Novi Sad

• 1. Introduction

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  Novi Sad sits on the southern edge of the Pannonian Plain, where the Danube narrows to just 350 meters beneath the stones of the Petrovaradin Fortress, and where the flat fields of Bačka meet the green slopes of Fruška Gora. Its name means "new plantation" in Serbian, yet the ground beneath it holds human traces reaching back to 5000 BC. That tension between newness and deep antiquity runs through every chapter of this city's story.

  A Serb merchant colony founded on the left bank of the Danube in 1694 grew into what one of the most celebrated figures in Serbian letters called the largest Serb municipality in the world. It became known as the Serbian Athens. It was bombarded, rebuilt, bombarded again, stripped of its bridges, and rebuilt once more. How does a city carry that weight? And what does it mean today that Novi Sad, population 260,438, is simultaneously the second largest city in Serbia, a UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts, and the site of a railway station canopy collapse in November 2024 that killed sixteen people and sent hundreds of thousands into the streets? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. From Cusum to Petrovaradinski Šanac

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  Celts of the Scordisci tribe were already building a fortress on the right bank of the Danube by the 4th century BC, making them among the first recorded inhabitants of the territory that would become Novi Sad. The Romans arrived in the 1st century BC, conquered the region, and raised a larger fortress named Cusum, which they folded into the province of Pannonia.

  Hunnic invasions leveled Cusum in the 5th century. The Byzantines rebuilt what remained and renamed it Petrikon, after Saint Peter. Slavic groups, including the Severians and the Serbs themselves, moved into the surrounding region across the 6th and 7th centuries. By 1237, the Hungarian variant of the settlement's name, Pétervárad, appeared in written documents, and several other communities were already recorded within what is now the urban area of Novi Sad.

  Ottoman forces swept through in the 16th century. Tax records from 1522 still show a mix of Hungarian and Slavic names in the nearby villages, but by 1590 the count had fallen to 105 houses, all inhabited by Serbs. The Hungarians had largely retreated. Those 105 households represent the surviving thread that connected the ancient settlement to the city that was about to be born on the opposite bank.

• 3. A Free Royal City

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  Habsburg rule arrived near the end of the 17th century and brought an immediate conflict: the new authorities prohibited people of Orthodox faith from living in Petrovaradin. The Serbs of the area had no choice but to cross the Danube. In 1694 they founded a new settlement on the left bank, calling it simply the Serb city, or Petrovaradinski Šanac.

  By 1720, the population of that settlement comprised 112 Serbian, 14 German, and 5 Hungarian households. The decisive moment came on the 1st of February 1748, when Empress Maria Theresa issued an edict granting the settlement the status of a free royal city. The edict is preserved in full, and it reads with the full imperial register of her reign: "We, Maria Theresa, by the grace of God Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia..." She abolished the name Petrovaradinski Šanac and assigned it four new names at once: Neoplanta in Latin, Új-Vidégh in Hungarian, Neusatz in German, and Novi Sad in Serbian.

  The Habsburg state had broader goals than naming a city. It recruited Germans from the southern principalities of the Holy Roman Empire to resettle the Danube valley, partly to increase population and partly to restore agriculture that had declined under Ottoman rule. The government guaranteed those communities freedom of religion and use of their own German dialects. That policy explains why, a century later, Germans were the second largest ethnic group in a city that carried a Serbian name.

• 4. The Serbian Athens

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  Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the reformer of the Serbian language, wrote in 1817 that Novi Sad was the largest Serb municipality in the world. His observation captured something real: in the 18th and 19th centuries, Novi Sad was the cultural and political nerve center for Serbs who had no state of their own.

  According to 1843 data, the city held 17,332 inhabitants. Of those, 9,675 were Orthodox Christians, 5,724 Catholics, 1,032 Protestants, 727 Jews, and 30 adherents of the Armenian church. Novelists, poets, jurists, and publishers all passed through. Đura Jakšić and Jovan Jovanović Zmaj worked here. Mika Antić lived here. Matica srpska, the oldest cultural-scientific institution in Serbia, was transferred from Budapest to Novi Sad in 1864, and its library now holds over 3.5 million volumes, making it the second largest library in the country. The Serbian National Theatre, one of the oldest professional theatres among the South Slavs, was founded here in 1861.

  The nickname Serbian Athens did not survive unchallenged. In 1849, the Hungarian garrison stationed at Petrovaradin Fortress, led by general Pál Kiss, opened an artillery bombardment on the city. The census taken in 1850 recorded only 7,182 citizens, compared with 17,332 just seven years before. Marija Trandafil and her husband funded the rebuilding of two churches out of the ruins.

• 5. Demographic Pressure and War

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  After Austria and Hungary reached their 1867 compromise, Novi Sad fell within the Kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarian government's Magyarization policy began reshaping the city. In 1880, Serbs were still the largest linguistic group, with 41.2% of inhabitants using Serbian most often and 25.9% Hungarian. By the 1910 census, the count stood at 33,590 residents, and the gap had narrowed: 13,343 spoke Hungarian, 11,594 Serbian, 5,918 German, and 1,453 Slovak.

  On the 25th of November 1918, the Assembly of Serbs, Bunjevci, and other Slavs of Vojvodina met in Novi Sad and proclaimed the union of Vojvodina with the Kingdom of Serbia. By 1921, the city had grown to 39,122 inhabitants. Twenty years later, Yugoslavia was partitioned by the Axis powers, and the northern regions, including Novi Sad, were annexed by Hungary. What followed ranks among the darkest episodes in the city's history: during three days of raids in January 1942, Hungarian police killed 1,246 citizens. Among those killed were more than 800 Jews. Their bodies were thrown into the icy Danube. The total death toll of the raids reached around 2,500. The Yugoslav Partisans of Syrmia and Bačka entered the city on the 23rd of October 1944, a date still marked as a city holiday.

  Fifty-five years later came another assault. During the 1999 Kosovo War, NATO bombardment destroyed all three of Novi Sad's Danube bridges: the Žeželj Bridge, the Varadin Bridge, and the Liberty Bridge. Residential areas were cluster-bombed. The oil refinery was hit daily. The city was left without communications, water, or electricity, and the ecological damage was severe.

• 6. Culture, EXIT, and Recent Reckoning

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  Since 2000, Novi Sad has hosted the EXIT festival, one of the largest summer music festivals in Europe. In 2017, over 200,000 visitors from 60 countries attended the festival across roughly 35 concerts. The city was chosen as a European Capital of Culture, with its mandate shifted to 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. From that mandate, the industrial zone in the Liman neighborhood was converted into an artists' quarter called Distrikt. The following year, in 2023, Novi Sad became a UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts.

  Underneath those accolades, older institutions endure. The Museum of Vojvodina was founded in 1847. The Gallery of Matica Srpska, also established in 1847, remains the largest exhibition space in the city. The folk song societies known as KUD have been active since at least 1892, when SZPD Neven was established. Letopis Matice srpske is the oldest Serbian journal still published.

  On the 1st of November 2024, the canopy of the main railway station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing sixteen people. The incident triggered a wave of mass protests against government corruption that continued into 2025. That same year, one million square meters of residential space were under construction simultaneously across the city, making Novi Sad the largest construction site in Serbia. The city that rebuilt itself after artillery fire in 1849, after the destruction of its bridges in 1999, is now building at a scale it has never seen before; and its citizens are demanding, as loudly as at any point in its history, a say in what gets built and how.