The hospital in Belgrade, officially named the City or General Hospital, with 100 patient beds, was handed over to the Municipality of Belgrade in 1935. That building was the nucleus of the later large Zvezdara Clinical Hospital Centre and is still in use today; it houses the Department of Surgery.
Spasić’s sanatorium
The hospital building at Bulbulder is an endowment of Nikola Spasić and the work of the well-known architect Ignjat Popović. The building was solemnly opened on 16 September 1935 and received its first patients two months later. On the front of the building is a relief portrait of the benefactor Nikola Spasić, remembered by the people for his care for sick and poor fellow citizens. The relief was made by the sculptor Đorđe Jovanović.
Built in the spirit of modernism, it was regarded at the time as a prominent building at Bulbulder. In one of the rooms His Holiness Patriarch Varnava consecrated the hospital. The first director of the hospital was Dr Siniša Ilić, and the head of the internal medicine department was Dr Miloš Sekulić.
Already in 1936, at the time of Queen Maria’s visit to the hospital, there were 45 patients in the hospital.
(Taken from the Facebook group Once Upon a Time There Was a Belgrade, author Mileta Andrić)
