Serbia

C

Climate

Serbia has a continental climate with cold winters and hot summers. On the Pannonian Plain of the north summers are hot, with temperatures sometimes rising above 40°C (100°F), and winters are long and cold, with temperatures sometimes falling below -20°C (-10°F). The average July temperature in Belgrade is 21°C (69°F); the average January temperature is 0°C (32°F). In the mountains the high altitude moderates summer temperatures and makes winters more severe with colder temperatures and heavy snowfall.

III

People of Serbia

Serbia has a population of 10,159,046 (2008 estimate). Ethnic Serbs constitute about two-thirds of the population. Ethnic Albanians are the largest minority group, making up about 17 percent of the population. Other groups include Hungarians and Muslim Slavs (generally known as Bosniaks).

Most Albanians live in Kosovo, where they make up more than 90 percent of the population. Bosniaks form a majority of the population in the southern region of Sandžak, which is sandwiched between Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia. Hungarians are concentrated in the northern part of the province of Vojvodina, bordering Hungary. In some parts of Vojvodina, Hungarians form a local majority. The province is also home to a small population of Roma (also known as Gypsies).

Croats had long lived in Belgrade and Vojvodina, but many of them fled after hostilities broke out between Croats and Serbs in 1991 in response to Croatia’s declaration of independence. As a result of the wars of Yugoslav succession, which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, about 646,000 refugees fled to Serbia and Montenegro from Croatia and Bosnia.

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Interethnic conflict in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 forced nearly 1 million ethnic Albanians to leave the province, with most going to Albania, Montenegro, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Nearly all of these refugees returned to Kosovo after a United Nations (UN) interim administration was set up in the province in June 1999. However, about 200,000 other residents of Kosovo, mostly Serbs, then fled from the province to other parts of Serbia. Many Serb refugees from Kosovo settled in Belgrade or Vojvodina.

A

Language and Religion

The official language of Serbia is Serbian, a South Slavic language that is traditionally written in the Cyrillic alphabet (see Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Languages). Minority groups speak their own languages, such as Albanian and Hungarian. Bosniaks generally speak Bosnian and write it with the Latin alphabet.

Serbs are by tradition Orthodox Christians. The Roman Catholic and Protestant churches also have adherents in Serbia. Most of the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo are Sunni Muslims (see Sunni Islam), as are the Bosniaks of the Sandžak region. Bosniaks are descendants of Slavs who converted to Islam in the 15th and 16th centuries.

B

Education

The leading institutions of higher learning in Serbia are the University of Belgrade, founded in 1863, and the universities of Kragujevac, Novi Sad, Niš, and Priština. Higher education in Serbia was crippled in 1998 when the Serbian parliament adopted a law that placed all universities under direct control of the government. This severely compromised academic freedom, and many of the most distinguished faculty members were fired. However, following the fall of the regime of Slobodan Milošević in late 2000, Serbian universities regained much of their traditional autonomy. Since that time they have worked to overcome the damage caused by the Milošević regime and by international sanctions against Serbia in the 1990s.

Schooling was particularly difficult for ethnic Albanians after 1990, when the Serbian authorities closed schools in Kosovo that used a curriculum oriented toward Albania, rather than Serbia’s uniform state curriculum. The University of Priština, in Kosovo, did not operate normally from 1990 to 2000, since most of its faculty members—who were ethnic Albanians—were dismissed by the Serbian authorities and almost all of the ethnic Albanian students quit or were expelled. Kosovar Albanians set up an underground school system in private homes and other locations, but education for Kosovar Albanian children clearly suffered. Since the establishment of autonomous provincial authority in Kosovo in 1999, the Kosovo education system has undergone reconstruction at all levels. The University of Priština has since reopened as an Albanian university.

IV

Culture of Serbia

The Orthodox Church had a major influence on the early development of the arts of Serbia. Serbia was once part of the Byzantine Empire, for which Orthodox Christianity was the state religion, and Byzantine influences appear in the country’s many beautiful Orthodox monasteries, such as Dečani, Studenica, and Gračanica, which contain magnificent frescoes and icons. These works demonstrate the originality and brilliance of Serbian religious art and architecture prior to the region’s conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century.

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