Serbia

  

Kingdom of Serbia Краљевина Србија / Kraljevina Srbija (Serbian)
Flag Coat of arms
Anthem: "Боже правде" / "Bože pravde" (English: "God of Justice")
Capital	Belgrade
Official languages	Serbian
Religion	90% Christianity –85% Orthodoxy –5% Catholicism –1% Protestantism –9% other 3% Islam 7% other or none
Demonym(s)	Serbian
Government	Unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy
• King	Alexander II
• Prime Minister	Nikola Maksimović
• National Assembly President	Tomislav Unković
Legislature	National Assembly
History
• Principality	780
• Empire	1346
• Ottoman conquest	1459–1556
• Serbian Revolution	1804–1835
• Yugoslavia	1924
• Current constitution	1958
Population
• 2020 estimate	7,190,887
GDP (PPP)	2018 estimate
• Total	$
• Per capita	$
HDI (2020)	0.802 very high
Currency	Dinar (RSD)
Time zone	Central European Time
Driving side	right

Serbia (Serbian: Србија, Srbija), officially the Kingdom of Serbia (Serbian: Краљевина Србија, Kraljevina Srbija), is a country in southeastern Europe, located at the crossroads of the Balkans and the Central European Basin. It has borders with Hungary to the north, Croatia to the northwest, Montenegro and Albania to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, and Romania to the east. Belgrade is the capital and largest city, and the country's population is about 7.1 million. The northern and central two-thirds of Serbia consist of plains, while southern Serbia is mountainous, part of the Rilo-Rhodope Mountain range.

Continuously inhabited since the Paleolithic Age, the territory of modern-day Serbia faced Slavic migrations in the 6th century, establishing several regional states in the early Middle Ages at times recognised as tributaries to the Byzantine, Frankish and Hungarian kingdoms. The Serbian Kingdom obtained recognition by the Holy See and Constantinople in 1217, reaching its territorial apex in 1346 as the Serbian Empire. By the mid-16th century, the Ottomans annexed the entirety of modern-day Serbia; their rule was at times interrupted by the Habsburg Empire, which began expanding towards Central Serbia from the end of the 17th century while maintaining a foothold in Vojvodina. In the early 19th century, the Serbian Revolution established the nation-state as the region's first constitutional monarchy, which subsequently expanded its territory. Following the Austro-Hungarian War, Serbia co-founded the South Slavic nation of Yugoslavia, with Croatia and Montenegro. During the Great War, Serbia would be invaded and occupied by Italy during its invasion of Yugoslavia, later becoming a communist state as the Socialist Republic of Serbia following the partition of Yugoslavia and the creation of several socialist client states in the Balkans from the former Yugoslav republics.

During the Cold War, Serbia was part of the Eastern Bloc and was under the leadership of the League of Communists of Serbia as the ruling party of the country. Serbia would formally join the Landonist International during the Great War and remained part of it in the ensuing Cold War. While it was aligned with Italy due to the latter creating a communist Serbian state, the country would remain neutral during the Italo–Continental split in the 1950s and maintained positive relations with both Italy and the United Commonwealth. In the 1990s, issues of political corruption and abuse of power lead to calls for reform, ultimately leading to the end of communist rule during the Revolutions of 2000 and the restoration of the monarchy in a process that was finalized in 2001 following a referendum on its political system.

Serbia is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy and is a member of the European Community as well as NTO. The World Bank describes it as a high-income economy that provides universal healthcare and education to its citizens.

See also

This page uses material from the Wikipedia page Serbia, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).