FRUŠKA GORA TRAIL
THIS IS WHERE I am from.
Belgrade got a page that said it was my city by heart. This page outranks it: Vojvodina is where I am from by birth — the flat land of wheat, church spires and slow rivers where I grew up, with this one wooded ridge standing over it like a promise that the world had hills in it somewhere. Writing this page is not work. It is going home with guests.
What you need to understand about Vojvodina is its pace. This is the unhurried half of Serbia — Pannonian, patient, built around long lunches and longer afternoons. The mountain carries sixteen working Orthodox monasteries in its folds, wine villages on its southern slopes that the Romans planted first, and at its foot the second city of the country, Novi Sad, with an Austro-Hungarian fortress across the river. You could fill a week. The race weekend gives you two days, so below is what I would actually do with them.
NOVI SAD OR KARLOVCI, the city or the vineyard.
Novi Sad is the practical answer — the race transport leaves from there, and the city earns its evenings. Sremski Karlovci is the romantic one: a small baroque wine town on the mountain's own slope, fifteen minutes from the city and three hundred years from it.
NOVI SAD
Vojvodina's capital and the country's second city — Habsburg squares, the long pedestrian sweep of Zmaj Jovina, and Petrovaradin fortress watching from across the Danube. The 06:00 race bus leaves from here, and so does everything else.
Best if you want zero race-morning logistics and a proper choice of dinner. This is the sensible one, and it is not a sacrifice.
SREMSKI KARLOVCI
A town of two streets and four centuries: the baroque square, the old Orthodox seminary, the fountain, and family wine cellars in half the houses. It sits on the mountain's own slope — you sleep closer to the trails than the city does.
Best if you are staying past the race and want the wine and the quiet. Check your route back to the start — a taxi to Popovica is short but must be arranged the night before.
SEARCH ROOMS for race weekend.
Live availability across Booking.com, Expedia and the rest for 23–26 April 2027 — centred on Novi Sad, with Sremski Karlovci in easy reach if you filter by distance.
As an Amazon Associate and Stay22 partner I may earn a commission on qualifying bookings, at no extra cost to you.
WHERE I'D ACTUALLY STAY.
This is the part of the guide I won't fake — and this one is home turf, so the picks below are personal knowledge, not a booking-site sort.
I'm finishing off my honest picks for Novi Sad and Sremski Karlovci — check back shortly, or search directly below.
Book early and mean it: Novi Sad's hotel stock is modest, the jubilee will pull the biggest field in fifty years, and April is already conference-and-wedding season. This is the one guide where the £30 room disappears first.
Photo: Vanilica, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
FOUR TASTES of my home ground.
Vojvodina's table is the Balkans with a Habsburg accent — paprika and cream, river fish and cellar wine, cakes that came down the Danube from Vienna and never left. Rather than name restaurants in a region where I owe you my own picks (they are coming, below), here are the four things to order wherever you sit down.
BERMET
The wineKarlovci's own aromatised wine — dark, sweet, spiced with a couple of dozen botanicals, every family cellar guarding its own recipe like a will. Vines have grown on this slope since the Roman emperor Probus, born across the water in Sirmium, is said to have planted them in the third century. And the story Karlovci tells — that bermet travelled on the Titanic's wine list — has never quite been proven, and nobody in Karlovci is in any hurry to check.
FIŠ PAPRIKAŠ
The riverThe Danube's answer to a French bouillabaisse: river fish stewed slow in a cauldron with enough paprika to change the colour of the evening, eaten with bread and, properly, with the river in view. A čarda — a riverside fish inn — is Vojvodina's kafana, and Friday night before a Saturday race is exactly what it is for.
SREMSKI KULEN
The curedThe pride of the Srem pig-farming villages: a hand-filled, paprika-red cured sausage aged for months, protected by origin, sliced thin and eaten with young cheese and fresh bread. This is what the mountain's foothill villages have made for centuries, and what should be in your bag for the trail — it is, honestly, the best checkpoint food ever invented.
ŠTRUDLA & MONASTERY HONEY
The sweetThe Habsburg inheritance: poppy-seed and walnut strudel rolled the way grandmothers on the plain still roll it, best eaten mid-morning with coffee. And from the mountain itself — the monasteries keep bees, and a jar of monastery honey is the one souvenir from this trip that means exactly where it came from.
WHERE I'D ACTUALLY EAT.
I'm finishing off my honest picks for where to eat around Novi Sad and Sremski Karlovci — check back shortly.
MY SHORT LIST.
What I would show you with the Sunday and a spare Monday — all of it within half an hour of your bed.
PETROVARADIN FORTRESS
The “Gibraltar on the Danube” — a vast Austrian fortress with sixteen kilometres of tunnels beneath it and a clock tower whose hands are famously reversed, the long one showing hours so the fishermen on the river could read the time from a distance. Walk up for sunset over the water.
SREMSKI KARLOVCI
Baroque square, the old seminary, the Four Lions fountain — and the treaty of 1699 that redrew Europe was negotiated here, in a building shaped so no delegation could sit at the head of the table. Then a cellar, and bermet.
THE MONASTERIES
Sixteen working Orthodox monasteries hide in the mountain's valleys — a concentration that earned it the name the Serbian Athos. Krušedol and Novo Hopovo are the two to see if you see only two; frescoes, silence, and honey at the gate.
NOVI SAD ITSELF
Zmaj Jovina to the cathedral square, coffee outside the Name of Mary church, the market at Futoška. A recent European Capital of Culture that never bothers to mention it — which is very Vojvodina.
THE ŠTRAND & THE QUAY
Novi Sad's Danube beach and the long riverside path below the fortress — the city's own running route, and the right place for a shakeout jog or a slow recovery walk with ice cream.
THE RIDGE AGAIN, SLOWLY
Drive or taxi back up to Iriški venac and walk a few unhurried kilometres of the same hearts you raced past. The mountain on the day after, with nothing to prove, is the version I grew up with.
Race-weekend order: arrive Friday, start pack and early night in Novi Sad · race Saturday, čarda in the evening · Karlovci and a monastery on Sunday with bermet last · the fortress at sunset before the train back.