Belgrade pagoda

Among them were hundreds of Kalmyks, Western Mongolian people of Buddhist faith, who inhabited the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Having several priests in their community, already in 1923 they rented rooms in the still existing house in the Vojislava Ilića street No 47 for religious service.

[2] The Kalmyks were headed by the former colonel of the Russian Imperial Army, Abusha Alekseyev (1886–1938) and the Buddhist elder Manchuda Borinov (1872-1928).

That same year, Kalmyks were granted permission to build the temple, given to them from both the political and Serbian Orthodox Church authorities.

The guests included members of the Kalmyk diaspora in Czechoslovakia and France, so as the representatives of the Russian organizations in Belgrade, including the atamans of the Don Cossacks and the Terek Cossacks, as the Kalmyks in Russian Empire mostly served in the army horse units.

Through the contacts with the Japanese envoy to Bucharest, in the neighboring Romania, a large bronze statue of Buddha arrived from Tokyo and was consecrated on 25 March 1934.

As a result of the cordial relations the two communities had, there were Kalmyk–Serbian marriages, where Kalmyk men would marry Serbian women.

Kalmyks would often serve tea to the neighbors and during the religious holidays they would give presents to the children from the neighborhood.

As the city government had no machinery required for the job, they invited the Kalmyks, with their horses and carts, to remove the rubble and earth from the foundation pit.

With the advance of Yugoslav Partisans and Soviet Red Army in the September 1944, and fearing the reprisals of the latter, some 300 remaining Kalmyks withdrew with German troops, first to Germany and then resettling in New Jersey, United States of America, where they established a new colony.

From 12 to 16 October 1944, during the final days of the Liberation of Belgrade, the upper section of the temple was demolished due to the fightings in its vicinity.

[1] However, in the 2010s, newspapers began to occasionally print articles on Kalmyks, bringing more and more their story to the modern readers and usually referring to the temple as the Belgrade pagoda.