Explore Raška: Novi Pazar, Đurđevi Stupovi & Stari Ras

Introduction

Raška is where the medieval Serbian state itself began — the district's very name comes from Ras, its first capital — and it holds a genuine crossroads town, a third UNESCO-linked monastery beyond the two already famous, and the practical questions the country's monastery circuit never quite answers.

Overview

Novi Pazar, the district's actual town and the practical base for visiting the monastery circuit, is a genuine crossroads in its own right — a compact old quarter of Ottoman-era architecture, working craft workshops and cafés, with the sixteenth-century Altun-alem Mosque and a hammam among the survivors of a long Ottoman commercial history, giving the town a distinctly different texture from the rest of Serbia even before reaching a single monastery. A short drive from town, Đurđevi Stupovi — a twelfth-century monastery founded by Stefan Nemanja before Studenica itself — sits on a hilltop above the ruins of Stari Ras, the fortified settlement that served as the first capital of the medieval Serbian state the whole district takes its name from; both are part of the same UNESCO World Heritage listing as Sopoćani, “Stari Ras and Sopoćani”, though Đurđevi Stupovi and the fortress ruins draw a fraction of the visitors either famous monastery does. Visiting practicalities matter here in a way the art-history telling elsewhere doesn't cover: Studenica and Sopoćani sit roughly two hundred kilometres south of Belgrade, genuinely too far for most day trips, and Novi Pazar makes a far better overnight base than attempting both monasteries plus Đurđevi Stupovi in a single push from the capital. Studenica, closer to the main road network, draws considerably more visitors than the quieter, more remote Sopoćani — worth knowing before picking which one gets the morning light.

Discover Raška

Frequently asked questions