Vojvodina

Three regions on one plain

Vojvodina is the northernmost part of Serbia, bordered by Croatia, Hungary and Romania. Its southern edge with the rest of Serbia mostly follows the Sava west of Belgrade and the Danube east of it.^[3] It joins three historic regions: Bačka, between the Danube, the Tisa and the Hungarian border; Banat, to the east; and Srem (Srijem), to the south.^[3]

Most of it is flat plain, part of the Pannonian Basin. Its chernozem soils make it Serbia’s farming heartland, growing much of the country’s wheat and maize.^[3] Its largest towns are Novi Sad, the provincial capital, Subotica and Zrenjanin.^[3]

A frontier that took its name in 1848

Slav farmers settled here in the 6th and 7th centuries, and Hungarian nomads arrived in the 9th and 10th. The Ottomans ruled it from the early 16th century to the late 18th, and many Serbs moved north into it from Ottoman Serbia.^[3] Once it passed to the Habsburg empire, large numbers of Hungarians, Germans and Romanians came too.^[3]

The Habsburgs gave settlers land and the right to elect their own leader, a vojvod, in return for guarding the border against the Turks. The zone was called the Military Frontier.^[3] After a Hungarian uprising was defeated in 1848, parts of Bačka, Banat and Srem were joined to it under Vienna and given the name Vojvodina. In 1867–68 most of it went back to the Hungarian crown, but the name stuck.^[3]

In and out of autonomy

In 1918 Vojvodina became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia.^[3] After the Second World War it came back into socialist Yugoslavia as an autonomous province of the Serbian republic, and by 1974 it had become a republic in all but name.^[3]

Serbian nationalists resented that independence, and in 1989 Serbia took direct control again.^[3] In the wars of the 1990s many people from the province’s minorities left, especially Hungarians, and Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo arrived.^[3] In 1999 NATO’s bombing hit Vojvodina hard, because much of Yugoslavia’s oil storage and refining was there; bridges over the Sava and the Danube were targeted.^[3]

A “nominal” autonomy, as Britannica calls it, came back in 2002. Vojvodina stayed in Serbia when Serbia and Montenegro split in 2006, and some local groups still call for more self-rule.^[3]

What the province runs today

Serbia’s 2006 constitution names two autonomous provinces: Vojvodina, and Kosovo and Metohija.^[1] Vojvodina’s supreme law is its Statute, which its own assembly adopts with the approval of Serbia’s National Assembly. Its territory can’t be changed without its citizens’ consent in a referendum.^[1]

Within Serbian law, the province regulates farming, water, forests, tourism, the environment, transport, education, sport, culture, health care and social welfare at the provincial level. It also sees to human and minority rights.^[1] The constitution guarantees it a budget of at least 7% of Serbia’s.^[1]

Its Statute, adopted in 2014, sets up a 120-seat assembly and a provincial government, with Novi Sad as the seat.^[2] Alongside Serbian in Cyrillic, Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian, Romanian and Ruthenian are in official use in the provincial authorities.^[2] Its flag is a red, blue and white tricolour with three yellow stars in the middle.^[2]

“In the Republic of Serbia, there are the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina and the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija.”^[1]