Construction of the neighborhood began in 1880 when a Scottish businessman and Nazarene Francis Mackenzie bought a large piece of land nearby (which eventually became known as Englezovac, Serbian for Englishman's place), parcelled it out into lots for selling and donated a piece of land to the Serbian Orthodox Church for the construction of the Temple of Saint Sava.

"The Society for the Embellishment of Vračar" suggested to Belgrade City Council to rename Englezovac to Savinac (Serbian for Sava’s place) on March 31, 1894.

They stated that it is "a shame for the Serbian capital that a whole district is called Englezovac" and inconceivable that a national shrine (Temple of Saint Sava) lie on foreign property.

In narrower sense, Savinac is just the triangular part between the streets of Svetog Save on the east, and the Boulevard of the Liberation, to which term Englezovac didn't apply.

In the late 1980s, many books and articles on "Old Belgrade" became popular again and so the term Englezovac, at this time already unknown to majority of people, resurfaced, but not Savinac.