Ask a Serb why they like Greece and you will usually get an answer about the sea. Ask a Greek why Serbian tourists are welcome and you will hear something about them being δικοί μας — ours, our own. Neither answer explains much, and both are true.
The affection is genuine and it has a history that is worth knowing, partly because it comes up constantly once you start speaking either language with older people.
It starts with the church, not the state
Long before either country existed in its modern form, the connection ran through Orthodoxy. Serbian medieval literacy came through Byzantium: Church Slavonic borrowed heavily from Greek, and the liturgical vocabulary you still hear in a Serbian church on Sunday is largely Greek in origin.
The most concrete piece of this is on Mount Athos. Hilandar, the Serbian monastery, was founded in 1198 by Stefan Nemanja — who became the monk Simeon — and his son Rastko, who became Saint Sava. It has been there, on Greek soil, for over eight centuries. For a great many Serbs, Greece is not a foreign country in the ordinary sense; it is where Hilandar is.
Two national movements, roughly in step
The Serbian uprisings began in 1804 and 1815. The Greek War of Independence began in 1821. These were separate events with separate causes, but they happened in the same imperial context, and the people involved were aware of each other. Greek merchants traded and lived in Belgrade; ideas travelled with them in both directions.
By the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the two states were formal allies — first against the Ottoman Empire, then, in the second war, on the same side again. That alliance was a matter of overlapping interests rather than sentiment, but it created the habit of ending up in the same coalition.
The winter that people actually remember
This is the part that explains the emotional weight, and most foreigners have never heard of it.
In late 1915 the Serbian army, along with a large number of civilians, retreated across the mountains of Albania and Montenegro in winter to avoid encirclement. Tens of thousands died on the way. The survivors reached the Adriatic coast and were evacuated by Allied ships to Corfu in early 1916.
They arrived in catastrophic condition. Many died of exhaustion and disease in the weeks after landing, and were buried at sea off the small island of Vido, because there was no room to bury them on land. The waters there are known in Serbian as the Плава гробница — the Blue Tomb, after a poem by Milutin Bojić, who himself died the following year.
The Serbian army reorganised on Corfu and went on to fight on the Salonika front. Today there is a Serbian mausoleum on Vido and a small museum in Corfu town. Serbian school groups still visit. If you ever wonder why an older Serb gets slightly solemn when Corfu is mentioned, this is why.
The waters there are known in Serbian as the Blue Tomb.
And then, the ordinary version
The twentieth century put both countries through occupation and upheaval, and the second half of it produced something much less dramatic and arguably more durable: the summer.
From the 1970s onward, Greece became the default holiday for Serbs and later for the whole region. Halkidiki, Paralia, Thassos, Evia. Entire Serbian friendship groups have a Greek village they have returned to for thirty years. Greek hoteliers learned enough Serbian to take a booking; Serbs learned enough Greek to order lunch, which is where a good number of my students started.
This is the layer most people actually live in, and it matters more for language learning than any of the history. The reason a Greek speaker learning Serbian and a Serb learning Greek both have a warm reception waiting for them is largely the accumulated goodwill of fifty summers.
A note on not over-romanticising it
It is easy to tell this story as pure brotherhood, and that version gets told a lot on both sides. It is worth being a bit more careful.
The two countries have had periods of ordinary diplomatic friction and competing interests, like any neighbours. Their modern political positions overlap on some questions and not on others, and those specifics are genuinely contested — including within each country. I have no interest in arguing them here, and a language school is the wrong place for it.
What is fair to say is that the cultural closeness is not invented. Shared religion, shared Balkan habits of food and hospitality, a shared century of ending up in the same wars, and half a century of holidays add up to something real. Knowing it makes the small talk easier, and the small talk is where a language actually lives.
A practical use for all this: if you are learning Serbian in Greece, or Greek in Serbia, mention Hilandar or Corfu to someone over sixty and you will not need to think of another conversation topic for a while. Which, when you are practising, is exactly what you want.