Place:Kragujevac, Šumadija, Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro

Watchers


NameKragujevac
TypeCity
Coordinates44.02°N 20.92°E
Located inŠumadija, Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Kragujevac is the fourth largest city in Serbia and the administrative centre of the Šumadija District. It is the historical centre of the geographical region of Šumadija in central Serbia, and is situated on the banks of the Lepenica River. , the city proper has a population of 150,835, while its administrative area comprises a total of 179,417 inhabitants.

Kragujevac was the first capital of modern Serbia and the first constitution in the Balkans, the Sretenje Constitution, was proclaimed in the city in 1838. A unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service was located there in World War I. During the Second World War, Kragujevac was the site of a massacre by the Nazis in which 2,778 Serb men and boys were killed.

Modern Kragujevac is known for its large munitions (Zastava Arms) and automobile (FCA Srbija) industries, as well as its status as an education centre housing the University of Kragujevac, one of the region's largest higher education institutions.

Contents

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Early and medieval

Over 200 archaeological sites in Šumadija confirm that the region's first human settlement took place around 40,000 years ago during the Paleolithic era. The Jerina cave, located near the village of Gradac in the direction of Batočina, is dated to have been inhabited from around 37,000 BP to 27,000 BP. Dugouts dated to 5,000 BC have been found in the city's vicinity, in the localities of Grivac, Kusovac, Divostin, Donje Grbice and Dobrovodica. These remains belong to the Neolithic Starčevo culture, which, in this area, spread along the river valleys of Lepenica and Gruža. The best known artifacts are the fertility figurines called Divostinke ("Girls from Divostin").

At the time of Roman conquest in 9 AD, the territory of the present-day city was largely inhabited by Illyrians (mainly the Dardani) and Celts (the Scordisci).[1] By the late 6th and early 7th centuries, large-scale Slavic raids and settlement began, along with invasions from Hunnic and Germanic tribes. Later, the area would become part of the First Bulgarian Empire. With the weakening of both the Bulgarian and Eastern Roman empires, Stefan Nemanja, Grand Prince of the consolidated medieval Serbian state, captured the territory between 1198 and 1199. Although it is hypothesized that the current area of the city was densely settled by the time of Stefan Nemanja's conquest, it does not appear in medieval Serbian documents.[1]

The first written mention of the city was in an Ottoman cadastral survey (defter) in 1476 after the city's incorporation into the Sanjak of Smederevo. Referred to as 'Kraguyfoça', the settlement, after Ottoman conquest, consisted of a square formerly used as a market with 32 houses. The surrounding region was largely empty; even the forests that once dominated the region had been burned. By the end of the same century, however, the Ottoman administration began to slowly resettle the city's area; by the 1536 cadastral survey, the town had 7 Muslim neighborhoods (mahalas) with 56 houses in total, along with a Christian community of 29 houses. On the left bank of the Lepenica, a mosque was erected.[1]

Habsburg-Ottoman conflict and major revolts

In spite of its newfound consolidation under Turkish rule, the town's location in strategic borderland between the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire made it an area of frequent conflict in the modern era. During the Great Turkish War, the Austrians, under Louis of Baden, pushed the Turks far to the south of the city. Although this occupation was short-lived, it spelled an end to consolidated Ottoman rule in the region. Soon after, in 1718, Kragujevac became a part of the Habsburg Kingdom of Serbia following conquest by Prince Eugene of Savoy and the signing of Treaty of Passarowitz. Under Austrian occupation, the area around the city was fortified, and the Muslim population driven out. In 1725 the first officially recorded cases of vampirism occurred in Kragujevac, in which two alleged vampires were accused of murdering 42 people. In other parts of Habsburg ruled Kingdom of Serbia similar cases followed after which the Serbian word vampir entered German and later other world languages. As the Ottomans retook the town in 1739, and lost it again in 1789 to the same enemy, the town was ripe for new rule—this time under Serbian rebels.[1]


As a settlement central to the Sanjak of Smederevo under Ottoman rule, Kragujevac was of utmost strategic importance to its agitating, largely rural Serb inhabitants. Therefore, it became a centre of the Serbian Revolution, a national awakening of Serbs led by their vojvoda, Karađorđe. First liberated on 5 April 1804 during the First Serbian Uprising, the city was finally freed from imperial rule during the Second Serbian Uprising in 1815.

In 1818, Kragujevac, though largely depopulated following the conflicts of the preceding centuries, was proclaimed capital of the Principality of Serbia on 6 May 1818 by Miloš Obrenović in the medieval Vraćevšnica monastery. To mark the occasion, he built the Amidža Konak, perhaps ironically a lone cultural souvenir of Ottoman rule. The first Serbian constitution, the Sretenje Constitution, was proclaimed in the city on 15 September 1835. It was one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe had ever seen.

Industrial development

Although Kragujevac lost its capital status to Belgrade in 1841, its importance only increased during the remainder of the 19th century as it grew into a city marked by its industry. Following centuries of economic underdevelopment, the underpinnings of the city's modernization—and Serbia's main munitions manufacturer, Zastava Arms—were laid in the commissioning of the city's foundry complex in 1835. Known under its Serbian acronym VTZ, the complex was completed in 1850, and the first cannon was cast in 1853. Colloquially styled the 'Knez's arsenal', its first director, Charles Loubry, was a French engineer authorized to take over this duty by a significantly larger figure than the Serbian knez—the Emperor of France, Napoleon III.


Following the creation of the VTZ, industrial development continued at an unprecedented pace. The first telephone exchange was installed in 1858, and in 1868 the first industrial brewery was opened by Nikola Mesarović. The first printing press was founded in 1870. To connect the city's burgeoning military industry as well as its production of iron ploughs to the rest of Serbia's regions, the BelgradeNiš railroad was built in 1886. To serve its industrial population, Serbia's first grammar school (gimnazija), the city's first pharmacy, and its first cinema, located in a local kafana, were all built during the remainder of the 19th century, along with Kragujevac's Great (or Upper) Park and, in 1891, its first regulatory urban plan.[1] The city's industrialism characterized it among its European peers, along with its workers' demonstrations, known as the Crveni barjak ('Red flag') demonstrations, first held on 27 February 1876.[2] Today, the beginnings of the town's industry, the now-defunct VTZ, have been recognized by the Serbian government as vital to Serbia's cultural heritage and, as of 2017, consists of 151 individual objects, of which 31 are protected as unique heritage, including the old foundry, the machine workshop, the chimney, the fire lookout tower, the railroad bridge over the Lepenica River, and the cartridge factory. Once known by its non-industrial residents as the 'Forbidden City' (Zabranjeni Grad), the complex is now open to the public.[2]

World War I

During World War I, Kragujevac again became the capital of Serbia (1914–1915), and the seat of many state institutions—the Supreme Army Command was housed within the court house building.[1]

A unit of the Scottish Women's Hospital for Women's Service was based there from December 1914 to November 1915. A list of those working in the hospital can be viewed on the website "Imperial War Museum: Lives of the First World War " and more information on these units is below.

During the war, Kragujevac lost around 15% of its population. On the night of 2 June 1918, a group of occupying Slovak soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian 71st infantry regiment mutinied in the city centre. The soldiers, led by Viktor Kolibík, had recently returned from captivity in Russia and were to be immediately deployed to the Italian Front. The mutiny failed, and 44 mutineers were executed.

Yugoslavia

Following World War I, Kragujevac became a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the period before the Second World War, the city continued its cultural and economic development with the founding of the Gundulić Theatre and the Kragujevac Academic Theatre as well as a number of new factories.


Following the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, the city came under direct Nazi occupation. After a joint Partisan-Chetnik attack on German forces in nearby Gornji Milanovac, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel calculated that 50 people were to be shot for every German soldier wounded and 100 people were to be shot for every German soldier killed. Franz Böhme therefore ordered the deaths of nearly 2,800 men and boys between 19 and 21 October 1941 in the Kragujevac massacre. The dead included a class from the city's First Gymnasium; today, a monument to the executed pupils is the symbol of the city. The massacre inspired a poem titled Krvava Bajka (A Bloody Fairy Tale) by Desanka Maksimović.

The city was liberated from Nazi Germany on 21 October 1944.[1]

In the post-war period, Kragujevac continued to develop its industry. Its main products were passenger cars, trucks and industrial vehicles, hunting arms, industrial chains, leather, and textiles. The biggest industry was Zastava Automobiles, which at one point employed tens of thousands people.

The first product of the Zastava Automobiles car company, the FIAT 750, was manufactured in 1955 under a licence to Fiat Automobiles (now FCA). In the following three decades, more than five million passenger cars (FIAT 750, Zastava 1300, Zastava 101, Zastava 128, Zastava Yugo, Yugo Florida, Fiat 500L) were manufactured and marketed in 74 countries worldwide. Perhaps most infamous among the automobiles produced is the Yugo, also marketed as the Zastava Korral.

The city's industry greatly suffered under international economic sanctions during the Milošević era in the 1990s, and some parts were reduced to rubble by the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Kragujevac today

The city today remains an industrial heart of Serbia, and has grown with the influx of students and refugees from the Yugoslav wars. In 2010, the city government signed a memorandum with the German development agency GIZ and in 2012 city hall adopted a strategy of urban development of the central city zone to be completed by 2030. As of December 2017, many objects within the complex deteriorated and the right bank of the Lepenica is urbanistically neglected. The authenticity and representative values of the complex must be preserved, but where it is allowed, the industrial and workers quarters will be transformed into the residential and commercial areas, traffic corridors and used for the numerous educational and cultural institutions Serbia's industrial city continues to cherish.[2]

Research Tips


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Kragujevac. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.