Serbia

Medieval Serbia grew into a kingdom and then, under Emperor Dušan in the fourteenth century, a large Balkan empire, and it left a legacy of Orthodox monasteries whose frescoes rank among the finest of the Middle Ages. The 1389 Battle of Kosovo, a defeat by the Ottomans, was mythologised into a sacred moment of national sacrifice that still shapes Serbian identity and politics. Some five centuries of Ottoman rule followed, ended by uprisings from 1804 that won an independent principality, recognised in 1878. A Bosnian Serb's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 triggered the First World War, in which Serbia lost a quarter or more of its people, and after 1918 it became the core of the new Yugoslavia.

Socialist Yugoslavia under Tito made Serbia one of six republics. The rise of Slobodan Milošević on a wave of nationalism in the late 1980s preceded Serbia's role, through the 1990s, as the main backer of Serb forces in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia — years of sanctions, record hyperinflation, and atrocities including the Srebrenica genocide.

The 1998–99 Kosovo War ended with a 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia. The October 2000 revolution ousted Milošević, who died awaiting trial in The Hague; Montenegro left the union in 2006; and Kosovo declared independence in 2008, which Serbia does not recognise and which remains the central block on its EU path. Since 2012 the country has been ruled by Aleksandar Vučić and his party, with a tight grip on media and institutions and a foreign policy that balances EU membership talks against warm ties with Russia and China. From late 2024, the largest protest movement in decades — student-led, sparked by a deadly railway-station collapse blamed on corruption — forced the prime minister's resignation.

Serbian culture centres on the Orthodox Church and its calendar — above all the slava, a family's own patron-saint day, marked with a ritual bread and a priest's blessing, and unique to the Serbs. Hospitality is emphatic: a guest is fed and given rakija whether they want it or not.

Music runs from the guslar's epic songs and the kolo circle dance to the brass bands celebrated at the Guča festival, and to turbo-folk, the loud folk-pop that soundtracked the 1990s and never left. Belgrade has a hard-earned reputation for nightlife, including the splavovi, floating clubs moored on the rivers.

Basketball, water polo, tennis — Novak Djokovic is a national figure of almost mythic standing — and football are the sporting passions, the last bound up with a fierce ultras culture. A dark, self-deprecating humour and a keen, endlessly argued sense of history round out the picture.

Serbia's population is shrinking and ageing, with heavy emigration of the young and skilled to Germany, Austria, and beyond, even as Belgrade — by far the largest city — has grown into a busy regional hub of IT, services, and construction, joined since 2022 by tens of thousands of Russians who left after the invasion.

Vojvodina in the north is flat, fertile, and multi-ethnic, the country's breadbasket; central and southern Serbia and the mountainous west are poorer and losing people faster. The economy has grown steadily on foreign-invested car and parts factories, a booming tech sector, agriculture — Serbia is one of the world's top raspberry exporters — and mining, the last increasingly Chinese-owned and the source of bitter fights over a planned lithium project.

The EU is overwhelmingly the biggest trade partner and investor, but Belgrade keeps cheap Russian gas, Chinese loans, and a foreign policy that refuses to choose, while at home a protest movement over corruption and one-man rule has kept the streets busy.

Serbian cooking is Balkan and meat-heavy, with Ottoman, Hungarian, and Mediterranean layers. The grill is central: ćevapi minced-meat fingers, pljeskavica patties, ražnjići skewers, and the stuffed karađorđeva šnicla. Sarma (minced meat and rice in pickled cabbage), stuffed peppers, bean stew, and the coiled cheese pie gibanica are home staples.

Ajvar, the roasted red-pepper relish, and kajmak, a rich clotted-cream cheese, are on every table, along with šopska salad and cornbread. Vojvodina adds paprika stews and Danube fish stew; the southern town of Leskovac does especially good grilled meat. Sweets lean Ottoman — baklava, tulumbe — alongside plum-jam palačinke pancakes.

Rakija, usually plum šljivovica, is the national spirit and a point of pride, often homemade, and strong Turkish-style coffee punctuates the day.

Belgrade sits on a ridge above the meeting of the Sava and Danube, crowned by the Kalemegdan fortress and its park, with the bohemian Skadarlija quarter, the huge Temple of Saint Sava, the Nikola Tesla Museum, and a nightlife of river barges. Novi Sad, the relaxed capital of Vojvodina, has the star-shaped Petrovaradin fortress above the Danube and an Austro-Hungarian old town.

The medieval monasteries are the country's cultural treasure: Studenica and Žiča near Kraljevo, Sopoćani near the Ottoman-flavoured town of Novi Pazar, Manasija and Ravanica of the "Morava school", and the seventeen frescoed monasteries of Fruška Gora, a wooded national park near Novi Sad.

In the west and south, the mountain resorts of Zlatibor and Tara, the Drina river canyon with its tiny "house on the rock", the Šargan Eight narrow-gauge railway loop at Mokra Gora, the eroded pillars of Devil's Town, and the meandering Uvac canyon with its griffon vultures draw hikers and weekenders. The Iron Gates, where the Danube cuts a dramatic gorge along the Romanian border past the prehistoric site of Lepenski Vir, and the ski mountain of Kopaonik complete the range.