Thursday, February 22, 2018, at 7:00 PM

Novi Sad is a typical Central European town. It is the second largest city in Serbia and the administrative seat of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, located in the southern part of the Pannonian Plain of Central Europe, in the north of the Republic of Serbia.

Novi Sad, and the XVIII century Petrovaradin Fortress, which is sometimes called the Gibraltar on Danube, has been one of the key European geostrategic points for centuries. Different cultures met and permeated each other. The people of Novi Sad purchased their city the status of a Free Royal City from Empress Maria Theresa in 1748. The Free City with a good reputation attracted members of different nations and confessions from various social strata. It grew as a multiethnic and multiconfessional community, which remained one of the main features of the City today.

Novi Sad is the city of museums, galleries, cultural monuments, theaters and festivals. It is the seat of the Matica Srpska, the oldest cultural and scientific institution of the Serbian people, which was founded in 1826 and comprises seven scientific departments, a library of several million publications, and rich national gallery collections.

Novi Sad is the city of education and science. The City with rich social life, inextricably linked to the University, pulsating with youthful, joyous and vibrant atmosphere.

In 2016 Novi Sad was proclaimed as the European Youth Capital 2019 and the European Capital of Culture 2021.

The Mayor of Novi Sad is Mr. Miloš Vučević, LL.M.

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CITY HALL

The seat of city administration is in the building on the City Hall, built in 1894, during the mandate of the mayor Stevan Popović Pecija, following the efforts made through several decades for the City to obtain a representative building which would host city authorities. The construction was assigned in 1874 to Georg Molnar, a renowned Novi Sad architect, and the decision to start building reached in 1893. Following Molnar’s design, parallelly with the construction of the City Hall, the Roman Catholic church of the Name of Mary was built on the main square, today’s Trg Slobode, opposite the City Hall. The building of the City Hall, then Magistrate, was constructed as a representative neo-Renaissance edifice with three visible facades. Four wings of the building create a closed trapezoid-shaped area, with the atrium in the middle. In the corners of the building, there are lower domes, and above the central area, behind the mansard roof, emerges a square diameter tower, encircled by a balcony, with a lantern tower on top. The primary function of the tower was to allow figher-fighters to oversee the city, due to which, in 1907, a bell was installed with the dedication to St. Florian, the protector of towns against fire. The angular parts of the edifice are emphasized with life-size allegorical female figures. The interior of the building is marked by a prominent hall decorated in rich ornaments made up of 20 ceiling cassettes with flower rosettes and stucco medallions with angel motifs on the side walls. These ornaments were the work of Novi Sad plaster sculptors J. Kestner and Julija Anika, who are also the authors of the decorations on the building facades. The fields within the medallions, that illustrate the people’s activities, were painted by the Novi Sad painter, Pavle Ružička, in 1911. One of these paintings was replaced by the new state coat of arms after the Second World War. The hall serves as the venue of various cultural events, such as concerts, book promotions, formal ceremonies, and receptions.