History History

The territory of present-day Serbia is located on one of the main migration routes connecting the Middle East with Central Europe. Thus, there are several important archaeological sites, such as the sites of Starčevo and Vinča near Belgrade and the site of Lepenski Vir on the Danube. During the Iron Age, this territory became a zone of interaction of several peoples of Indo-European origin: Illyrians, Thracians, Dacians and Celts. On the border between the Greek and Latin worlds, these peoples appear in the texts as formidable warriors, renowned for their piracy and their raids on the coasts and inland.

The Roman conquest of the region was slow, motivated above all by the need to stop pirate raids on the trade routes of the Adriatic. Rather superficial, it intensified once they discovered the gold and silver mines of the Dacians, further north. The province of Dacia then saw the massive installation of legionary garrisons and the Latin culture spread there. Several cities were founded, with aqueducts, bridges and fortifications. Things change little in the region until 395, when the Roman Empire splits between East and West. Serbia then came under the authority of Constantinople. As unrest increased, this border area with the Western Roman Empire became increasingly unstable. The Goths and the Huns made numerous incursions into the Balkans, settling there for decades and the imperial authority disintegrated. At the beginning of the 7th century, it was the turn of the formidable Avars, based in present-day Hungary, who seriously threatened the borders of the Eastern Empire. The emperor Heraclius then invited the Slavs of Poland to fight against this enemy. After some successes, an unknown Slavic prince negotiates new lands in the Balkans. The migration of the Southern Slavs, the future Serbs and Croats, began in 640. They created their own villages and gathered in clan communities under the suzerainty of the Empire, as federated peoples.

From 850 onwards, Constantinople controlled only a few cities on the coast. The rest of the land was administered directly by Slavic princes, each at the head of an independent state. In this political galaxy, the Serbian identity did not yet exist and the Slavs were called indifferently Serbs or Croats by the Romans. Among the Slavic kingdoms, Rascia or Raška, under the authority of a prince of the Vlastimirović dynasty, stands out as one of the most important. The first of these princes in our sources is Višeslav. His successors would continue to serve the emperors in exchange for a large degree of autonomy. At the same time (9th century), the Serbs converted to Christianity (before the Orthodox schism, which took place in 1054). From this date, the Serbs will be Orthodox Christians, in theory. At the same time, they also adopted the Cyrillic alphabet, born of the evangelism of the Slavs by the monks Cyril and Methodius, sent by the Byzantine emperor. The following centuries were marked by civil wars and revolts against the Roman influence. Until 1169 and the reign of Stefan Nemanja.

In 1169, Stefan became great župan (prince) of Rascia and founded the second Serbian dynasty, Nemanjić. Taking advantage of a civil war among the Byzantines, he emancipated himself, expanded south and east and encompassed the Adriatic coastline and the Zeta. He also built the first large Serbian monasteries, Studenica and Ðurđevi Stupovi. His son, Stefan Prvovenčani, became the first Serbian king in 1217 by gift from the emperor. In 1209, another of his sons, Rastko, founded the Serbian autocephalous patriarchate(Orthodoxwie).

Thus, at the beginning of the 12th century, the Nemanjids were at the head of a state based on an independent church and monarchy, including the current territories of southern Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, northern Macedonia, Albania and part of Greece. It is then that, after a few decades where the Serbian power strengthens and the Byzantines decline, on the background of civil wars, crusades coming from the West and jihad coming from the East, that in 1346, Dušan the Great is crowned "emperor of the Serbs, Greeks and Albanians". His reign marks the apogee of medieval Serbian power and a cultural golden age in the Byzantine style, to which many monasteries still bear witness today: Mileševa and Sopoćani in Central Serbia, Dečani, Peć and Gračanica in Kosovo, Hilandar in Greece. While Dusan is about to conquer the city Constantinople for good (at least he hopes so, having been delayed several times in this project), he inexplicably dies. The empire sinks in its turn into civil war.

Rastko Nemanjić, a prince by birth who became a monk, is the most popular saint in Serbia. He is venerated on January 27 as the founder of Serbian religious culture. The Cathedral of St. Sava on Vračar Hill in Belgrade is dedicated to him.

According to legend, the youngest son of the great župan Stefan Nemanjić, he fled duringa hunt to a Greek monastery on Mount Athos, where he became known for monastic patronage activities under the name Sava

In 1219, he obtained autonomy from Constantinople from the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Byzantine Emperor for the Serbian Orthodox Church, gaining autocephaly and becoming its first archbishop.

He is also known for his literary works, making him the patron saint of students. He wrote the first Serbian religious works, including a collection of ecclesiastical laws known as the Code of Sava, otherwise Krmcija or Nomocanon, as well as a biography of his father, The Life of St. Symeon, considered one of the most remarkable creations of Serbian literature.

Prey to internal struggles, the territory, which had never been very stable, was divided into autonomous feudalities: this was the time of the despots, allied for a moment against the Ottomans on the occasion of the fall of Andrinople, but unable to maintain this union when the latter moved towards Bulgaria.

In 1371, the Serbian defeat at the battle of Maritsa, central in Serbian national memory today, marked the beginning of a slow subjugation of Serbia by the Ottomans. It ends with the capture of the fortress of Smederevo in 1459, which begins five centuries of Ottoman domination. Under this new system, Serbia was divided into regions which, every five years, sent their children to join the slaves of the palace and become high officials or the famous janissaries (often taken by force during the dreaded devchirme): children of the country will thus distinguish themselves many times in the service of the Ottomans. While social ascension was limited to Muslims, who were exempt from tribute and also paid less taxes, Serbs converted very little. Indeed, they benefit from the Ottoman system of tolerance, the kânûnname: the Orthodox religion is authorized but supervised, the Serbian language, its learning and writing, is limited to the spheres of the house and the church. The Orthodox monasteries thus became the heart of the national culture and of the anti-Ottoman revolts that periodically shook the region. The Ottoman contribution in Serbia is very visible in the architecture and in the numerous Turkish borrowings in the language. Among the remarkable Ottoman buildings: the bridge of Višegrad, in Bosnia, built on the orders of Mehmed Pasha Sokolović, the great Ottoman vizier of Serbian origin.

From 1590, the Balkans became a front line between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. The Christian Serbs were courted by Austria. It is in this unstable context that the first of the great Serbian revolts took place, in 1594. Banat rose up under the banner of Saint-Sava. The Sultan subdued the insurgents and burned the relics, creating a high point of Serbian nationalism. When the war took hold in the Balkans, the Serbs created irregular bands with the Austrians: the haidouks. The withdrawal of the Austrian army in 1690 pushed many Serbs to flee. In a few years, between 40,000 and 200,000 Serbs from Kosovo and Rascia followed Archbishop Arsenije III into the Austrian Empire. They took with them relics and religious books and obtained the installation of an autonomous patriarchate as well as Serbian trading posts, soon joined by settlers from all over the empire. Their territory was a special region, the military confines, and they owed military service to the Austrian Crown.

Two more uprisings will allow the Serbs to exist as a nation, and give rise to two ruling dynasties in the country. The first, in 1804, took place under George the Black, who founded the Karadjordjević dynasty. In this context, the concept of the "black man" is a very important element of the concept of the "black man". One of his young comrades-in-arms and rivals, Miloš Obrenović, revolted again in 1815. After some victories, he obtained the creation of a council of twelve Serbian princes in Belgrade, creating an autonomous region. In 1817, Miloš was appointed reigning prince by the Skupština, the assembly of representatives of the principality. It was not a peaceful reign: Miloš reigned as an autocrat, had his opponents such as George Karadjordjević assassinated, while he tried to return from exile. The Ottomans recognized Miloš's dynasty in 1830, marking the beginnings of the Serbian state: a national army was created, attempts were made to unify the language, etc. The Serbian national project is not a popular project. The Balkans were very rural and had no specific national identity, beyond the attachment to local traditions and the Church in the face of the Ottomans. The national project thus came from the elites, seduced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and French nationalism. Among the national projects, that of the union of the South Slavs in a single state, Yugoslavia, was very popular. Thus, the Croatian Ljudevit Gaj (1809-1872) and the Serbian Vuk Karadžić together founded the Serbo-Croatian language at the beginning of the 19th century, laying the modern foundations for all the languages of the region.

Under the influence of the Ottomans, the country was very unstable and experienced much political violence. Princes were in constant competition, oligarchs corrupted the institutions and the two dynasties of the Karadjordjević and Obrenović struggled for power and succeeded each other through coups and revolts. During this very tumultuous century, Serbia gradually expanded into neighboring territories and obtained the departure of the last Ottoman garrisons in 1867. After the war of Bulgarian independence with the Russians, the Congress of Berlin in 1878 liberated the whole of the Balkans and redrew its borders: Serbia was officially independent. It became a kingdom ruled by Milan IV Obrenović, who became Milan I. The Serbian nation is complete.

The legacy of genius inventor Nikola Tesla is disputed by Croatia and Serbia, divided over whether his hometown was more Croatian or Serbian... although he lived first in Austria and then in the United States. Either way, you can see prototypes of his inventions at the Nikola-Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

Nikola Tesla was a naturalized American electrical engineer and inventor, the inventor of the centrifugal magnetic field and the whole (production/distribution) alternating current system. Tesla also built the high-frequency, high-voltage alternating current generators and coreless transformers: the famous Tesla coils used by all cartoon mad scientists

He was born on July 10, 1856, in Smiljan, Austria-Hungary and present-day Croatia. After studying in Austria and at the university in Prague, he worked at the telegraph office in Budapest. He began his career as an inventor and went to Paris in 1882 to meet with the Continental Edison Company, and in 1884 he went to the United States to work. The following year he left Edison to found his own company, Co. Tesla Arc & Light, partly because of their conflict between alternating and direct current. He spent the following decades revolutionizing the fields of electricity, telegraphy, radiology, radio, mechanical engineering... but failed miserably to make a living from it. He considered that science was for the benefit of the general public and not for profit, and he did not succeed during his lifetime in gaining public recognition nor in defending his patents (unlike Edison, a genius communicator but a mediocre scientist). He died ruined and forgotten on January 7, 1943 in a hotel room in New York. Tesla was gradually rediscovered in the post-war decades and is now rehabilitated in modern science.

The collapse of the Ottoman influence opens the Balkans to the great powers. The Habsburg Empire and Russia were the main rivals, occasionally interrupted by the French and British. In addition, there were conflicts between the new countries. Wars were very common and peace treaties always seemed temporary. In this difficult geopolitical context, Serbia was very unstable: the country was underdeveloped, the army was too influential and swallowed most of the budget, the government was corrupt and often inept, foreign influences favored coups between pro-Austrian or pro-Russian factions, the Obrenović/Karadjordjević rivalry continued to poison politics, etc. The region is ripe for the outbreak of a world war

The triggers in Serbia are

after yet another coup d'état, the so-called May coup in 1903, which ended the Obrenović dynasty with the bloody massacre of Alexander I and his wife Draga, their mutilated bodies defenestrated to land on a dung heap, Peter Karadjordjević took the throne and promulgated a liberal constitution or "Miracle of 1903." This new regime, one of the most democratic in Europe, actually favored ultranationalism: it allowed for the stabilization of political power and the detour of blame for the country's problems to foreigners;

in 1908, Bosnia-Herzegovina, administered by Austria-Hungary since 1878, was annexed. The Serbs were furious and turned their backs on Austria (their former ally and main trading partner). The nationalists embarked on an intense secret war in the region: secret societies, guerrilla and spy groups operated despite the ban of the Serbian government;

serbia has been protected by Russia since its independence. The Russian big brother was joined by France in the early 1900s through the network of European alliances.

Dragutin Dimitrijević, an influential secret service officer, founded the nationalist and terrorist Black Hand organization. In the summer of 1914, he sent three Serbian students, including Gavrilo Princip, to assassinate Franz Ferdinand, the crown prince of the Austrian throne, during his visit to Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand, a reformist, was a danger because he could have easily integrated Bosnia into the institutions of the Empire and stabilized the region. Princip succeeded by a stroke of luck, and Serbia found itself at the heart of a major diplomatic crisis: although it was not officially responsible for the assassination, the terrorists were extremely influential in all the administrations and even the government. Moreover, the Serbian state could not give the impression of backing down in the face of Austro-Hungarian pressure. The war was declared, the First World War began. After some successes, the Serbs are quickly cornered and desperate. In 1915, the army retreated through the "Albanian Golgotha", crossing snow-covered mountains and passes at more than 2,500m. The rest of the country was occupied.

If in France one knows little about Serbia, the Serbs know and appreciate the history that unites the two peoples.
The Franco-Serbian alliance was born out of ancestral rivalries between the Habsburgs and France. Despite a few episodes in the Middle Ages (for example, the marriage of King Uroš to Princess Helene of Anjou), contacts really solidified during the Third Republic. At that time, the growing Serbian nationalism was a thorn in the side of the Austro-Hungarians but caused havoc in the economy of Serbia (because, paradoxically, Austria-Hungary was the first commercial partner of the country and racial hatred drove out Muslim entrepreneurs and foreigners). The French state decided to finance the Serbian government to a large extent with soft loans, which allowed it to continue its aggressive militarism that finally triggered the First World War. During the war, Serbs and French became comrades in arms and the French rebuilt the exiled Serbian army. They took over the Serbian lands and stayed in the country until 1921, leaving strong memories in Serbia. In France, many Serbian refugees were welcomed. Serbian children were even placed in republican schools.

Since then, the friendship of the Serbs for France has remained engraved in the hearts, both at the political level and in the population, which considers that France saved Serbia.

The outcome of the war was terrible: 28% of the population died. This is the only way to ensure that the new concept of the "city of the future" can be understood and implemented. This is the first time that a city's economy has been affected by the economic crisis, and it is the first time that a city's economy has been affected by the economic crisis, and it is the first time that a city's economy has been affected by the economic crisis, and it is the first time that a city's economy has been affected by the economic crisis.

In 1921, the kingdom became a centralized and parliamentary state based on the French model, the constitution created by French jurists gave freedoms to minorities, and an attempt was made to forge a Yugoslav national feeling. The honeymoon did not last long and the Croats were disadvantaged by Serbian attempts to centralize the country. The regime became increasingly authoritarian and the politics violent. In 1928, three Croatian deputies were shot in parliament by a Serbian radical. In January 1929, King Alexander suspended the constitution and renamed his kingdom Yugoslavia: "the country of the South Slavs. The leader of the Croatian Peasant Party was imprisoned and many politicians emigrated. The king was assassinated in Marseille in October 1934 by Croatian partisans. The regency of Prince Paul then tried to fulfill Croatian aspirations and Prime Minister Cvetković signed the Sporazum - the Entente - with the Croatian parties in August 1939. The Croatian banovina now encompassed not only Croatia, but also Slavonia, Dalmatia and even part of Bosnia; in addition, the Croats had an autonomous governor(ban) and assembly(sabor). But it is too late to heal the wounds.

Hoping to remain neutral, Yugoslavia was forced to join the Axis in 1941. This decision provoked a coup d'état favored by the Allies and as a result the Nazis invaded and occupied the kingdom. Yugoslavia was then divided between the fascist Ustasha Croatia (led by Ante Pavelić, it declared its independence during the invasion) and the collaborating Serbia with General Nedić at its head.
A Serbian uprising began in the summer of 1941. The royalists (chetnik) regrouped in the maquis of eastern Serbia, under the banner of the minister of defense of the government in exile, General Draža Mihailović. His ultranationalist fighters settled old scores with the Croats in Herzegovina and decimated the Muslims in eastern Bosnia. They try to form an ethnically pure territory. For their part, the Croatian Ustasha, who had installed a real clerical-fascist state, carried out an extermination of the Serbs. They founded the Jasenovac concentration camp, the third largest in Europe (six times larger than Auschwitz), which stood out for the extreme cruelty of its methods. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 700,000 people died there. In this climate, the Communists of Croatian Tito emerged as the only force for national unity. On November 29, 1943, in the Bosnian town of Jajce, the Communist resistance fighters created a federation of six republics at the second council of the Avnoj (Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) and finally won over all their enemies.

Tito's Yugoslavia was founded in 1945 on the principle of total equality between five constituent peoples, now the Slovenes, Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs and Macedonians. The Bosnians were recognized a little later. Each of the nations listed in the constitution has full sovereignty within its republic: parliament, government, school system, etc. The constitution even goes so far as to provide for the right to secede if necessary. Tito, as a good political strategist, also saw this as a way to weaken the weight of the Serbs in the new federation. In 1946, this policy was coupled with a ferocious purge that lasted three years. Nationalists were hunted down, as well as undesirable groups such as the Germans from Vojvodina. Although a dictator with an iron fist, Tito was a very flexible leader who surfed between the factions in his country and internationally. In 1948, he refused to join the Eastern bloc and executed his communist opponents. In 1952 he promoted his "third way" between the Eastern bloc and the West and was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, which enabled him to obtain the help of both sides of the Cold War.

Between 1949 and 1956, Goli Otok, one of the most important political camps in the communist world, was located on Naked Island, a rocky strip lost in the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. The inscription at its entrance, just as absurd as that of Auschwitz, is "The Party's concern for our health is a shining example of humanity." The camp housed members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia after the Tito-Stalin split and the dissolution of the Comintern in 1948. Around 30,000 prisoners were de-Stalinized by torture: wheelbarrow torture, mock firing squads, prolonged stays in pits, etc. Tito closed the camp in 1956 following his reconciliation with Khrushchev in Belgrade. The prison was not abandoned, however, and was later used for common law prisoners. After the Croatian Spring of 1971, Goli Otok was again populated for a while by political prisoners. The prison did not close its doors for good until 1988.

Having renounced land collectivization, Tito attempted to completely decentralize the economy. This policy caused major fractures in the country and reawakened nationalism by creating abandoned republics and prosperous republics. In 1974, he tried to ease tensions by ceding political rights. The new constitution increased the number of member republics to eight, with Kosovo and Vojvodina separated from Serbia. This will only accelerate the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Tito died in 1980.

President of the Serbian Communist Party in 1986 and then President of Serbia in 1989, Montenegrin Slobodan Milošević is a true Serbian nationalist apparatchik. In 1987, he began a "bureaucratic revolution" that cancelled the special status of Kosovo and Vojvodina, causing much violence and concern in the other republics. In January 1990, weakened by the fall of the Wall, the Congress of the Yugoslav Communist League abolished the leading role of the party and authorized the holding of multiparty elections. Milošević then tried to dominate the federation and caused the Croats and Slovenes to leave. Each of the states of the federation began to tear itself apart along ethnic and religious lines, as well as in conflict with the bloodless Yugoslav federal state. Battles between militias, massacres and population movements increased. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbian ultranationalist commandos boycotted the referendum on Bosnian independence and surrounded Sarajevo. The war that followed lasted three years, was from the outset a war of ethnic cleansing and culminated in the massacre of Srebrenica in July 1995. The conflict ended with the Dayton Agreement, which divided Bosnia-Herzegovina in two.

On April 27, 1992, with the departure of most of the republics of the Federation, a new Yugoslavia was declared, consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro. Slobodan Milošević, who had failed in all his attempts to unify the former federation around the Serbs (and committed numerous war crimes in the process), became president. He rules autocratically over the rubble of a country under international embargo. Milošević brutally repressed the Kosovo Albanians to make them fall in line. Although they make up nearly 90% of the region's population, they suffer real segregation and have no political autonomy. Society was then organized in a parallel manner, with a Kosovo government in exile, clandestine elections, clandestine schools and hospitals, run for example by the 6,000 Albanian teachers sent back by Milošević. In the summer of 1998, the radical KLA militia began an armed struggle against the Serbs. This escalation leads to the Račak massacre, which causes the international community to react. In March, the expulsion of 800,000 Albanians from Kosovo began, forcing them to take refuge in Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.

The Rambouillet conference having failed, from March 24 to June 8, 1999, the largest operation that NATO had ever undertaken took place, aimed at forcing the Serbian army to withdraw from Kosovo. Without a UN mandate, a massive bombardment was undertaken, first against military targets, then against civilian targets. The main bridges over the Danube and the Morava, but also industrial sites were hit. The results were disastrous: 2,300 Serbian or Albanian civilians died under the bombs, targeted, the chemical factories of Panćevo spilled tons of ammonia into the Danube for two weeks, some bombs with depleted uranium contaminated Kosovo for decades.

With his term of office ending in 2001, Slobodan Milošević decided to call for early elections. The Otpor (Resistance) movement, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, organized a broad opposition coalition, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), which appeared to win the September 24 election. However, Milošević refused to accept his defeat and called for a new election. The opposition and the youth of Belgrade launched a great movement of civil disobedience: strikes, peaceful actions and massive demonstrations culminated on 5 October 2000. On that date, nearly a million people in the streets of Belgrade bulldozed the federal parliament and the state television. That same evening, Vojislav Koštunica addressed the nation as the new president of Serbia: Milošević had lost power. This revolution was the first peaceful revolution financed by the U.S. government (it directly spent nearly $41 million to fund the Serbian opposition) and the first of the color revolutions.

On February 4, 2003, the moribund FRY became the Union of Serbia under the initiative of the European Union. A month later, on March 12, Zoran Ðinđić, the hope of the federation and a brilliant Prime Minister of Serbia, was assassinated by elders of the Milošević regime

The Union of Serbia malfunctions, the decentralization of the economy wreaks havoc and finally Montenegro holds a referendum for independence on May 21, 2006, with 55 per cent of the votes for yes. The Union of Serbia gave way to the Republic of Serbia, alone and independent for the first time since 1918

The last painful chapter for the Serbs was on February 17, 2008, when Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence. The country was then driven by a single objective: to join the European Union.

After the self-declaration of an independent Kosovo, the Serbs will do everything they can to try to integrate into the EU without recognizing the province's independence. On 28 April 2008, an Association Agreement (SAA) was signed as a first step towards membership, conditional on the arrest of the last war criminals. Three months later, Radovan Karadžić was arrested and Serbs were granted visa-free entry into the Schengen area in November 2009. Unfortunately, the economic crisis of 2008, which shook all of Europe in 2011, pushed France (especially) and Germany to put the enlargement of Europe on hold. The new Serbia will have to wait for better days. Against all odds, the country manages to stabilize, the economy progresses and the political system is cleaned up (although corruption remains a problem). Aleksandar Vučić, Prime Minister from 2014 to 2017, was elected President of the Republic of Serbia on April 2, 2017 in the first round. He is the strongman of the country, supported by an absolute majority in the National Assembly (single chamber of the Serbian Parliament). After this election, the youth of Belgrade took to the streets to protest the election of this conservative candidate and express their fed up with a regime with still authoritarian tendencies. The Serbian civil opposition is gaining momentum, under the supervision of the EU, which hopes that this is the start of a dynamic political life and not a new phase of the incessant civil war that the country has experienced since its foundation in 1878.

A first in Serbia: Novi Sad is designated as the European Capital of Culture, along with Kaunas in Lithuania and Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg.

The city hopes to attract tourists by organizing more than 1,500 events.