Holidays in Serbia

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Serbia

The Date That Kept Returning

On 15 June 1389 by the old Julian calendar, the armies of Serbian Prince Lazar and Ottoman Sultan Murad fought each other to a standstill on the plain of Kosovo, a battle in which both commanders died and which decided comparatively little militarily but grew, in the centuries that followed, into the single most important date in Serbian national memory. Adjusted to the modern Gregorian calendar, that date falls on 28 June, and it became known as Vidovdan, Saint Vitus's Day, observed ever after by the Serbian Orthodox Church in memory of Lazar and the Kosovo dead.

What makes the date genuinely extraordinary is how often it kept reappearing at pivotal moments in Serbian history over the centuries that followed, whether by design or by a coincidence historians still debate. In 1881, an Austro-Serbian alliance effectively subordinating Serbian foreign policy to Vienna was signed within a day of the Vidovdan anniversary. On 28 June 1914 itself, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo, an act that set off the chain of events leading directly to the First World War, and one his own testimony suggests was deliberately timed to fall on the Kosovo anniversary. Most remarkably of all, the treaty that formally ended that same war, the Treaty of Versailles, was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years to the day after the assassination that had started it, a date the Allied negotiators chose deliberately rather than by accident. A single calendar date, unchanged since a medieval battlefield, had by then anchored the outbreak and the formal conclusion of a war that killed millions.

Symbols Older Than Sumerian Writing, Still Unread

In 1908, the Serbian archaeologist Miloje Vasić began excavating a large mound on the banks of the Danube a few miles from Belgrade, at a site called Vinča, uncovering the remains of a Neolithic society that had thrived there roughly seven thousand years ago. The Vinča culture, which flourished from around 5300 to 4500 BCE across a region spanning much of the modern Balkans, built some of the largest settlements anywhere in prehistoric Europe and produced the earliest known evidence of copper smelting found anywhere in the ancient world.

Among the pottery, figurines and clay tablets recovered from Vinča sites, archaeologists identified a recurring set of incised symbols, ranging from simple crosses and circles to more elaborate geometric marks, that some researchers have argued may represent one of the earliest writing systems ever developed, potentially predating the cuneiform script of Sumer. The claim remains genuinely contested: many archaeologists argue the so-called Vinča symbols more likely functioned as ownership marks, religious or decorative motifs, or some other form of pre-linguistic notation rather than a true written language, and the debate has never been definitively settled either way. What is not disputed is the symbols' longevity: found across more than a hundred and fifty identified sites in Serbia alone, they remained in use for roughly two thousand years before disappearing from the archaeological record around 3500 BCE, disappearing as mysteriously as their original meaning.

Frequently Asked Questions