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Department of Oriental Studies

Programs of Study

History

The Department of Oriental Studies in Belgrade was founded in 1926 and was the first university department of Oriental Studies in the Balkans. The founder was Dr Fehim Bajraktarević, who had studied and completed his PhD in Vienna. In 1925, at the invitation of Bogdan Popović, he came to the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade and began teaching Persian literature and the Turkish language at the Department of World Literature. Just one year later, he founded the independent Seminary for Oriental Philology (by a decree dated July 15, 1926), where he spent his entire working life, devotedly, conscientiously, and studiously dedicated to both academic and pedagogical work.

The year 1960 represented a specific turning point for both Belgrade’s Faculty of Philology and the Department of Oriental Studies. In that year, by separating from the Faculty of Philosophy, a new Faculty of Philology was founded, and in addition to the Sub-Department for Oriental Philology, two new ones were formed at the Department: one for Arabic Language and Literature and another for Turkish Language and Literature, which gave the Department a new profile and opened up new development opportunities for Semitic and Altaic studies. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the number of Arabic language students grew continuously due to Yugoslavia's political and economic connection with the Arab world, meaning local Arabic translators were in high demand.

Library

The Library of the Department of  Oriental Languages, Literatures and Cultures (Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Oriental Philology groups) currently has 19,760 books and 555 titles of journals in many world languages, mostly Arabic, Turkish, Persian, English, Russian, French, German and Serbian.

The Fund is classified according to areas of language and literature studies into the Arabic (A), Turkish (T), Persian (P) and so-called miscellaneous (R) categories, and it is distributed by numerus currens under separate call numbers.

All the books that are recorded in the inventory book have been catalogued, and their data can be found in several types of catalogs, both classic and electronic.

The reading room has 30 seats and 4 places for using 2 computers.

  • Important information:
  • COBISS
  • Working hours with users are in 2 shifts: 10am-1pm and 2.30am-5.30pm.
  • The reading room is open from 08AM to 7PM.

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