Friendship park

New Belgrade is the area where immediately after the Second World War a whole new city started to be born. In 1961 here started the creation of the Friendship Park, a park that is unique in the world. No matter how long one searches, a park like this cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

The Friendship Park, also known as the Park of Peace, is located in the riverbank area of New Belgrade, in the place where the Danube’ s branch flows into the Sava, and it occupies 14 hectares. Thanks to its position, this area is one of the most representative parts of the city. 

The creation of the park was initiated and proposed by the Young Conservationists Organization of Belgrade and it was meant to memorize the First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non – Aligned Countries, held in September 1961.

During the Conference, the statesmen planted 26 seedlings of the plane tree ( Platanus acerifolia ) . Some of them were: Josip Broz Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The plane trees planted at the time of the First conference of Non – Aligned Countries are now part of a large tract of green land that was eventually created, on which more than one hundred remarkable statesmen left their mark by planting a delicate birch, linden, maple or some other tree. 

Some of them are: Lopez Mateos, Indira Gandhi, Richard Nixon, Queen Elizabeth II, Willi Brandt, Olaf Palme, Gerald Ford, Leonid llyich Brezhnev, ” Valery Giscard d’ Estaing, Hua Guo Feng, Margaret Thatcher, Konstantinos Karamanlis, Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, Fransois Mitteran and many others. In the meantime, the history was taking its inevitable course, events were changing the world and statesmen were leaving the political scene, but the trees have remained to remind us of the time when Yugoslavia had a leading role in the world of non – aligned and neutral countries.