Belgrade

• 1. Introduction

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  Belgrade sits where the Sava and Danube rivers meet, and that single geographic fact has determined nearly everything about it. Cities at crossroads attract trade. They also attract armies. Belgrade has been battled over in 115 wars and razed 44 times, bombed five times, and besieged too many times to count. Yet today it is home to nearly 1.2 million people in the city proper, making it the capital and largest city of Serbia and one of the most populous cities on the entire Danube.

  What kind of place survives that? What does a city look like when it has been rebuilt over and over, by Romans and Byzantines, by medieval Serbian kings, by Ottoman sultans and Habsburg emperors, by socialist planners and Emirati developers? And why do the noon bells ringing in Catholic churches across the world trace their origin to a battle fought here in 1456?

  To understand Belgrade is to follow one of the longest stories in European urban history, beginning not with medieval walls or ancient Romans but with people living in these river valleys more than 50,000 years ago.

• 2. Before History Began

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  Chipped stone tools found in Zemun place nomadic foragers in the Belgrade area during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic eras. Some of those tools are of Mousterian industry, which places them in the hands of Neanderthals rather than anatomically modern humans. Aurignacian and Gravettian tools have also turned up nearby, evidence of occupation somewhere between 50,000 and 20,000 years ago.

  The first farming communities arrived with the Neolithic Starčevo culture, which flourished between 6200 and 5200 BC. Their settlements gave way to the Vinča culture, dating from around 5500 to 4500 BC. The Vinča people built some of the largest settlements in prehistoric Europe, and within the Belgrade area they produced something remarkable: anthropomorphic figurines like the Lady of Vinča, the earliest known copper metallurgy anywhere on the continent, and a proto-writing system known as the Old European script, which dates to around 5300 BC. That predates the writing of the Sumerians and the Minoans.

  On Cetinjska Street in the city proper, workers in 1890 discovered a Palaeolithic human skull dated to before 5000 BC. The ridge overlooking the river confluence later found its way into the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, suggesting that even in antiquity people recognised this place as something worth remembering.

• 3. Rome, then the Slavs

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  In 279 BC, Celtic invaders known as the Scordisci took the settlement from the Thraco-Dacian tribe called the Singi and named it Singidūn, the suffix meaning fortress. The Roman army reached it in 34-33 BC. By the mid-2nd century AD the Roman authorities had declared it a municipium, and before the end of that century it had risen to the status of a full colonia, the highest city class Rome awarded.

  Flavius Iovianus, known as Jovian, was born in Singidunum. He would later become emperor and reestablish Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, ending the brief revival of traditional Roman religion under Julian the Apostate. In 395 AD the city passed to the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire.

  By 442 it had been ravaged by Attila the Hun. Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, took it in 471 before moving on into Italy. Then came the Gepids, then Byzantine reconquest in 539. In 577 an estimated 100,000 Slavs poured into Thrace and Illyricum, and the Avars under Bayan I consolidated control of the entire region and its new Slavic population by 582. The first written record of the name Belograd appeared on the 16th of April, 878, in a papal letter to Bulgarian ruler Boris I. In all its variants the name meant some version of white fortress.

• 4. Medieval Seat of Power

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  Stefan Dragutin received Belgrade from his father-in-law, Stephen V of Hungary, in 1284, making him the first Serbian king to rule the city. It then served as the capital of the Serbian Despotate under Stefan Lazarević, son of the Serbian prince Lazar Hrebeljanović who fell at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Lazarević built a castle with a citadel and towers, refortified the ancient walls, and turned Belgrade into a haven for Balkan peoples fleeing Ottoman expansion. The population at that time is thought to have reached between 40,000 and 50,000.

  In 1427, Lazarević's successor Đurađ Branković returned the city to the Hungarian king and made Smederevo his capital instead. Even so, Belgrade, known in Hungarian as Nándorfehérvár, held out. The Ottomans besieged it unsuccessfully in 1440 and again in 1456, when more than 100,000 Ottoman soldiers surrounded the walls. The Christian army led by Hungarian general John Hunyadi successfully defended the city.

  Pope Callixtus III ordered noon bells rung throughout the Christian world to mark the victory. That noon bell tradition is still observed in Catholic churches worldwide today, and it is considered a cultural symbol of Hungary.

• 5. Ottoman City, Habsburg Wars

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  On the 28th of August 1521, Suleiman the Magnificent arrived at the walls with 250,000 soldiers and more than 100 ships. The fortress fell. Most of the city was razed, and its entire Orthodox Christian population was deported to Istanbul, to an area that has since been known as the Belgrade forest. Belgrade then became the seat of the Pashalik of Belgrade and grew quickly into the second-largest Ottoman town in Europe, surpassed only by Constantinople.

  In 1594, a major Serb rebellion was crushed. In retaliation, Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha ordered the relics of Saint Sava burned publicly on the Vračar plateau. The Church of Saint Sava, one of the largest Orthodox church buildings in the world, was later built on that same plateau to commemorate the act.

  The Habsburgs occupied the city three times: 1688-1690-1717-1739, and 1789-1791. Each time the Ottomans retook it and razed much of what had been rebuilt. During these conflicts, hundreds of thousands of Serbs led by two Serbian Patriarchs retreated into Habsburg territory in what became known as the Great Serbian Migrations, settling in present-day Vojvodina and Slavonia. Those migrations reshaped the demographic map of southeastern Europe permanently.

• 6. Rebirth as a Serbian Capital

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  At the start of the 19th century, Belgrade was predominantly a Muslim city. The first Serbian uprising brought revolutionary forces into the city from the 8th of January, 1807, until 1813 when the Ottomans retook it. A period of extraordinary violence followed: around 6,000 Muslims and Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity and most mosques were converted into churches.

  After the Second Serbian Uprising in 1815, Serbia gained a form of sovereignty formally recognised by the Ottoman government in 1830. In 1841, Prince Mihailo Obrenović moved the capital from Kragujevac to Belgrade. The Ottoman garrison finally withdrew from the Kalemegdan fortress on the 18th of April, 1867, the last formal symbol of Ottoman suzerainty in Serbia.

  Urban planner Emilijan Josimović then transformed the city. He stated plainly that he wanted to rebuild Belgrade so that the capital would not retain the form that, in his words, "barbarism gave it." He designed it to resemble Vienna, including grand boulevards modelled on the Ringstrasse. What remained of Ottoman Belgrade by the late 19th century amounted to two mosques, the citadel, and a fountain with Arabic inscriptions.

  In June 1896, a representative of the Lumière brothers named André Carr held the first-ever projection of motion pictures anywhere in the Balkans and Central Europe, in Belgrade. He filmed the city the following year, though those images have not survived. The first permanent cinema opened in 1909.

• 7. Two World Wars

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  Austro-Hungarian monitors shelled Belgrade on the 29th of July, 1914, a single day after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The city fell to General Oskar Potiorek on the 1st of December, was retaken by Serbian troops under Marshal Radomir Putnik on the 16th of December, and then fell again in October 1915 to forces commanded by Field Marshal August von Mackensen. It was finally liberated on the 1st of November, 1918, by Serbian and French troops under Marshal Louis Franchet d'Espèrey of France and Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia. The city had been so devastated that it briefly lost its status as the largest city in the Kingdom to Subotica.

  The Second World War brought its own catastrophe. When a military coup overthrew the government that had signed the Tripartite Pact, the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade on the 6th of April, 1941, killing up to 2,274 people. Six German soldiers led by their officer Fritz Klingenberg then bluffed the city into capitulating by feigning overwhelming force. Under German occupation, General Franz Böhme enforced a policy of shooting 100 Serbs or Jews for every German soldier killed. Belgrade became the first city in Nazi-occupied Europe to be declared judenfrei. Resistance was led by Major Žarko Todorović until his arrest in 1943. The Allies bombed the city on the 16th of April, 1944, killing at least 1,100 people; that date fell on the Orthodox Easter. Liberation by the Red Army and Communist Yugoslav Partisans came on the 20th of October, 1944.

• 8. Socialist Belgrade and Beyond

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  The city that emerged from World War II had 11,500 demolished housing units. Marshal Josip Broz Tito proclaimed the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in Belgrade on the 29th of November, 1945. The post-war regime rebuilt in a modernist style inspired by Le Corbusier, constructing the New Belgrade district beginning in 1948. By 1969, the city's population crossed one million for the first time, driven largely by rural migration; an estimated two of three Belgradians at that time had been born in the countryside.

  The pressures of that growth were severe. The mayor of Belgrade, Branko Pešić, told a journalist in 1965 that between 20,000 and 30,000 people had been arriving each year for seven or eight years. He said some found housing but most were "forced to house in basements, in unhygienic apartments and barracks." In 1965 the city was estimated to be short of 50,000 housing units.

  In 1972, Belgrade experienced the last major smallpox outbreak in Europe since World War II. Tito's funeral in May 1980 was attended by delegations from 128 of the 154 United Nations member states, making it one of the largest state funerals in history. When NATO bombed the city in 1999 during the Kosovo War, between 500 and 2,000 civilians were killed across Serbia and Montenegro, of whom 27 died in Belgrade.

  In 2014, the Belgrade Waterfront urban renewal project began, backed jointly by the Serbian government and Emirati partner Eagle Hills Properties. By May 2025 the project had attracted over 900 companies, created around 10,000 working places, and sold more than 10,000 apartments, with an investment of over 4 billion euros. The plan is to triple the project's scope, reaching a total investment of over 12 billion euros.