Serbia

Serbia, officially the Republic of Serbia, is a landlocked country in Central and Southeastern Europe. Serbia is bordered by Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.

For centuries, shaped at cultural boundaries between East and West, a powerful medieval kingdom – later renamed the Serbian Empire – occupied much of the Balkans. The Serbian Empire collapsed after wars with the Ottomans and Habsburgs beginning in the 16th century which captured its territories. The modern Serbia emerged in 1817 following the Serbian revolution. Later, it retook territories lost to the Ottoman Empire, such as Kosovo, Raška and Vardar Macedonia. From 1815 to 1918, Serbia was the only country in the region that was allowed by the Great Powers to be ruled by their own domestic dynasties.

The WWI initially started between Austria-Hungary Empire and Serbia, joined later by most European powers. Serbia was a major Balkan Entente Power which contributed significantly to the Allied victory in the Balkans in November 1918. After WWI Croatia and Slovenia joined the Kingdom of Serbia into a Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia).

Germany invited Yugoslavia in 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was dissolved and Serbia was set up as a Nazi German-occupied puppet state. During the WWII, almost every neighboring country had some of Serbian territories in hand. The current borders of the country were established following the end of World War II, when Serbia became a federal unit within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Serbia became an independent state again in 2006, after Montenegro left the union that formed after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1990s.