Serbia - The Flag

I received this card (together with one more flag card, which I'm going to show you later) from Ana as a total surprise :) Thank you very much! :)

This card shows the flag of Serbia with a small Coat of arms.
I love flag cards, although they're quite hard to find, much harder than the map cards. In my city, which is quite popular tourist destination, you can find at least 100 different postcards (probably more), but no normal map or flag cards. I travel quite often, so I can say that in some cities and countries you can easily find a map card (for example in Belgium), but you can rarely find a flag card showing nothing else but the country's flag. This makes me even more grateful for this surprise :)


The flag of Serbia is a tricolour with Pan-Slavic colours, with three equal horizontal fields, red on the top, blue in the middle and white on the bottom, which is really the flag of Russia upside down. The same tricolour, in a number of variations, was the flag of Serbia throughout history, and is the National flag of Serbs. On the State flag there is a small Coat of arms of Serbia centered vertically and located left of center by one-seventh of the flag's length.

The Coat of Arms of Serbia is the same as the coat of arms of the former Obrenović dynasty (first adopted in 1882; re-adopted in 2004) and features the white bicephalic eagle of the House of Nemanjić (which in turn took on the eagle from the Palaiologos dynasty of the Byzantine Empire). An ermine cape of the style once worn by kings is featured in the background. The double-headed eagle has been used since Byzantine times, the Serbian cross has been used since the 12th century.
Small coat of arms of Serbia is also known as kokarda.

Serbia - Belgrade

Serbia is a new country in my postcard collection! :)
My first Serbian card shows the capital of this country, Belgrad (Београд in Serbian). It arrived a bit damged, but probably that's beacause it's really big :)

Belgrade 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 1 710 000 (official estimate 2007), Belgrade is the largest city in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, second largest city on the Danube river and the fourth largest in Southeastern Europe, after Istanbul, Athens, and Bucharest.

One of the oldest cities of Europe, with archeological finds tracing settlements as early as 6th millennium BC,Belgrade's wider city area was the birthplace of the largest prehistoric culture of Europe, the Vinča culture. The city was discovered by the Greeks, founded and named by the Celts (White City, name it still bears), awarded city rights by the Romans before it was permanently settled by White Serbs from the 600s onwards. As a strategic key, the city was battled over in 140 separate wars since the ancient period by countless armies of the East and West.In medieval times, it was in the possession of Byzantine, Frankish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Serbian rulers. In 1521 Belgrade was conquered by the Ottomans and became the seat of the Pashaluk of Belgrade, as the principal city of Ottoman Europe and among the largest European cities. Frequently passing from Ottoman to Austrian rule, the status of Serbian capital would be regained only in 1841, after the Serbian revolution. 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.