Apatin

Apatin is a little town on the Danube of 40,000 population in contact with Croatia and Hungary. It had drawn out of this position an economic advantage because it remained an important river port leading to Novi Sad. Otherwise, the common living of Serbs, Hungarians, Croats, Gipsies and other minorities may explain the proliferation of ethno feasts in various colours and in a communicative warmth. Apatin has also got the advantage of being in a region of forests and of river isles contributing to the creation of natural reservations and the nautical and fishing places agreeable enough. Finally, the walks in an harboured town where the places of the cults of all confessions and the houses typical to Vojvodina would not miss a charm. You will for sure taste the local specialty of pasted trout paprikas in one if these terraces leaning on the Danube.

Because of its position on the Danube and thanks to its natural riches there developed there the cereal cultures and important hunting and fishing. Apatin had always been a cross-roads of the movement of the peoples. The Sarmates, the Huns, the Slavs and the Hungarians had been successively distributed on the Danube until the Hungarian catholic church in 1371 had given the town its name and had founded a bishopric. During the Middle Ages the bishop had been under the control of many gentle people, one of which had been the Serb Stefan Lazarevic. Thereafter the Turks had occupied the region and the development of Apatin had been stopped: in 1560 there were only 80 families in the town and more than50 places had existed under Lazarevics.

Since the XVII century the enmities between the Turks and the Austrians Apatin became a place of colonisation and of migration. The Serbs, unseizable to the Ottoman Army, had settled in this region in 1690 and had founded the burghs of Bukcenovac and Vranjesevo. The Austro-Hungary had been sending the German workers and artisans throughout the whole XVIII century, who, having been dwelling in Ulm, had navigated down the Danube up to Apatin. They used to work in the brick kilns and in the mines making Apatin the greatest German centre in Vojvodina of XIX century.

But the co-existence of many nationalities had been broken in the moment of the II World War. The resistance to the German occupation had been organized by the bishop Adam Berentz, but that did not prevent the numerous outstanding people of the German nationality to co-operate with the occupiers to cast out the majority of other nationalities out of the town. In 1946 it had been the turn of Germans to be cast out and to be substituted by Montegrins and the Serbs from Krajinas. Apatin had since known a development thanks to industry: the ship construction, the cement plants and the clothes. it has been well known worldwide by its brewery of the light beer, the "Jelen pivo".