Novi Sad, Serbia

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   NOVI SAD vojvodina

S E R B I A  A N D  M O N T E N E G R O

Source:
Wikipedia. This city has some Hungarian history and it might seem like
I'm trying to take Serbia and Montenegro apart piece by piece but
that's not why I chose it. Any city where my people were treated like
this I'd be proud to call my own someday as well! It has one of the
most interesting histories of Serbian cities:

Novi Sad (Нови Сад, Nov�
Sad, �jvid�k, Neusatz an der Donau, Neoplanta) is a city located in
Serbia and Montenegro; it lies in the northern Serbian province of
Vojvodina and is located on the banks of the Danube river.

It is the capital city of the Vojvodina province and a large industrial
and cultural centre. Its name means "New Planting" (noun) in Serbian.

Novi Sad City is divided into two municipalities:
Novi Sad and Petrovaradin. Between 1980 and 1989, the city was divided
into seven municipalities: Stari Grad, Podunavlje, Liman, Slavija,
Petrovaradin, Detelinara, and Sremski Karlovci.

The city's population was 215,659 in 2002 and
298,139 with the surrounding inhabited places of the municipalities
included. An unofficial estimate of the current city population is
approximately 240,000-250,000.

According to the 2002 census, the population of
Novi Sad is composed of Serbs (75.50%), Hungarians (5.24%), Yugoslavs
(3.17%), Slovaks (2.41%), Croats (2.09%), Montenegrins (1.68%) and
others. Most of the inhabited places in the municipalities have a
ethnic Serb majority, while the village of Kisač has a ethnic Slovak
majority.

Human settlement in the territory of present-day Novi Sad has been
traced as far back as the Stone Age (about 4500 BC). This settlement
was located on the right side of the river Danube in the territory of
present day Petrovaradin. This region was conquered by Celts (in the
4th century BC) and Romans (in the 1st century BC).

The Celts founded the first fortress at this location, which was
located on the right bank of the Danube. During Roman rule, a larger
fortress was built in the 1st century with the name Cusum and included
in Roman Pannonia. In the 5th century, Cusum was devastated by the
invasion of the Huns.

By the end of the 5th century, Byzantines had reconstructed the city
and called it by the names Cusum and Petrikon. The city in time became
conquered by the Ostrogoths, Gepids, Avars, Franks, Bulgarians, and
again by the Byzantines.

The city was conquered by the Kingdom of Hungary (in the 12th century);
by the Ottoman Empire (in 1526), and by the Habsburg Monarchy (in
1687). The city was first mentioned under the name Petrovaradin
(P�terv�rad) in documents from 1237.

Petrovaradin was known under the name P�terv�rad under Hungarian rule,
Varadin under Ottoman rule, and Peterwardein under Habsburg rule.

During the Ottoman rule, Petrovaradin had 200 houses, and three
mosques. There was also a Christian quarter with 35 houses populated
with ethnic Serbs.

At the outset of the Habsburg rule, people of Orthodox faith were forbidden from residing in Petrovaradin,
thus Serbs were largely unable to build homes in the city. Because of
this, a new settlement was founded in 1694 on the left bank of the
Danube. The initial name of this settlement was Serb City (Ratzen
Stadt). The settlement officially gained the name Novi Sad in 1748 when
it became a "free royal city".

For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, Novi Sad was the largest city
populated with ethnic Serbs (The reformer of the Serbian language, Vuk
Stefanović Karad�ić, wrote in 1817 that Novi Sad is the "largest Serb
municipality in the world"). It was a cultural and political centre of
Serbs, who did not have their own national state at the time. Because
of its cultural and political influence, Novi Sad became known as the
Serb Athens (Srpska Atina in Serbian). In 1820 Novi Sad had 20,000
inhabitants, of whom about 2/3 were Serbs.

During the Revolution of 1848-1849, Novi Sad was part of Serbian
Vojvodina, a Serbian autonomous region within Habsburg Empire. In 1849
the Hungarian army located on the Petrovaradin Fortress bombarded and
devastated the city, which lost much of its population (According to
1850 census there were only 7,182 citizens in the city compared with
about 20,000 in 1820).

Between 1849 and 1860, the city was part of an separate Austrian
crownland known as the Vojvodina of Serbia and Tami� Banat. After the
abolishment of this province, the city was included into newly formed
Bačka-Bodrog County. After 1867, Novi Sad was located within the
Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, also known as Transleithania.

Serbian troops entered the city on November 8, 1918, and on November
25, 1918, the Assembly of Serbs, Bunjevci, and other nations of
Vojvodina in Novi Sad proclaimed the union of Vojvodina region with the
Kingdom of Serbia. Since December 1, 1918, Novi Sad is part of the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1929, Novi Sad became the
capital of the Dunavska banovina, a province of the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia.