The main promenade that no one has ever called by its official names, which it has changed several times during its history. Everyone knows it as Gospodska Street (Street of Gentlemen), and that’s the only name it’s been called for more than a century.
It was created at the beginning of the 19th century, in the place where Muslin’s pond used to be, where, in winter, when it froze, children would skate on it.
It is interesting that it got its name Gospodska Street because at the beginning of the street was the house of Albanija (during the Austro-Hungarian occupation), owned by Toma Radulović, one of the richest merchants in Banja Luka, who had a grocery store on the ground floor of the house. Revolted by the behaviour of certain uncultured visitors, who left a mess in his shop, he wrote “This is Gospodska Street” on a large piece of cardboard and hung the note on the facade of his house. Since then, this street has remained known as Gospodska.
The facades of the houses in Gospodska street are a protected architectural unit.
If we take a walk through the city’s past, each of those luxurious old buildings would tell an interesting story about the families that lived there and each, in their own way, left a mark in some segment of the city’s development with their actions, and I will mention a few interesting ones.
The longest house in Gospodska Street, which stretches for 32 meters, belonged to the Popović-Delić family. Lazar Popović was one of the richest merchants from Banja Luka. He married Mara Delić from Novi Pazar, who brought as a dowry two saddlebags of ducats, from which the magnificent house was built. As a sign of gratitude, the husband added her Delić to his surname, which is not common for today’s times, let alone for the period of a century ago.
That Banja Luka was a developed city at that time is proven by the Divjak family, which had a house in Gospodska and was a representative of Ford in the thirties of the twentieth century. The real attraction was the car parked in the window of the house where there was a dealership and their company “Braća Divjak”, where they sold bicycles, motorbikes and other goods. Their buses and taxi service operated in the city.
In one of the houses was the bookshop and printing house “Ugrenović” from 1898, one of the oldest in the city, where the well-known newspaper “Otadžbina” was printed, which was started and edited by Petar Kočić, our famous author and people’s tribune, known for the fact that he directed his actions against the occupiers to the fight with the written word, with the fact that this fight often apostrophized the improvement of the people’s mental and spiritual feelings.
Jewish families left a strong mark on the development of the city, and their businesses were mostly located in Gospodska Street – jewellery stores, barbershops, the first pharmacy…
Photo: banjalukatravel.com
Author: Marijana Mališanović, tourism graduate with a tourist guide license
The Srpska Times
