Waiting for the sunset
Belgrade (Serbian: Београд) is the capital and largest city of Serbia. The city lies on two international waterways, at the confluence of the Sava and Danube in north central Serbia, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkan Peninsula. With a population of 1.689.000 (official estimate 2006), Belgrade is the largest city in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and the fourth largest in Southeastern Europe, after Istanbul, Athens, and Bucharest.
One of the oldest cities of Europe, with a continuous documented history of 7,000 years, Belgrade's wider city area was the birthplace of the largest prehistoric culture of Europe, the Vinca culture. Discovered by the Greeks, the foundation of the city itself dates back to Celtic and later, Roman periods, followed by the settlement of White Serbs around the 7th century. In medieval times, it was in the 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. Northern Belgrade, though, remained an Austrian outpost until the breakup of Austria-Hungary in 1918. The united city then became the capital of several incarnations of Yugoslavia, up to 2006, when Serbia became an independent state again.
En. wikipedia. org/wiki/Belgrade
Kalemegdan is the core and the oldest section of the urban area of Belgrade and for centuries the city population was concentrated only within the walls of the fortress, thus the history of the fortress, until most recent history, equals the history of Belgrade itself. First settlement was founded in the 3rd century BC by the Celtic tribe of Scordisci. The city-fortress was later conquered by the Romans, became known as Singidunum and became a part of "the military frontier", where the Roman Empire bordered "barbaric Central Europe". Singidunum was defended by the Roman legion IV Flaviae which built a fortified camp on a hill at the confluence of the rivers the Danube and the Sava.
City’s history is long and complicated, more about Kalemegdan and Singidunum can be read on wikipedia.
After almost two millennia of continuous sieges, battles and conquests the fortress is today known as the Kalemegdan fortress.
The name Kalemegdan derives from two Turkish words, kale (fortress) and megdan (battleground) (literally, "battlefield fortress").
En. wikipedia. org/wiki/Kalemegdan
En. wikipedia. org/wiki/Singidunum
