SerbiaСрбија

The Danube was Rome's frontier, and what is now Serbia was a military heartland. Singidunum (Belgrade), Naissus (Niš), Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica) and Viminacium were major cities, and seventeen Roman emperors were born on Serbian soil — most famously Constantine the Great, born in Niš around 272. Galerius built his fortified palace Felix Romuliana near Zaječar; Trajan cut a road and a bridge through the Iron Gates gorge.

Slavic tribes settled in the 6th and 7th centuries and accepted Christianity from Byzantium. The Nemanjić dynasty, founded by Stefan Nemanja in the 1160s, built a medieval Serbian state. His son Sava became the first archbishop of an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church in 1219 and is Serbia's patron saint; the vast Church of Saint Sava in Belgrade is named after him.

The Nemanjić kings endowed monasteries whose frescoes are among the finest of Byzantine art: Studenica, Sopoćani, Mileševa (with its White Angel), and in Kosovo, Dečani, Gračanica and the Patriarchate of Peć. Under Tsar Dušan in the mid-14th century Serbia briefly ruled much of the Balkans and wrote a legal code, Dušan's Zakonik.

On 28 June 1389 Prince Lazar's army met the Ottomans at Kosovo Polje. The battle itself was probably indecisive, but it became the central myth of Serbian identity: a choice of the heavenly kingdom over the earthly one, and the root of the emotional weight Kosovo still carries.

The Serbian Despotate held out until 1459, when Smederevo fell and the Ottomans absorbed Serbia. Belgrade, on the frontier with Hungary, changed hands repeatedly between Ottoman and Habsburg armies and was besieged dozens of times; the Kalemegdan fortress above the rivers is a palimpsest of those sieges. Many Serbs moved north into Habsburg lands in the Great Migrations of 1690 and 1737, settling Vojvodina, where Sremski Karlovci became their religious and cultural centre.

The First Serbian Uprising under Karađorđe (1804) and the Second under Miloš Obrenović (1815) won autonomy. The two leaders' families became rival dynasties, and Serbian politics for a century swung between them, sometimes by assassination. Full independence was recognised at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Vuk Karadžić reformed the language on the principle 'write as you speak', creating the phonetic Cyrillic alphabet still used today.

In Niš the Ottomans built Ćele Kula, the Skull Tower, from the heads of Serbian rebels killed in 1809 — a deterrent that became a national memorial. In Belgrade, only one Ottoman mosque, Bajrakli, survives; the rest of the Ottoman city was rebuilt in the Central European style of the new state.

Serbia won the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and then paid a terrible price in the First World War, which began with Austria-Hungary's ultimatum after the Sarajevo assassination. The army retreated across the Albanian mountains in the winter of 1915; Serbia lost perhaps a quarter of its population. In 1918 it became the centre of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes — Yugoslavia — with Belgrade as capital.

In the Second World War Belgrade was bombed by the Luftwaffe, occupied and fought over by Tito's Partisans and the royalist Chetniks. Tito's socialist Yugoslavia made Belgrade the capital of a non-aligned state that hosted the first Non-Aligned Movement summit in 1961 and built the Brutalist new city across the Sava. Tito is buried in the House of Flowers at the Museum of Yugoslavia.

After Tito, Slobodan Milošević rose on Serbian nationalism, especially over Kosovo. As Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s, Serbia backed Serb forces in Croatia and Bosnia; sanctions and hyperinflation wrecked daily life. The 1998–99 Kosovo war ended with 78 days of NATO bombing. In October 2000 mass protests ousted Milošević, who died in 2006 during his trial at The Hague. Montenegro left the union with Serbia in 2006, and Kosovo declared independence in 2008.

These events are recent and contested. Many Serbs see themselves as victims of the 1990s as much as participants; memorials and bombed buildings in Belgrade present that view. Visitors do best to listen, avoid lecturing, and read widely.

Serbia has about 6.6 million people, and the population is ageing and shrinking. Vojvodina in the north is one of Europe's most diverse regions, with Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Rusyns and Croats and six official languages; the Sandžak region around Novi Pazar is mostly Bosniak and Muslim; the Preševo valley in the south is mostly Albanian.

Orthodoxy is central to Serbian identity. The most distinctive custom is the slava, a family's feast of its patron saint, inherited through the male line: bread (slavski kolač), boiled wheat (žito), a candle and a day of open-house hospitality. St Nicholas (19 December) and St John (20 January) are the most common. Being invited to a slava is an honour.

Hospitality, defiance and humour are the traits Serbs claim for themselves. The kafana — a tavern with rakija, grilled meat and a band — is the social stage for celebrations and sorrows alike, and the starogradska (old-town) songs and brass bands of the south fill it. Sport, especially basketball, water polo, tennis (Novak Đoković) and football, is followed with passion.

Serbia has two halves. North of the Sava and Danube, Vojvodina is flat Pannonian plain — wheat, sunflowers, maize and river forests, once the floor of an inland sea. The one hill, Fruška Gora, holds monasteries and vineyards. South of the rivers the land rises through the rolling orchards of Šumadija to the mountains of the west and south.

The Danube is Serbia's great river. It enters from Hungary and Croatia, meets the Sava at Belgrade and then cuts the Đerdap gorge — the Iron Gates — on the border with Romania, one of Europe's most dramatic river landscapes. On its bank, Lepenski Vir preserves a Mesolithic settlement of fish-faced stone sculptures more than 8,000 years old.

The west has Tara National Park above the Drina canyon, the green meanders of the Uvac, and the plateau resort of Zlatibor. Kopaonik in the south is Serbia's main ski area. The country is plum country: plums supply the national rakija, šljivovica, and appear in cakes, jams and dumplings.

Serbia is an EU candidate that also keeps close ties with Russia and China. It has not joined EU sanctions on Russia; Chinese companies have built motorways, bridges, a steel mill and the Belgrade–Budapest railway. Aleksandar Vučić and his SNS party have dominated politics since 2012, first as prime minister and since 2017 as president.

On 1 November 2024 the newly renovated canopy of Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 16 people. Students blamed corruption and launched blockades that grew into the largest protest movement in decades, bringing down the prime minister in early 2025. Protests continued through 2025 — check the situation when you travel.

The economy has grown on car and components factories, IT and foreign investment. Belgrade is being remade by the Belgrade Waterfront towers on the Sava and is preparing to host Expo 2027. Emigration of young professionals continues, but Belgrade has also absorbed tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians since 2022.