EXIT Festival, Petrovaradin Fortress, and the Balkans' most liveable city
Novi Sad is Serbia's second city and its most cultured — a Danube-side university town of Art Nouveau facades, bicycle lanes, and a café culture that runs deep into the night. The EXIT music festival each July takes over the enormous 18th-century Petrovaradin Fortress for four days of electronic and rock music, attracting 200,000 people from across Europe. The street food is deeply Balkan: burek flaky with meat or cheese, roštilj grilled meats, and pljeskavica burgers that are genuinely life-changing.
Novi Sad was established as a free royal town in 1748, across the Danube from the Habsburg fortress of Petrovaradin. Its Serbian Orthodox intelligentsia made it the cultural capital of the Vojvodina region — it was called the 'Serbian Athens' in the 19th century, home to the Matica srpska (Serbia's oldest cultural institution, founded 1826). The city was heavily bombed by NATO in 1999 during the Kosovo War, and three of its Danube bridges were destroyed — rebuilt with EU funds, they now carry cycle paths and are illuminated each night.