Serbia Pictures

From the outside this structure defies the concept of a monastery as a place of peace and spirituality. What confronts visitors is a massive block of a fortress, dating from the early 1400s when it was built by a community fleeing the Ottoman takeover of Kosovo. The surviving frescoes are patchy, but still have startling vitality and colour.

The main tourist period is April to September, and the height of the season is during the school holidays in July and August when accommodation, be it campsites, B&Bs or luxury hotels, is at a premium. Edinburgh in particular becomes impossibly crowded during the festival period in August, so book well ahead.

Statistically, your best chances of fine weather are in May, June and September; July and August are usually warm, but may be wet too. In summer, daylight hours are long; the midsummer sun sets around 23:00 in the Shetland Islands and even Edinburgh evenings seem to last forever in June and July. Conversely, in December the sun doesn’t show its face for very long at all.

Belgrade (Serbian: Београд, Beograd listen (help·info)), is the capital and largest city of Serbia. The city lies at the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers in north central Serbia, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkan Peninsula. With an official population of 1,576,224 (2002),^[2] Belgrade is the largest city in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and the fourth largest in Southeastern Europe, behind Istanbul, Athens and Bucharest.

One of Europe’s oldest cities,^[3][4] Belgrade’s wider city area was the birthplace of the largest prehistoric culture of Europe, the Vinča culture.^[5] The foundation of the city itself dates back to Celtic and later, Roman periods, followed by the settlement of Slavs around the 7th century. In the medieval times, it was in possession of Byzantine, Frankish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Serbian rulers, until it was conquered by the Ottomans in 1521 and became the seat of the Pashaluk of Belgrade. It became the capital of an independent Serbian state for the first time in 1284 (lost to Hungary in 1427), the status that it would regain only in 1841, after the liberation from the Ottomans. In the 20th century, it was also the capital of several incarnations of Yugoslavia, up to 2006, when Serbia became an independent state again.

Belgrade has the status of a separate territorial unit in Serbia, with its own autonomous city government.^[6] Its territory is divided into 17 municipalities, each having its own local council.^[7] It covers 3.6% of the territory of Serbia, and 21% of the Serbian population lives in the city.^[8] Belgrade is the central economic hub of Serbia, and the capital of Serbian culture, education and science.

Serbia (Serbian: Србија / Srbija), officially the Republic of Serbia (Serbian: Република Србија / Republika Srbija, listen (help·info)), is a landlocked country in Central and Southeastern Europe, covering the southern part of the Pannonian Plain and the central part of the Balkan Peninsula. Serbia is bordered by Hungary to the north; Romania and Bulgaria to the east; the Republic of Macedonia and Albania^[1] to the south; and Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro to the west. The capital is Belgrade.

For centuries, shaped at cultural boundaries between East and West, a powerful medieval Kingdom - later renamed Serbian Empire - occupied much of the Balkans. The modern state of Serbia emerged in 1817 following the Serbian revolution. Later, it expanded its territory further south to include Kosovo and the regions of Raška and Vardar Macedonia. Formerly an autonomous Habsburg crownland, Vojvodina proclaimed its secession from Austria-Hungary on November 25, 1918 to unite with Serbia, preceded by the Syrmia region. The current borders of the country were established following the end of World War II, when Serbia became a federal unit within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbia became an independent state again in 2006, after Montenegro left the union which was formed after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1990s.

In 1999 Kosovo was placed under interim UN administration pursuant to UN Resolution 1244. In February 2008 the parliament of Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. Serbia’s government, as well as the UN Security Council, have not recognised Kosovo’s independence. The response from the international community has been mixed. In April 2008 Serbia was offered to enter the intensified dialogue programme with NATO despite the diplomatic rift with the Alliance over Kosovo