsk was Jewish and Yiddish-speaking, Prague was primarily German and Bratislava was called Pozsony and was until the 1840s the coronation city of the Hungarian crown and the most frequent seat of the Magyar Estates. Budapest consisted of Buda, Obuda and Pest, all three predominantly German in the early nineteenth century. Belgrade was Muslim; Bucharest was Greek-dominated; Skopje more Muslim than Macedonian; and Sofia a multi-ethnic, largely Muslim city. In Sarajevo the Muslims, today’s ‘Bosniaks’, remained a (large) minority until sometime between 1948 and 1991, while in 1926 Ukrainians were less than half of Kyiv’s population and Romanians less than half of Chişinău’s.37
Inter-ethnic friction and conflicts festered in East-Central Europe throughout the twentieth century and even after, but the character of the nation-state capitals was never in doubt, except for Vilnius, which was not the capital of the inter-war Lithuanian Republic because it was ruled by Poland and
