On this day, March 8th, 2026, International Women’s Day is celebrated. It was first marked in 1911, although at the beginning it was not connected with a specific date. The link between March 8 and this holiday was established later, at the Second International Congress of Communist Women in 1921. The United Nations recognized this holiday in 1977.
Just 3 kilometers from Raška, in the village of Gnjilica, lies the Končul Monastery, one of the oldest endowments of Grand Župan Stefan Nemanja. It was built in the pre‑Nemanjić period, and Stefan Nemanja restored it around 1175. In this monastery, the future archbishop Danilo II took monastic vows, and during the reign of King Milutin it was also the seat of the Končul Diocese.
The Vinča culture belongs to the Late Neolithic, that is the Younger Stone Age, and the initial period of the Copper Age. It developed in the period from about 5300 BCE until 4500 BCE. It encompassed a wide area of the northern and central Balkans. On the territory of Kraljevo, remains of the Vinča culture were discovered at the site Divlje Polje in Ratina.
Miljko Petrović Riža was one of the richest industrialists in Kraljevo between the two world wars. He owed his nickname to the water chute (riža), by which timber was transported from the forests on Čemerno and Goč to his sawmills. After the war he was accused of economic collaboration with the occupier, and his property was confiscated.
The vine has been cultivated in these areas for thousands of years. During the Middle Ages, viticulture flourished on the estates of monasteries and nobility. Wine regions were formed that are known to this day. After the Ottoman period, viticulture developed again, and Serbian wines, despite the appearance of phylloxera and the extinction of old varieties, gradually broke through to European markets.
On February 3rd, 2026, we mark 105 years since the birth of Olga Jovičić Rita, national hero and the first woman political commissar in the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. A technical student, she became a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1940. During the war, she joined the communist resistance movement, eventually serving as political commissar of the First Company, Fourth Battalion of the First Proletarian Brigade.
In 1935, the chapel of Saint Sava together with the dining room, according to the project of academician Aleksandar Deroko. The Russian painter Nikolai Baron Mayendorff painted the church in 1937, and on that occasion a representative portrait of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II Romanov, who was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks, was executed. After World War II and the victory of the revolutionary authorities, the church of Saint Sava in Žiča was closed to the public, and the nuns covered the emperor’s portrait with blue paper, and over time he sank into oblivion.
On this day, December 15th, 1893, Vasa Pomorišac was born, painter, professor, critic, illustrator and the first Serbian trained stained glass artist. This artist-craftsman was attached to the Byzantine and Serbian past, whose spiritual reflections he drowned in his works, guided by the idea of art as a phenomenon inseparable from society and tradition.
On this day, November 15th, 1983, Mihailo Petrov, a Serbian graphic artist, painter, illustrator, poet and critic, died. The artist, who left behind a rich painting oeuvre, but also with many years of commitment earned graphics a place of equal artistic discipline as the first professor in this field.
The final break with the Ottoman feudal society and the liberation of Serbia began with the First and Second Serbian Uprisings. After 1815, Miloš Obrenović continued his independence through diplomatic activities, and at the beginning he managed to collect and pay imperial taxes instead of the Turks, and then, in the name of the people, to lease the imperial spahilukas. In the next step, he becomes an intermediary between the raja of the Serbs and their spahis. Miloš’s mediation between the raja and spahi is evidenced by a letter to Ismail spahi, in which he complains to the people from Konarevo in September 1824 that they do not respect him in the manner and order that was valid until recently.