Sreten Stojanović

Who was Sreten Stojanović?

Sreten Stojanović was one of the most prominent Bosnian and Serbian sculptors of the 20th century.

He was born on the 15th of February 1898 in Prijedor in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the house of Orthodox priests who "preached the faith for strength of people and who imagined Russia to be something that is ours or more beautiful, bigger, more Orthodox, closer to God and more powerful than anything that was German or Turkish”, as he wrote in his autobiography. He inherited such a patriarchal family's firmness and stability, from people who grew up in that very soil and he spent his whole life being so ingrained, not giving up on the deepest and unchanged moral principles. He belonged to the Young Bosnia Movement where he was, as a juvenile pupil of the Tuzla's high school, sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was also shortly engaged adventurously in national interests at the end of the First World War. In Vienna he studied sculpture and at the beginning of the 1920s he enjoyed a turbulent bohemian life in Paris, where he also devoted himself to study. With Dragiša Vasić and Vladislav Ribnikar he was traveling through the Soviet Union in 1927. After the Second World War he was a dynamic social and cultural activist.