🇷🇸 Serbia
Novi Sad
Novi Sad is the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina in Serbia and the self-proclaimed "European Athens of the Balkans" — a title earned through a 19th-century flowering of Serbian literature, theatre and publishing that made this Austro-Hungarian city the cultural capital of the Serbian people while Serbia itself was under Ottoman rule. The city is built on the flat Pannonian Plain at a bend of the Danube River, opposite the dramatic cliff on which Petrovaradin Fortress (1692–1780) stands — the Habsburg military architecture so massive and elaborate that Napoleon, who bombed it in 1809, called it "Gibraltar on the Danube." Today Novi Sad is best known internationally for the EXIT Festival (Europe's best outdoor music festival, voted multiple times, held in July at Petrovaradin Fortress, capacity 30,000), but the city repays slower exploration: the Art Nouveau and Secession buildings of its pedestrian zone (Zmaj Jovina Street), the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, the multiethnic Vojvodina heritage museum with its Pannonian agricultural and craft collections, and the vineyards of the Fruška Gora hills rising from the Danube bank just south of the city — Serbia's most productive wine region producing amber wines and the local bermet (vermouth-style aperitif wine). Novi Sad was also the scene of one of WWII's most brutal civilian massacres (Novi Sad Raid, January 1942, when Hungarian forces killed 3,000 Jews and Serbs in three days on the frozen Danube ice) and of the 1999 NATO bombing that destroyed all three Danube bridges.