Belgrade

People have lived where the Sava meets the Danube for thousands of years: the Neolithic Vinča culture developed around Belgrade in the sixth millennium BC. Celts settled the ridge after 279 BC and called it Singidūn, and the Romans made it Singidunum, a frontier fortress on the Danube that gained city rights in the second century; across the Sava stood Taurunum, today's Zemun. Slavs settled in the 520s, and after centuries of changing hands the Serbian king Stefan Dragutin made it his seat in 1284. It was the capital of the Serbian Despotate under Stefan Lazarević, was returned to Hungary in 1427, and held out against the Ottomans in the siege of 1456, still remembered by the noon bell rung in churches across the Christian world.

The Ottomans took Belgrade in 1521, and for two centuries it changed hands between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Serbian rebels held it from 1807 to 1813, and it grew into the capital of the new Serbian state; by 1914 it had passed 100,000 people. Austro-Hungarian monitors shelled the city on 29 July 1914, and it was captured that December. Between the wars it became the capital of Yugoslavia and absorbed Zemun.

The Second World War opened for Belgrade with a Luftwaffe raid on 6 April 1941 that killed up to 2,274 people, and Allied bombs fell again at Orthodox Easter in 1944. After 1948 New Belgrade was built across the Sava. In 1999 the NATO bombing campaign targeted a number of buildings in Belgrade, and the Avala Tower was destroyed. The city has been fought over in 115 wars and razed 44 times. Since 2014 the Belgrade Waterfront project has rebuilt the Sava bank, and the city is preparing to host Expo 2027.

Belgrade is proud of its nightlife. Its best-known feature is the splav, a barge moored on the Sava or Danube that serves as a restaurant by day and a bar or club at night. The older tradition lives in the kafana, the tavern where people eat, drink and talk for hours, and in Skadarlija, the 19th-century bohemian quarter of poets and painters, bands still play starogradska, the old-town music of northern Serbia's cities.

The city has a dense cultural calendar: FEST, the film festival held since 1971; BITEF, the international theatre festival every September; BEMUS, the oldest classical music festival in Serbia, founded in 1969; the Belgrade Book Fair; and the Beer Fest every August. Belgrade hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2008, after Marija Šerifović won the year before, and the performance artist Marina Abramović, who was born here, held a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019.

Sport divides the city between Red Star and Partizan, Serbia's two biggest football clubs and rivals in basketball as well. Red Star won the European Cup in 1991, and the rivalry is one of the fiercest in world football. Most Belgraders are Orthodox, and family life follows the slava, the household's patron saint's day, along with Orthodox Christmas and Easter; the city also has smaller Muslim, Catholic and Protestant communities.

The 2022 census counted about 1.2 million people in the city proper and about 1.68 million in the wider administrative area, roughly a quarter of the population of Serbia. Belgrade is the political, financial and media centre of the country: in 2024 it held almost 30 per cent of Serbia's jobs and produced more than 43 per cent of its GDP. New Belgrade has become the main business district, with offices for a growing IT sector, and cranes stand over Belgrade Waterfront and many other new developments.

Most Belgraders live in flats — in the 19th-century streets of Stari Grad and Vračar, the concrete blocks of New Belgrade, or the suburbs spreading south and east. Since January 2025 the city's buses, trams and trolleybuses have been free to ride, and a metro is being built. Traffic, air pollution and rising rents are constant complaints, and since late 2024 student-led anti-government protests and road blockades have been part of life in the city.

The day moves at a relaxed pace: coffee on a terrace, a late lunch as the main meal, and an evening walk along Knez Mihailova or the river. In summer the beaches of Ada Ciganlija fill up, and on warm nights the riverbanks and splavovi stay busy until late.

Grilled meat dominates. Ćevapi, small fingers of minced meat, and pljeskavica, a spiced patty of minced pork, beef and lamb, are served almost everywhere, often with kajmak, a milk cream, ajvar, a pepper relish, and onions, or in lepinja, a flatbread. Karađorđeva šnicla — a rolled veal, pork or chicken steak stuffed with kajmak, breaded and fried — was created in Belgrade: the chef Mića Stojanović first made it in the 1950s at a restaurant in Košutnjak. Kafanas also serve sarma, pickled cabbage leaves stuffed with minced meat and rice, and podvarak, roasted sauerkraut with meat.

Burek, a flaky pastry filled with cheese, meat, spinach or potato, is the breakfast and quick meal of choice, traditionally with drinkable yoghurt; palačinke, thin crêpes, are the sweet street snack. On the rivers, floating restaurants serve riblja čorba, fish soup, and riblji paprikaš, fish stew, with carp, catfish, zander and perch.

The city's open and covered markets — Kalenić in Vračar, Zeleni Venac below the centre and Bajloni by Skadarlija — sell fruit, vegetables, cheese and kajmak. Rakija, fruit brandy, is the drink for toasts, and coffee is drunk all day.