Niš, Serbia: Constantine’s Birthplace and a City at the Crossroads of the Balkans

The emperor who gave his name to Constantinople was born not in Rome or on the Bosporus but in a river town of the central Balkans. Niš, Serbia, the Roman Naissus, is the place Britannica gives as the birthplace of Constantine the Great, and archaeologists have traced the imperial residence that he and his sons developed on the edge of the city. Yet Constantine is only one layer here. The same valley carried Roman armies, crusaders, Ottoman garrisons and the railways of the modern Balkans, and the twentieth century left memorials of its own. On Days 7 to 9 of our small group Balkans tour from Dubrovnik to Kotor, the group is based in Niš, with a guided tour of the city and its fortress, a stop at the Roman remains of Medijana and a visit to the city’s Second World War memorials.

Why Niš, Serbia sits at a Balkan crossroads

The reason Niš matters is geography before it is history. Britannica explains the city’s importance through its command of the Morava–Vardar and Nišava river corridors, which it calls the two principal routes from central Europe to the Aegean Sea. Travelling south from the Danube, the Morava valley leads towards the Vardar and Thessaloniki; turning east, the Nišava valley leads towards Sofia and on towards Istanbul. Niš sits where those routes divide, and Britannica notes that the main railway line from Belgrade still splits here, one branch towards Thessaloniki and the other towards Sofia.

That position explains much of what follows. Armies, emperors and merchants passed through Niš because it was hard to avoid, and each period left something behind: a Roman city and an imperial estate, a medieval stopping place on the road to Byzantium, an Ottoman fortress on the river, and twentieth-century sites of memory. For the way Niš fits into the whole route, from the Croatian coast to Montenegro, our day-by-day guide to the Balkans history tour sets out the journey, and our account of Belgrade Fortress above the Sava and the Danube covers the other great Roman and Ottoman stronghold that the group visits on Day 5, two days before reaching Niš.

Naissus: a Roman city on the military road

Roman Naissus, Britannica records, probably succeeded a Celtic settlement, and the city was already known to the geographer Ptolemy in the second century CE. Its significance grew with the road that ran through it. The Roman military road known as the Via Militaris passed this way, and the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade places the imperial residence at Mediana immediately beside it, just east of the city. A town on this road was a town on the line of march.

That brought danger as well as traffic. Britannica records that in 269 CE the emperor Claudius II defeated an army of the Goths near the walls of Naissus, an episode from a century in which emperors spent much of their time on campaign in the Danube and Balkan provinces. It is a long way from the emperors of Rome’s first two centuries, the rulers from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius profiled in our guide to who the Roman emperors were, to the soldier-emperors of the late empire, but the story of Naissus belongs firmly to the second group.

Constantine’s birthplace

Constantine the Great was born at Naissus. Britannica gives his birthday as 27 February but treats the year as uncertain: its entry on Niš says about 280, its biography of Constantine “after 280”. It names his parents as Flavius Valerius Constantius, an army officer, and Helena. The National Museum Niš gives his reign as 306 to 337. Britannica describes him as the first Roman emperor to profess Christianity, and credits his reign with beginning the empire’s transformation into a Christian state.

What makes Niš more than a name in a biography is the evidence that Constantine kept a connection with the place. According to the Institute of Archaeology, between 317 and 334 the emperor often stayed in the Balkans, and in those years he built and rebuilt at Mediana, on the outskirts of his native city. The Institute reads the architecture there as an expression of his wish “to mark the place of his origin properly”. Visitors arriving at the villa were greeted, it notes, by a statue of Dea Dardanica, the patron goddess of the Dardanians, the people to whom Constantius Chlorus and Constantine belonged.

It is worth keeping the two places distinct. Constantine was born in the Roman city of Naissus, whose remains lie under modern Niš; Mediana was a suburban imperial estate a few kilometres to the east, which grew into a residence in the decades of his rule. The tour visits the second, but it is the first that gives Niš its claim.

Mediana: an imperial residence outside the city

The archaeological site of Mediana, spelled Medijana on the tour page, lies beside the line of the old Via Militaris, a few kilometres east of the centre of Niš; the Institute of Archaeology gives the distance as about 4 kilometres and the National Museum Niš as 5. The Institute describes an open settlement covering about 80 hectares that grew from an agricultural estate into a luxurious administrative and residential complex. The National Museum Niš, which began excavating there in 1933, calls it the endowment of Constantine the Great and his sons, and dates the most active period of its life to between 330 and 361.

The heart of the site is a villa with a peristyle, a colonnaded courtyard around which the main rooms were arranged. Around it, the Institute lists baths, courtyards and a ceremonial entrance, and beyond the enclosure wall a villa with an octagonal hall, a granary (a horreum), military barracks, a water tower and two early Christian churches. A water tower and reservoir on the nearby slope of Vlaško Brdo, built at the end of the third century, supplied the settlement through a channel.

The decoration matched the status of the owner. The National Museum Niš describes buildings richly decorated with architectural ornament, mosaics, frescoes and sculpture. The Institute links an intensive phase of rebuilding, which it dates between 330 and 378, to preparations for the celebration of thirty years of Constantine’s reign, and records that the imperial ceremonial introduced by Diocletian, including proskynesis, the ritual prostration before the emperor, shaped the design of the residence. Because the villa stood next to the main road, the message about the origin and power of the emperor was visible to anyone passing by.

Mediana also shows how the imperial court moved. Constantine’s sons Constans and Constantius II continued to build there, and the Institute records that it was at Mediana, in 364, that the emperors Valentinian I and Valens divided the army and the empire between themselves. After 383, it suggests, families of Gothic federates were settled in the complex and adapted its buildings to their own needs. Life on the site ended with the Hun invasion: the National Museum Niš dates its destruction to 441–443.

On the tour, the stop at Medijana is a brief one, made on the return leg of Day 8. The day’s main Roman visit, before that stop, is to Felix Romuliana, the palace of the emperor Galerius at Gamzigrad, which UNESCO inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2007 as a complex commissioned by Galerius in the late third and early fourth centuries.

After Rome: Huns, crusaders and the road to Byzantium

Naissus did not survive the fifth century intact. Britannica records that the town was destroyed during the migrations of the Huns, and the Institute of Archaeology notes that the Mediana area was not inhabited again until the eleventh or twelfth century. Among the city’s older surviving monuments, Britannica lists a fifth-century Byzantine crypt. In the centuries that followed, Niš changed hands repeatedly, passing between Bulgarian, Hungarian, Byzantine and Serbian rulers.

Its position on the road to Constantinople kept bringing travellers. In 1189, during the Third Crusade, the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa led his army across the Balkans, and the historian A. A. Vasiliev, in his History of the Byzantine Empire, records that “during his stay at Nish” Frederick received Serbian envoys and the Serbian ruler, the Great Župan Stefan Nemanja, himself. It is a reminder that the medieval city was still a halting place for anyone moving between central Europe and Byzantium. For the longer arc of medieval Serbia, from the Nemanjić dynasty to the arrival of the Ottomans, our article on the Serbian story in Balkan history traces the kingdom and the centuries that followed.

Niš Fortress: an Ottoman stronghold on older foundations

The Ottomans took Niš from the Serbs in 1375, according to Britannica, and, with brief interruptions, their rule lasted until 1877, during which time the town became an important station on the route from Istanbul to Hungary. The fortress that dominates the centre today belongs to that period. The National Tourism Organisation of Serbia describes it as a well-preserved eighteenth-century fortress of the Ottoman period on the bank of the river Nišava, built of stone from the nearby Hum quarry “on the foundations of Roman, Byzantine and Serbian mediaeval forts”, with building material from those earlier periods reused in its walls.

The same source describes four gates, the Stambol Gate, the Belgrade Gate, the Vidin Gate and the Large Gate, and a moat filled with water from the river, parts of which still surround the northern side. Inside the walls there was once a settlement with a library, shops and barracks. What survives includes the Bali-Bey mosque, a square building with a dome that now serves as an art gallery, several gunpowder magazines and the arsenal; not far outside the walls stands a fifteenth-century Turkish bath. The Day 8 guided tour of Niš takes in the fortress, where these layers sit side by side within a single circuit of walls.

The same guided tour includes the Skull Tower, raised in 1809 during the First Serbian Uprising, a monument whose history and difficult legacy are the subject of our article on the Skull Tower in Niš. Ottoman rule in Niš ended in the war of 1877–78: Britannica records that the Serbian army took the town in 1877 and that it was ceded to Serbia by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Britannica also notes that bomb damage in the Second World War and post-war construction erased much of the older townscape, which is one reason why the fortress now carries so much of the city’s visible past.

How much walking do the days in Niš involve?

The tour page does not give distances or walking details for the individual visits in Niš. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. If you would like to talk through what that means for you, a Tour Specialist can help.

Crveni Krst and Bubanj: remembering the Second World War

Day 9 turns to the twentieth century. During the occupation of Serbia in the Second World War, the German authorities established a concentration camp in the Crveni Krst (Red Cross) district of Niš. According to the National Museum Niš, which now cares for the site, the camp was set up in September 1941 and operated until the Germans left on 14 September 1944, a month before the city was liberated. The European memorial-sites portal memorialmuseums.org lists prisoners of war, Jews, Roma, hostages and partisans among those held there, and records that the Jewish men imprisoned in the camp were shot on Bubanj hill in February 1942.

The camp is also remembered for a breakout. The National Museum Niš records that on 12 February 1942 a group of 147 unarmed prisoners attacked the guards; 105 escaped and 42 died on the camp’s wire. On the 25th anniversary of the breakout, on 12 February 1967, a memorial museum opened in the former camp building. It is known as the Memorial Complex “February 12”.

Many of those held at Crveni Krst were executed at Bubanj, a nearby hill. Estimates of the number killed vary between sources: the National Museum Niš states that of about 30,000 people imprisoned in the camp, more than 10,000 were executed on Bubanj, while memorialmuseums.org gives a figure of up to 2,000 and notes that some records give 10,000 or 12,000. A memorial park was laid out on Bubanj in 1963, with three large sculptures by the artist Ivan Sabolić, commonly described as three raised, clenched fists. The tour visits both the camp and the memorial at Bubanj, and they ask for a quieter pace than the Roman and Ottoman sites of the previous day.

What else do the three days in Niš include?

Day 7 looks beyond the city. The tour page describes a drive through hills and valleys to Kalenić monastery, which it calls architecturally significant, where the group learns about the history of religion in the area and takes a walking tour of the monastery grounds, followed by the Belimarković manor house, now a museum. Day 9 also includes a short trip to see the eroded earth pillars of Đavolja Varoš (Devil’s Town) near Kuršumlija, which the tour page calls the Devil’s Towers.

Where does the route go before and after Niš?

The group arrives from Kragujevac, after a Day 6 that takes in a memorial to those who died in the Balkan wars and the First World War, the Church of St George and the Karađorđević mausoleum at Topola, and the fifteenth-century fortified monastery of Manasija. On Day 10 the route continues south past another Roman site and Vranje into North Macedonia, visiting the prehistoric archaeological site of Kokino and an aqueduct on the outskirts of Skopje, the base for Days 10 and 11.

Reading Niš at the crossroads

Niš is easy to pass through, which is exactly why it rewards a pause. The same river corridors that made it a stopping place for Roman armies explain why Constantine’s family came from here, why an emperor built a residence beside the highway, why a crusading army halted on its way to Byzantium, and why the Ottomans rebuilt a fortress on the bank of the Nišava.

Over three days based in the city, mature travellers in a small group of up to 16 travellers move from the fortress and the Roman remains of Medijana to the palace at Gamzigrad and the Second World War memorials, with a program leader to connect the layers. It is a place where the history of the Balkans can be read not as a single story, but as a sequence of journeys that all passed the same way.