Long before anything called Serbia existed, these lands were home to Illyrian, Thracian and Celtic peoples, and were later absorbed by the expansion of Rome. By the 1st century AD, the territory was divided between the Roman provinces of Moesia and Pannonia, crossed by the Danube, which served as both frontier and trade route. Cities such as Singidunum (today's Belgrade), Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica) and Naissus (Niš) became major military and administrative centres.
Sirmium became one of the four capitals of the Empire during the Tetrarchy, and these Danubian provinces gave Rome several emperors. The most famous was born in Naissus around the year 272: Constantine the Great, the emperor who legalised Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 313 and founded Constantinople. That the man who changed Europe's religious destiny was born in what is now Niš is something Serbs recall with pride, and a hint of just how central this soil was to the ancient world.
With the division of the Empire in 395, the territory fell within the orbit of the Eastern Roman Empire, that is, Byzantium. That belonging to the Byzantine world, rather than the Latin one, would shape the language, the script and, above all, the religion of the Serbs forever.
Between the 6th and 7th centuries, waves of Slavic peoples crossed the Danube and settled in the Balkans, displacing or mixing with the Romanised population. Among them were the ancestors of the Serbs, who gradually occupied the mountain valleys of the interior, around the Ibar, Drina and Morava rivers. For centuries they lived in small tribal principalities, the župas, in the shadow of two powers: Byzantium to the south and, later, the Hungarian and Bulgarian kingdoms to the north and east.
The decisive event of this period was Christianisation. In the 9th century, the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius and their disciples spread Christianity in the Slavic language and created an alphabet of their own, the one that would evolve into the Cyrillic script Serbia still uses today. The Serbs adopted Christianity in its Eastern form, the one that after the Schism of 1054 would be defined as Orthodox.
That choice was far more than religious: it tied Serbian identity to the Byzantine and Orthodox world, and drew a cultural line with neighbouring peoples who turned towards Rome, such as the Croats and Slovenes. Cyrillic script, the liturgical calendar, the art of icons: much of what distinguishes Serbian culture today was decided in these formative centuries.
The great leap came with the Nemanjić dynasty, which ruled Serbia for almost two centuries and turned it into a Balkan power. Its founder, Stefan Nemanja, unified the Serbian principalities into a solid state in the late 12th century. His son Stefan was crowned king in 1217, and another son, Rastko, became a monk under the name Sava: as Saint Sava, in 1219 he secured autocephaly for the Serbian Orthodox Church, that is, an independent national Church. A king of its own and a Church of its own: the two pillars of medieval Serbia.
The Nemanjić left their most lasting mark in stone and paint. They built monasteries that still astonish: Studenica, with its white marble church; Žiča, the coronation seat; Sopoćani and Mileševa, whose frescoes, such as the famous White Angel, rank among the high points of medieval European art. These monasteries were not just places of worship, but centres of power, culture and writing.
The splendour peaked under Stefan Dušan. Crowned king in 1331, he expanded the kingdom at Byzantium's expense until it doubled in size, taking in Macedonia, Albania, Epirus and Thessaly. On 16 April 1346, in Skopje, he had himself crowned 'Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks', claiming the Byzantine legacy for himself. That same year he raised the Serbian Church to the rank of patriarchate. Under Dušan, Serbia was the most powerful state in south-eastern Europe, with its own law code, the Zakonik of 1349. But the empire depended too heavily on one man: when Dušan died in 1355, aged just 47, the whole structure began to crack.
After Dušan's death, the empire fragmented into rival lordships just as a formidable enemy appeared in the Balkans: the Ottoman Empire. The decisive clash came on 28 June 1389, Saint Vitus' Day (Vidovdan), on the field of Kosovo, near today's Pristina. There, a Serbian and allied army led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović faced the Ottoman troops of Sultan Murad I.
The historical facts are partly uncertain. We know the battle was extraordinarily bloody, that both Prince Lazar and Sultan Murad were killed, and that both armies were decimated. Many historians consider it, in strictly military terms, a draw or an indecisive result. But an exhausted Serbia could not replace its losses, while the vast Ottoman Empire could: over the following decades Serbia was reduced to vassalage and, eventually, absorbed.
Kosovo matters less for what happened than for what it came to mean. Over the centuries, the battle became the great founding myth of Serbian identity: Prince Lazar turned martyr, the choice of the 'heavenly kingdom' over the earthly one, the sacrifice of a people for their faith. That narrative, sung in popular epic poetry for generations, gave Serbs a sense of continuity under foreign rule, but it was also exploited politically, above all in the late 20th century. It is worth keeping the distinction any honest history demands: the events of 1389 are one thing, the legend built on top of them is another.
After the fall of Smederevo in 1459, the last stronghold of the Serbian state, Serbia ceased to exist as a political entity and was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, where it would remain, with nuances, for almost four and a half centuries. It was a long and complex period, far from the simple 'slavery' of nationalist accounts, but also far from an idyllic coexistence.
As Christians, Serbs were second-class subjects: they paid special taxes and, above all, endured for generations the devşirme, the 'blood tax' by which the Ottoman state took Christian boys to convert them to Islam and train them as Janissary soldiers or officials. At the same time, the millet system allowed the Orthodox Church to survive as an institution and preserve the language, faith and memory of the people. The Patriarchate of Peć, restored in 1557, served as the backbone of a stateless Serbian identity.
The frontier between the Ottoman and Habsburg worlds ran through these lands and made them a zone of recurring wars. In 1690, after a failed rebellion, came the Great Serbian Migration: tens of thousands of families, led by Patriarch Arsenije III, fled north into Habsburg territory in today's Vojvodina and Hungary. That exodus reshaped the demographic map of the Balkans and explains why much of modern Serbian cultural life took root north of the Danube, outside Ottoman rule.
Serbia's political rebirth began in violence and desperation. In 1804, a group of renegade Janissaries, the dahije, seized power in the Pashalik of Belgrade and massacred dozens of Serbian notables in the episode known as the 'Slaughter of the Knezes'. The response was the First Serbian Uprising (1804-1813), led by Đorđe Petrović, nicknamed Karađorđe ('Black George'). What began as a revolt against abusive officials turned into a war of independence after almost three centuries of Ottoman rule. The rebels went on to govern a de facto state, but in 1813, without Russian support, the Ottomans crushed the uprising.
Two years later the Second Uprising broke out (1815), led by Miloš Obrenović, more skilled at negotiation than at war. His strategy of pressure and diplomacy paid off: in 1830 and 1833 Serbia was recognised as an autonomous principality, with hereditary princes who paid tribute to the sultan. The rivalry between the two founding dynasties, the Karađorđević and the Obrenović, would stain Serbian politics with blood for the rest of the century.
Full independence came in stages. In 1867 the last Ottoman garrisons withdrew from Serbian fortresses, and in 1878, after the Russo-Turkish War, the Congress of Berlin formally recognised Serbia's independence. In 1882 the principality became a kingdom. In just eighty years, a stateless peasant people had put Serbia back on the map of Europe.
For Serbia, the 20th century opened with ambition and tragedy. The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 allowed it to expand southwards, regaining Kosovo and part of Macedonia and doubling its territory. But that growth strained relations with Austria-Hungary, which saw a rising Serbia as a threat to its rule over the South Slavs.
On 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The attack triggered the crisis that within weeks dragged the great powers into the First World War. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, and the system of alliances did the rest.
For Serbia, the war was devastating. After successfully resisting the first offensives, in 1915 it was invaded by Austro-Hungarian, German and Bulgarian forces. The Serbian army and thousands of civilians then began the tragic retreat across the mountains of Albania in the depths of winter, a march in which hundreds of thousands died of cold, hunger and disease. Serbia is estimated to have lost around a quarter of its population in the war, one of the highest proportional death tolls of the entire conflict. The survivors, regrouped on the Salonika front, took part in the final offensive that defeated the Central Powers in 1918.
From the sacrifice of the Great War came an old dream: uniting all the South Slavs in a single state. On 1 December 1918 the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed, under the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty. Serbia, as a victorious power, provided the crown and much of the state apparatus, which from the outset fuelled the perception, especially among Croats, that this was a 'Greater Serbia' in disguise.
The new kingdom was born with deep tensions between the centralism championed in Belgrade and the federalism demanded by Croats and other peoples. The political crisis reached its most violent point in 1928, when a Serbian deputy opened fire on Croatian leaders in the middle of parliament, killing Stjepan Radić among others. In response, King Alexander I suspended the constitution in 1929, set up a dictatorship and renamed the country the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, seeking to forge a single nation by decree. Alexander himself was assassinated in Marseille in 1934.
That first Yugoslavia was an unstable experiment, unable to resolve the national question tearing it apart from within. It never had time to find its balance: in April 1941, Nazi Germany and its allies invaded and dismembered it.
In Yugoslavia, the Second World War was a war within a war: against the German and Italian occupiers, but also a brutal civil war. Croatian territory was ruled by the fascist Ustaša regime, responsible for the genocide of Serbs, Jews and Roma, with the Jasenovac camp as its most horrific symbol. Two rival movements rose up against the occupation: Draža Mihailović's monarchist, Serbian Chetniks, and the communist, multi-ethnic Partisans led by Josip Broz, Tito. The fighting between them, on top of the fight against the occupiers, left hundreds of thousands dead.
Tito's Partisans won both the war and power. In 1945 the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was founded, with six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro, plus two autonomous provinces within Serbia, Vojvodina and Kosovo. In 1948, Tito broke with Stalin and took Yugoslavia down its own path, distinct from the Soviet bloc: workers' self-management, relative openness to the West and leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Tito's Yugoslavia offered decades of stability, modernisation and growth, with a standard of living and a freedom of movement that set it apart from the rest of Eastern Europe. But the balance rested on the charisma of one man and on the slogan 'brotherhood and unity', which kept national tensions in check without resolving them. When Tito died in 1980, nothing was left to hold those tensions back.
The decade after Tito's death was marked by economic crisis, resurgent nationalism and paralysis in the federal government. In Serbia, Slobodan Milošević rose to power by exploiting discontent and grievance over Kosovo, and in 1989 he curtailed the autonomy of that province and of Vojvodina. His rhetoric, built on the sacrifice of 1389, alarmed the other republics.
In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence; in 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia followed. The breakup of Yugoslavia led to a series of wars that were the bloodiest on European soil since 1945. In Croatia and, above all, in Bosnia, the conflict took on the character of ethnic cleansing. The siege of Sarajevo lasted almost four years. In July 1995, in Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces murdered some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in what international courts ruled to be genocide.
This is the most painful and contested chapter of recent Serbian history, and it demands precision. Serious crimes were committed by all sides, but international courts established that most of them, and the gravest, including the Srebrenica genocide, were the responsibility of Serbian and Bosnian Serb forces. Acknowledging this does not mean collectively blaming the Serbian people, who also had their own victims, refugees and opponents of the regime. Milošević was put on trial in The Hague, where he died in 2006 before his trial concluded. The wars left more than 100,000 dead and millions displaced across the former Yugoslavia.
The last war of the Yugoslav breakup was fought in Kosovo, the Albanian-majority province that Serbia regards as the cradle of its historical and religious identity. In the late 1990s, the crackdown by Serbian forces on the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK) insurgency and on the Albanian civilian population triggered a humanitarian crisis, with mass displacement.
After negotiations failed, on 24 March 1999 NATO launched an air bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that lasted eleven weeks, until 10 June. It was an intervention without explicit authorisation from the UN Security Council, which opened a legal and political debate that continues to this day. The bombs hit military targets but also civilian infrastructure in Belgrade and other cities, and killed hundreds of civilians. In Serbia, those bombings left a deep wound and are remembered every anniversary.
The campaign ended with the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo and the establishment of a UN administration. In 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared independence, recognised by most Western countries but not by Serbia, which still considers it part of its territory, nor by Russia, China and several other states. The dispute over Kosovo remains unresolved and shapes all of Serbian politics. In October 2000, a popular uprising toppled Milošević, closing the most tragic decade of contemporary Serbia.
After Milošević's fall, Serbia began a difficult transition. In 2003, what remained of Yugoslavia became the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which dissolved in 2006 when Montenegro became independent by referendum: since then Serbia has been a fully sovereign, independent state. The reformist prime minister Zoran Đinđić, who had handed Milošević over to The Hague, was assassinated in 2003 by groups linked to the old regime.
Internationally, Serbia walks a fine line. It applied to join the European Union in 2009 and gained candidate status in 2012; accession negotiations began in 2014. However, the process has stalled, and Belgrade keeps close ties with Russia and China at the same time, a balancing act that strains its rapprochement with Europe. Normalising relations with Kosovo remains the underlying condition for progress towards the EU.
Today's Serbia is a country of contrasts: an economy that is growing but weighed down by emigration and distrust of institutions, recurring citizen protests, a capital, Belgrade, that is ever more lively and cosmopolitan, and a recent past that still carries enormous weight. For travellers, Serbia offers genuine hospitality, centuries-old monasteries, spectacular mountains and rivers and a famous nightlife. Travelling it with an understanding of its history, without prejudice but without naivety, is the best way to grasp one of Europe's most intense and misunderstood corners.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Belgrade (Beograd, 'the white city') stands at the confluence of the Danube and the Sava, a strategic spot that made it one of the most fought-over places in European history. Founded by the Celts and Romanised as Singidunum, the city changed hands an astonishing number of times: Byzantines, Franks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Ottomans and Austrians conquered it, lost it and took it back. Belgrade is estimated to have been razed and rebuilt dozens of times, making it one of the most destroyed capitals in the world.
That frontier position explains its military history and its character too. For centuries, Belgrade was the key to the Danube and the gateway between the Christian and Ottoman worlds. Today, that crossroads heritage shows in its mix of architecture: Ottoman fortresses, Austro-Hungarian palaces, socialist blocks and modern buildings sit side by side within a few blocks.
The historic heart of Belgrade is Kalemegdan Fortress, perched on the headland where the Sava flows into the Danube. Its walls hold two thousand years of history: Roman foundations, Byzantine and Hungarian extensions, Ottoman walls and Austrian bastions. The name itself is Turkish in origin and means something like 'castle battlefield', which sums up its fate exactly.
Today the fortress is the city's great park, with museums, churches, an Ottoman clock tower and magnificent views over the meeting of the rivers. Walking through Kalemegdan at sunset, among old cannons and couples gazing at the Danube, is the best introduction to Belgrade: a place where war turned into a stroll and hard history became an everyday landscape.
For much of the 20th century, Belgrade was the capital not just of Serbia but of all Yugoslavia, first the monarchy and then Tito's state. As such, it held the political power, the cultural life and the major institutions of the federal state. The Novi Beograd district, built from scratch across the Sava after the war, is a monumental record of Yugoslav socialism's ambitions in urban planning.
Belgrade also bore the hardest moments at the end of the century. It was bombed by the Nazi air force in 1941 and again by NATO in 1999. The half-ruined buildings of the former General Staff, right in the centre, were kept for years as a reminder of that campaign. Understanding this double identity, as a glorious capital and a battered city, is key to understanding the pride and the wound that live side by side in the people of Belgrade.
If one thing sets Belgrade apart in today's Europe, it is its nightlife, legendary across the Balkans. The splavovi, the famous floating clubs moored on the Danube and the Sava, keep the party going until dawn in summer. Add to them the bars of the bohemian Skadarlija district, the old artists' street, and a music scene that ranges from turbo-folk to the latest electronic sounds.
This nighttime energy is no recent whim: it was also a response to the isolation and hardship of the 1990s, when Belgrade's young people found in parties and music a way to escape and to resist. Today, its reputation as a cheap, welcoming city that stays awake at all hours has made Belgrade one of the favourite destinations for young European travellers.
East of Belgrade, following the Danube downstream, the great river squeezes into the Djerdap gorge, known internationally as the Iron Gates. It is the longest and most spectacular river canyon in Europe, where the Danube forms the natural border between Serbia and Romania and cuts its way between rock walls hundreds of metres high. Djerdap National Park protects this landscape of forests, deep waters and abundant wildlife.
The gorge also holds a very distant past. On the Serbian bank lies Lepenski Vir, one of the oldest and most enigmatic settlements in Europe, home to a Mesolithic culture from more than eight thousand years ago that left stone sculptures with human faces. Nearby, Trajan's Roman plaque and the remains of his bridge recall that this passage was a strategic artery of the Empire. Djerdap thus combines breathtaking nature with a density of history that goes back to the continent's first inhabitants.
Niš, the largest city in southern Serbia, is one of the oldest in the Balkans. Founded by the Celts and turned by Rome into the important Naissus, it was a strategic road junction on the Via Militaris linking Central Europe with Constantinople. Its claim to fame is being the birthplace of Emperor Constantine the Great, born there around the year 272, the man who legalised Christianity and founded Constantinople.
On the outskirts lies Mediana, the Roman residential complex linked to Constantine, with mosaics and baths. Thanks to its crossroads position, Niš was always the gateway to the south: whoever controlled Niš controlled the passage between the European and the Eastern worlds, which is why the city changed hands countless times over the course of history.
Niš preserves the mark of the Ottoman centuries like few other Serbian cities. Its well-preserved fortress was rebuilt by the Turks in the 18th century on Roman and Byzantine foundations, and it is still the city's monumental centrepiece. But the most chilling monument in Niš is the Ćele Kula, the Skull Tower.
The Ottomans built it after the Battle of Čegar in 1809, during the First Serbian Uprising: to make an example of the rebels, they set the skulls of fallen Serbian fighters into a tower. Far from intimidating anyone, the macabre monument became a symbol of sacrifice for independence. Today, protected inside a chapel, the Ćele Kula is both a place of remembrance and a warning about the cruelty of those wars. During the Second World War, Niš was also home to one of the first Nazi concentration camps in the Balkans, Crveni Krst, another painful chapter the city preserves as a memorial.
Eastern Serbia, towards the Danube and the borders with Romania and Bulgaria, was a land of frontiers for thousands of years. The limes ran through here: the fortified frontier of the Roman Empire, lined with camps and cities such as Viminacium, one of the largest Roman sites in the region, with its necropolis and mosaics. The armies of Rome, Byzantium, the Bulgarians and the Ottomans all advanced and retreated across these lands.
The region is mountainous and has a long mining history. It keeps a strong identity of its own, along with Romance-speaking Vlach communities, a legacy of its place where peoples met and mixed. In just a few kilometres, the Đerdap Gorge, also known as the Iron Gates, packs in history from Europe's first settlers to Roman engineering, with the prehistoric site of Lepenski Vir and the remains of Trajan's Bridge.
In the southwest, towards the Sandžak region, the Uvac nature reserve has one of the most photographed landscapes in Serbia. The Uvac River winds through tight, dizzying bends, hemmed in by rock walls more than a hundred metres high. From the high viewpoints, the river traces a series of S-curves that look almost unreal.
Uvac is also a nature sanctuary. It is one of the few places in Europe where the griffon vulture still lives. The species came close to dying out, and protection programmes brought it back here. The canyon also hides a cave system with long galleries. The area is part of the Sandžak, a region with a large Bosniak Muslim population, a reminder that Serbia's religious and cultural diversity reaches into its mountainous south too.
Every summer, the small town of Guča in the heart of central Serbia becomes world-famous for the Guča Sabor, the biggest trumpet festival in the Balkans. It started in 1961 and brings together brass bands and musicians from across the country and abroad. For several days, the competition and street party fill the town with music, dancing, food and crowds.
The star is the unmistakable sound of the Balkan trumpet. It grew out of Ottoman military bands and local folk music, and bands and the films of Emir Kusturica made it famous around the world. Guča is much more than a music event. It celebrates the festive, loud and exuberant spirit of rural Serbia, and it's one of the best chances to see the country's folk culture up close.
Western Serbia is a land of mountains, forests and deep valleys, very different from the plains of the north. Peaks such as Zlatibor, Tara and Zlatar, and green-water rivers like the Drina, make up one of the most beautiful landscapes in the Balkans. Life here was always harder and more isolated, and perhaps that is why this region held on especially firmly to the traditions, language and customs of rural Serbia.
These mountains were also a refuge and a stronghold. Under Ottoman rule their rugged terrain sheltered the rebels; during the Second World War they were a stage for the resistance. The very name Zlatibor ('golden pine') evokes the forests covering these heights, today a favourite destination for Serbian domestic travellers looking for fresh air, hiking and a proper break.
This land is home to one of Serbia's most sacred monuments: Studenica Monastery, founded around 1190 by Stefan Nemanja, founder of the Nemanjić dynasty, shortly before he retired as a monk. It is the largest and richest of the medieval Serbian monastic foundations, and its main church, faced in white marble, marked the birth of a style of its own, the Raška school.
Studenica holds some of the most valuable Byzantine frescoes in European art, such as the famous Crucifixion of 1209. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the monastery was for centuries the spiritual, cultural and political centre of medieval Serbia, and the remains of several members of the founding dynasty rest there. Visiting it means stepping into the sanctuary where Serbian statehood and religious identity were forged.
Tara National Park protects one of the last great virgin forests in Europe, home to the Serbian spruce (Pančić's spruce), a relict species that survived the ice ages. From the Banjska Stena viewpoint, the view opens over the Drina canyon and the Perućac reservoir, a landscape of emerald waters set between rock walls.
The Drina, which marks much of the border with Bosnia, carries enormous weight in the Serbian imagination. It was a border between empires and between religions, and the protagonist of 'The Bridge on the Drina', the novel by Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, which used an Ottoman bridge in the town of Višegrad to tell centuries of coexistence and conflict between the region's communities. In its winding course, the Drina sums up the frontier history that defines the whole of western Serbia.
At the foot of the mountains, Mokra Gora preserves one of the most unusual feats of railway engineering in the Balkans: the Šargan Eight, a narrow-gauge section that climbs a steep gradient by tracing a figure of eight, with tunnels and viaducts that now run as a heritage train. It was part of the historic line linking Belgrade with Sarajevo and Dubrovnik.
Very close by is Drvengrad ('wooden town'), the ethno village that filmmaker Emir Kusturica built for his film 'Life Is a Miracle' and then turned into a real village, with traditional wooden houses moved from all over the region. Home to a film festival, Drvengrad is an example of how western Serbia has recreated and showcased its rural heritage for tourism, mixing nostalgia, traditional architecture and contemporary culture.
On the southern edge of this mountainous region rises Kopaonik, Serbia's main ski resort and a national park as well. Its name comes from mining ('kopati' means to dig): for centuries its slopes were worked for their wealth of silver, lead and other metals, as far back as Roman and medieval times, when mining was a key source of wealth for the Serbian state.
Today Kopaonik is above all a destination for nature and sport, with ski runs in winter and trails in summer, and protected biodiversity that includes endemic species. Like much of western and central Serbia, it embodies the close bond between the mountains, survival and identity: for centuries these heights were at once a larder, a refuge and a symbol of the resistance of a people used to retreating to the peaks whenever the lowlands fell into foreign hands.
Vojvodina, the autonomous province in the north, is a different Serbia from the south. While the rest of the country lived under Ottoman rule, this fertile plain north of the Danube and the Sava came under the Habsburg Empire from the late 17th century. It was here, on Austrian territory, that the Serbs of the Great Migration of 1690 took refuge, and here that much of modern Serbian culture flourished, far from the Ottoman yoke.
That Central European belonging shows everywhere: in the Baroque churches, in towns laid out with imperial order, in the architecture and even in the food. Vojvodina looks as much to Vienna and Budapest as to Belgrade, and it keeps an unmistakable Mitteleuropa air that sets it apart from the rest of the Balkans.
Vojvodina is Serbia's most diverse region. Alongside the Serbian majority live Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Rusyns, Croats and other communities, the legacy of centuries of Habsburg colonisation that brought settlers from all over the empire to repopulate lands won back from the Ottomans. The province officially recognises several languages besides Serbian, and in many villages the signs appear in two, three or even more languages.
This multi-ethnic coexistence, with Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches almost door to door, makes Vojvodina a unique case in the Balkans: a region that, on the whole, came through the wars of the 1990s without the outbreaks of violence that devastated other areas, and that is often held up today as an example of coexistence. Its autonomy, cut back in the Milošević era, is still a live political issue.
Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina and Serbia's second city, embodies the spirit of the region. Founded as a Serbian trading town opposite the Austrian fortress of Petrovaradin, it became such a vibrant centre of Serbian cultural life that it was nicknamed the 'Serbian Athens'. It was home to the Matica srpska, the oldest Serbian cultural institution, founded in 1826.
Above the Danube rises Petrovaradin, an imposing Baroque fortress built by the Habsburgs and nicknamed 'the Gibraltar of the Danube' for its kilometres of underground galleries. Every summer its walls host the EXIT festival, one of Europe's great music festivals, born in 2000 as a youth movement against the Milošević regime. Novi Sad was also European Capital of Culture in 2022, a recognition of its historic role.
In the far north, almost touching the Hungarian border, Subotica is a small treasure of modernist architecture. In the early 20th century, when it was a prosperous town in the Kingdom of Hungary, it filled up with Art Nouveau buildings (or Secession, in its Central European version): the City Hall, the Synagogue and many mansions show off façades of coloured ceramics, floral motifs and flowing lines of surprising elegance.
Subotica also mirrors Vojvodina's diversity: a town with large Hungarian and Bunjevac Croat communities as well as Serbs, with a bilingual cultural life and an atmosphere closer to Szeged or Budapest than to Belgrade. Nearby Lake Palić, with its period villas and spa park, rounded off its air of an elegant Mitteleuropa retreat in the early 20th century.
In southern Vojvodina rises the Fruška Gora mountain, a green island in the middle of the plain, famous for two things: its monasteries and its wine. Its slopes hold more than a dozen Orthodox monasteries, many founded between the 15th and 18th centuries, which made the area a spiritual refuge for Serbs under foreign rule: that is why it was sometimes called 'the Serbian Mount Athos'.
At its foot lies Sremski Karlovci, a Baroque town of enormous historical importance for Serbs: it was the seat of the Patriarchate and of the first Serbian grammar school, and it was where the Treaty of Karlowitz was signed in 1699, redrawing the borders between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs in Central Europe. Surrounded by vineyards cultivated since Roman times, Sremski Karlovci is famous today for its wine, especially the sweet bermet, and for its calm atmosphere of churches and wine cellars.
Hardly anything that happened to Serbia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
