Vinča

The Story Behind the Place

Farmers of the Starčevo culture settled the bluff around 5700 BC; a century after their departure, the Vinča culture took hold, and for the next eight centuries (c. 5300–4900 BC) Belo Brdo grew into one of Neolithic Europe’s great centres — thirteen building horizons, each a generation of houses burned and rebuilt on the same spot. Its early phase made the settlement the region’s ritual capital: “mushroom amulet” and animal-head jewellery of imported semi-precious stone was invented here and copied across the Vinča world, and over a thousand anthropomorphic figurines — the masked faces of the oldest Europe — have come out of its soil. In the late phase, figurines standardised and the potters began incising the Vinča signs on their wares. The tell was abandoned around 4900 BC, five centuries before the wider Vinča collapse, and lay quiet until the medieval era. Modern archaeology began here in 1908, when Miloje Vasić — Serbia’s first academically trained archaeologist — started rescue digs as the Danube ate the mound’s edge; interrupted by two wars, his work resumed 1929–31 with the backing of the British industrialist and amateur archaeologist Sir Charles Hyde. Research has run almost continuously since; the site is protected as an Archaeological Site of Exceptional Importance.