Belgrade is not a city that gives itself away at first sight: it's a city that wins you over. The Serbian capital, set on the confluence of the Danube and the Sava, has been razed and rebuilt dozens of times over two thousand years, and that turbulent history shows on its skin: Austro-Hungarian façades next to socialist blocks, Orthodox churches, traces of Ottoman Belgrade and bullet-scarred buildings, all living alongside an overflowing urban energy. Anyone looking for perfect postcards may be puzzled; anyone looking for authenticity, atmosphere and life will find one of the most vibrant and hospitable capitals in Europe.
The heart of the city is Kalemegdan fortress, a huge historic park on the headland where the rivers meet, with walls from every era and Belgrade's best sunset. From there, the pedestrian Knez Mihailova street runs down to Republic Square, and just off to one side lies Skadarlija, the cobbled street of the bohemians, with its taverns (kafanas), live music and rakija. But Belgrade is famous above all for its nightlife: the splavovi, barge clubs moored along the banks of the Sava and the Danube, turn summer nights into a party that lasts until dawn.
This guide covers the essentials of Belgrade with a practical, warm approach: how to organise your days between the fortress, the museums and the neighbourhoods; where to eat ćevapi and drink rakija; how to use the city's public transport; which barges and bars to pick at night; and how to escape to Zemun, the Danube or Novi Sad. Belgrade is noisy, imperfect and addictive, and it usually leaves travellers wanting to come back.
Belgrade's history begins long before it bore that name. On the headland above the confluence of the Danube and the Sava there was a Celtic settlement, Singidunum, which the Romans turned into a legionary camp and a city of the province of Moesia. Because of its strategic position —the gateway between Central Europe and the Balkans— the city was fought over for centuries by Byzantines, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Serbs and Ottomans. In the Serbian Middle Ages it enjoyed its golden age under Despot Stefan Lazarević, in the early 15th century, when Belgrade became the capital and the fortress was strengthened. In 1521 it was taken by Suleiman the Magnificent, and for centuries it was an Ottoman frontier stronghold contested by the Habsburgs, who occupied it several times. In the 19th century, Belgrade was the symbol of Serbia's rebirth: capital of the autonomous principality and later of the independent kingdom, it saw the last Ottomans leave in 1867. The 20th century was brutal: the city suffered through the First World War, was bombed by Nazi Germany in 1941 and occupied, became the capital of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia after 1945, and was bombed again by NATO in 1999 during the wars of Yugoslavia's break-up. Its stones keep the memory of all of it. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Serbian capital and its Danube surroundings: one of the oldest and most destroyed cities in Europe, now vibrant and alive at night, alongside the spectacular Iron Gates gorge.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities in the world have such a clear birthplace as Belgrade. It all begins on the white headland where the Kalemegdan fortress stands today, at the exact point where the Sava river flows into the Danube. Whoever controls that crossing controls the gateway between the Pannonian Plain to the north and the Balkan Peninsula to the south. That is why, for more than two thousand years, this rock has been coveted, conquered and razed again and again.
The first to fortify it in a recognisable way were the Scordisci, a Celtic tribe that founded a settlement called Singidūn there in the 3rd century BC. The Roman name Singidunum comes from it. In the 1st century AD, Rome added the region to the province of Moesia and turned Singidunum into an important military camp. The Legio IV Flavia Felix was stationed here and built a stone castrum where the fortress stands today. A civilian town grew up next to the camp, with baths, streets and a cemetery, and Singidunum was given the rank of municipium and later of colonia.
Like so many towns on the Danubian limes, the fortified frontier the Empire held along the great river, Singidunum lived to the rhythm of wars against the peoples on the other bank. In 395, when the Roman Empire was divided, it fell on the eastern, Byzantine side. From then on it suffered waves of Huns, Ostrogoths, Gepids and Avars, who sacked it repeatedly. Only scattered remains of that Roman town survive beneath the fortress, but its strategic location would shape the fate of the place forever.
The current name first appears in 878, in a papal letter, in the Slavic form Beograd, 'the white city', after the colour of the rock and its walls. By then the Slavs had already settled in the region, and Belgrade had become a frontier stronghold that changed hands at a dizzying pace. Byzantines, Bulgarians and Hungarians fought over it for centuries. Being a frontier made it strategically attractive, and it also doomed the city to be destroyed and rebuilt dozens of times.
For much of the Middle Ages, Belgrade belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, which saw it as its southern bastion against the Byzantine world and later the Ottoman one. The high point of Serbian rule came in the early 15th century. Despot Stefan Lazarević, an ally of the Hungarians, received the city and made it the capital of his state (around 1403-1405). Under his rule Belgrade flourished. The walls of the upper and lower fortress were strengthened, churches and palaces went up, and the city filled with merchants, craftsmen and refugees fleeing the Turkish advance in the south. That Belgrade of the Despots was one of the last great Christian cities of south-eastern Europe before the Ottoman tide.
As the Ottoman Empire pushed towards the heart of Europe, Belgrade became the obvious target. In 1456 the city was the setting for one of the most famous episodes in European history: the Siege of Belgrade. Christian forces led by the Hungarian nobleman János Hunyadi (John Hunyadi), and spurred on by the friar John of Capistrano, drove back the army of Sultan Mehmed II, who had taken Constantinople three years earlier. Christendom celebrated the victory so widely that, according to tradition, the noon bell was introduced to commemorate it. Belgrade held out, but only for a few decades.
In 1521 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent finally conquered Belgrade, and it became one of the most important strongholds on the Ottoman Empire's European frontier. For almost three centuries the 'white city' was an Ottoman city, with mosques, hammams (bathhouses), bazaars and a mixed population of Turks, Serbs, Sephardic Jews, Armenians and merchants from all over the empire. It was the great military base from which Ottoman armies set out for Hungary and Vienna. For that very reason, the Austrian Habsburgs never stopped trying to take it.
Sitting on the frontier between two empires turned Belgrade into a battlefield again and again. The Austrians took it and lost it several times during the 17th and 18th centuries. They captured it in 1688, the Ottomans won it back in 1690, and it fell to Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1717, an episode made famous by a well-known folk song. The peace treaties of the following decades handed it from one side to the other once more. Every siege brought destruction, fires, deportations and rebuilding, and less and less of the Ottoman city survived. Much of the fortress you can visit today at Kalemegdan is the result of the large Austrian and Ottoman fortification works of that period of war.
In the early 19th century Belgrade was still an Ottoman city, but the world was changing. Nationalism was starting to stir in the Balkans, and the Serbs, tired of centuries of foreign rule, were getting ready to demand their freedom. Belgrade was the symbol of that rule and also of the future Serbian state, so it was bound to be at the centre of that revival.
The 19th century was when Serbia awoke, and Belgrade became its symbol. In 1804 the First Serbian Uprising broke out, led by Karađorđe (Black George), founder of the Karađorđević dynasty, who took Belgrade from the Ottomans in 1806. The uprising was crushed, but it started a process that could not be stopped. In the following decades a Second Uprising, led by Miloš Obrenović, won broad autonomy for the Principality of Serbia within the Ottoman Empire, with Belgrade as its capital.
Even so, an Ottoman presence lingered on as a symbol. For decades a Serbian administration and a Turkish garrison in the fortress existed side by side. The decisive moment came in 1867, when Prince Mihailo Obrenović secured the final withdrawal of Ottoman troops and the handover of the keys to Belgrade Fortress. The departure of the last Turkish soldiers is remembered as the birth of a fully Serbian Belgrade. The equestrian monument to Prince Mihailo in Republic Square commemorates it, with his arm pointing south towards the lands still under Ottoman rule. In 1878, after the Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlin, Serbia gained full independence, and in 1882 it was proclaimed a kingdom.
Once it was free, Belgrade set about modernising, with an eye on Vienna and Paris. The last oriental traces were torn down, and streets and boulevards were laid out. Grand buildings went up, along with the National Theatre, the University, cafés and shops, and the city took on the Central European feel you can still sense on Knez Mihailova. Within a few decades Belgrade went from an Ottoman frontier stronghold to the proud capital of a young Balkan nation-state.
The 20th century hit Belgrade with unusual force. In 1914, after the Sarajevo assassination, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and shelled Belgrade, making it one of the first cities attacked in the First World War. The city was taken, lost and retaken, and it endured a very harsh occupation. Serbia lost an enormous share of its population in that war but ended up on the winning side. In 1918 Belgrade became the capital of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929 it was renamed Yugoslavia, and it brought the South Slavs together in a single state.
The Second World War was even worse. On 6 April 1941 the air force of Nazi Germany bombed Belgrade in what was called Operation Punishment. It was revenge for the coup that had overthrown the pro-Axis government, and it killed thousands of people and caused massive damage. The Germans occupied the city. Belgrade's Jewish community, one of the oldest in the Balkans, was almost entirely wiped out in the Holocaust, and thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma died at the Sajmište camp across the Sava. Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav Partisans, backed by the Red Army, liberated Belgrade in October 1944.
After the war Belgrade became the capital of Tito's new socialist Yugoslavia, a federation of six republics. After the split with Stalin in 1948 it went its own way between the two blocs and led the Non-Aligned Movement. The city grew enormously. Across the Sava, Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) was built from scratch: a vast complex of modernist blocks and government buildings that is now an icon of the architecture of that era. These were decades of growth, industrialisation and some openness, up to Tito's death in 1980. His tomb in the House of Flowers is still a place of pilgrimage.
The last decade of the 20th century was tragic for the whole region. After Tito's death, amid economic crisis and rising nationalism, Yugoslavia broke apart from 1991 onwards in a series of wars that brought bloodshed to the Balkans. Belgrade was the capital of Slobodan Milošević's Serbia and of the smaller Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). There was no fighting on its own soil, but it went through years of international isolation, sanctions, hyperinflation and impoverishment. The wars killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Croatia, Bosnia and later Kosovo, and they left deep wounds that still shape politics and relations in the region. This text covers them briefly and soberly and points to the extensive historical literature on the subject.
In spring 1999, during the Kosovo War, NATO bombed Serbia and Belgrade for 78 days. Some of the buildings hit then, such as the former Ministry of Defence, still stand half-ruined in the middle of the city centre, visible scars of that episode. The following year, in October 2000, a huge popular uprising in Belgrade brought down Milošević and marked a turning point towards democracy and a more open country.
Since then Belgrade has come back as one of the liveliest capitals in south-eastern Europe. It has become a booming tourist destination thanks to its legendary nightlife (club barges on the rivers, kafanas, alternative bars), its thriving cultural and food scene and its affordable prices. The city keeps growing and changing, with controversial projects such as Belgrade Waterfront on the banks of the Sava. It carries the weight of its history along with the energy of a future that is slowly turning towards the European Union. Belgrade, the white city destroyed and rebuilt dozens of times, is still true to its character: resilient, imperfect and intensely alive.
