Fruška gora

Seen from Novi Sad across the Danube, Fruška gora is a long green wall where no wall should be: an eighty-kilometre ridge running east–west through the dead-flat Srem plain, nowhere higher than the 539 metres of Crveni čot and yet unmistakably a mountain, because everything around it is sediment. The ridge is the older thing by an order of magnitude. When the Pannonian Sea filled the basin in the Miocene, Fruška gora was an island in it, and its flanks still carry the proof — reef limestones and shell beds around Beočin have made the mountain a standard reference for the basin's geological past, with the loess of the surrounding plain lapped up against its feet. Declared in 1960, it was Serbia's first national park, and the 2015 law extended it to 26,672 hectares.

The forest is the park's substance: dense oak, beech and above all linden, which covers these slopes in a concentration with few rivals in Europe and scents the entire ridge in June. Under it runs one of the richest herb floras in the country — the park's botanists count several dozen orchid species — with steppe fragments surviving on the dry southern spurs. But Fruška gora's fame is monastic. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, as Serbian church life shifted north under Ottoman pressure, some three dozen monasteries were founded in these folds; sixteen survive, close enough together that the mountain earned the name of a Serbian Athos. Krušedol, burial church of the Branković despots and later of kings; Novo Hopovo with its Cretan-school frescoes; Grgeteg; Vrdnik, which kept the relics of Prince Lazar after Kosovo — the cluster is on Serbia's tentative list for UNESCO, and visiting two or three of them through the vineyards is the classic Fruška gora day.

The mountain's south-eastern foot drops into Sremski Karlovci, the small baroque town that was the seat of Serbian church and schooling in the Habsburg centuries, and the vineyards between town and forest have been worked since Roman emperors — Probus is credited with the first vines here. Above Sremski Karlovci at Stražilovo lies the grave of the Romantic poet Branko Radičević, a place of pilgrimage of the literary kind.

What's worth knowing before you go

This is the most accessible park in Serbia: Novi Sad is twenty minutes from the central ridge at Iriški venac, and city buses reach the mountain's edge. The Partisan road along the crest links the main trailheads, and the park's marked network is dense — Fruška gora hosts one of Europe's biggest organised mountain marches each May, which is the one weekend the ridge is genuinely crowded. Sremski Karlovci and the monastery circuit are easily combined with a walking day; the monasteries keep church hours and dress codes.

Spring and early summer are best — orchids in the meadows, linden bloom in June; autumn brings the wine harvest and mushroom pickers in numbers. The connoisseur's detail is in a glass: bermet, the spiced dessert wine of Sremski Karlovci, has been made on these slopes for centuries, allegedly sailed on the Titanic's wine list, and is still the right way to end a day that started under the lindens.