More than a century ago, a Serb competed in the Olympics in as many as four disciplines and was more than successful, without being a professional athlete but a respected architect! His name was Momcilo Tapavica. he was a Serbian architect, a versatile athlete, a participant in the First Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens and a third place winner in tennis for Hungary. At that time, Vojvodina was part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and Austria and Hungary had special teams at the Olympic Games.
The first modern Olympic Games… Greece at the end of the 19th century… Only 14 countries responded to the invitation to compete for the greatest sporting features. Serbia was not among them, but that does not mean that there were no Serbs in Athens in 1896, at least in an indirect way. The ceremonial opening of the first Games of the modern world was attended by King Aleksandar Obrenović as the only foreign official who found time to go to Greece. Among the participants, under the flag of Hungary, Momcilo Tapavica, a Serb from the village of Nadalj in Vojvodina, also competed.
An architect with the heart of an Olympian!
There was no living from sports at that time. He just loved himself then. Momcilo Tapavica was an architect who ran, lifted weights and played tennis in his free time. He was considered one of the strongest people in Vojvodina, strong and very developed. When the invitation came from Hungary to compete under its flag at the renewed Olympic Games, Momcilo also responded by trying out as many as four disciplines - athletics, wrestling, weightlifting and tennis. Out of a total of six medals won by Hungary at the Olympics in Athens, Momcilo Tapavica took one, but the others escaped him "by a hair". He was fourth in wrestling and sixth in weightlifting. Due to the injury, he had to give up competition in athletics. The crown of Momcilo's competition was a bronze medal in tennis. After him, this success was repeated for Serbia only by Novak Djokovic more than a century later, at the Olympics in Beijing in 2008.
A true renaissance man!
Momcilo Tapavica was born to Nadalja near Novi Sad, on October 26, 1872. Aron's father was a village gendarme, while his mother is said to have been called Ekatarina and her maiden name was Kaćanski. After graduating from high school, Tapavica finished architecture in Budapest. He lived and worked in Novi Sad for some time, and after designing the Boka Hotel in Herceg Novi (1907), at the invitation of the Montenegrin King Nikola I, he went to Montenegro where he designed and built several other important buildings. In Cetinje he designed the buildings of the German Embassy and the State Bank of Montenegro, in Bijela he designed a building that was later converted into an orphanage, and in 1912 in Novi Sad he designed his most important architectural work - the Matica Srpska building. During the First World War he emigrated from Austro-Hungary and went to Morocco via Rome and Lausanne. In Rabat, Tapavica is working on a demanding job of state geodetic surveying, doing this work until the end of the war. After that, he lived in Novi Sad for the entire interwar period and ran the design office he opened in Petrovaradin. For a time, he was also the government commissioner for land reclamation in northeastern Srijem. He spent the Second World War entirely in Novi Sad, and in 1948 he moved to Istria. A restless spirit at the age of 76 brought him to Poreč, where he settled and became involved in the reconstruction of the city, which was destroyed by the war. After only a year, he contracted jaundice and died on January 10, 1949. He found his final peace in Pula, where he was buried.
BUST IN HERCEG NOVI!
The only city that deservedly owes the athlete Tapavica is Herceg Novi, where his bust was placed in 1996. In addition to designing the Boka Hotel, members of his family were active athletes in Herceg Novi, so we learn that his son Mirko was the goalkeeper of the water polo club "Jadran" and his daughter Jasna was one of the first tennis players in the city. Although Mirko later moved to Argentina, it is said that he remained faithful to this coastal town and that sailing on the seas of South America on his sailboat carried the flag of the "Adriatic" from Herceg Novi.
Although he won the Olympic medal for the national team of Hungary (today's Hungary), the International Tennis Federation leads Momcilo Tapavica as a Yugoslav tennis player.
