Belgrade means White City and is among Europe's oldest towns
Serbia's capital and largest city, Belgrade—Beograd, literally "White City"—has been inhabited since deep prehistory, with the Vinča culture among Europe's key Neolithic complexes nearby. After the Serbian Revolution it was again named the capital in 1841.
Sitting at the confluence of major Balkan rivers, Belgrade claims continuous settlement deep into European prehistory. Archaeological cultures around the site, including Vinča, mark early farming and symbolic life on the Danube corridor. Empires traded the fortress for centuries before modern Serbian statehood reclaimed it as political center.
Stone tools found in Zemun, some of them made by Neanderthals, show foragers were here long before farmers. Celts settled after 279 BC and called the place Singidūn before Rome took it under Augustus; Attila ravaged it in 442. Stefan Dragutin received the city from Hungary in 1284 and is counted the first Serbian king to rule it, and under Despot Stefan Lazarević it flourished as a capital with a new castle and walls. Known to Hungarians as Nándorfehérvár, it beat off Ottoman sieges in 1440 and 1456.
Suleiman the Magnificent finally captured it on 28 August 1521 with some 250,000 soldiers, deporting its Orthodox population to Istanbul, where the Belgrade forest still bears the name. Under the Ottomans it grew past 100,000 people, second only to Constantinople among their European towns. The Habsburgs held it three times between 1688 and 1791, and each Ottoman recapture left it largely razed. Northern Belgrade stayed the southernmost Habsburg outpost until 1918. The 2022 census counted 1,197,114 people in the city proper, and it has hosted the first Non-Aligned Movement summit in 1961 and Eurovision in 2008.
Source: Belgrade
