1360-1686 From a haze of the by-gone centuries and into the light of historiography Sombor first surfaced in 1360, the year a settlement by the name of Szent Mihaly was referred to as being located on the estate of the Cobor family, the one that, at the peak of its power, was to supply heads to the Bodrog County. In 1478, listening anxiously to the beat of the war drums in the south, the Cobors completed the construction of fortifications. These, however, proved insufficient to withhold the overwhelming Ottoman invasion and yielded in 1541. Two years later, 1543, Ottoman registers record the settlement's first appearance under its present-day name – Sombor. One hundred and forty-six years of Ottoman rule have left almost no tangible traces in the town itself, except for the defter entries and literary accounts of travels testifying to its growth into an important market town, an intersection of caravan routes, and the centre of a Turkish county crammed with shops, places of worship, schools, inns and taverns.  Up
	1687-1749 After the expulsion of the Turks, Sombor was incorporated into the Austrian empire on September 12, 1687, and it was in that frame that it reached the acme of its importance and repute. Included into the Tisza-Maros Military Frontier, Sombor became an oppidum fossatum in 1702, and in 1717 it was granted the status of an oppidum militare, a reward for its performance in the so-called ‘Varadin War' against the Turks. On February 17, 1749 it bought its way to the status of a ‘free and royal town' by paying 150,000 forints in gold to the Crown. The Charter of Privileges granted to Sombor included the so-called Alternative , a document introducing the principle of alternation in the election of Chief Justice agreed between the Orthodox and Roman-Catholic citizens on July 1, 1748. Up
	1750-1843 The attainment of independence brought the town to the threshold of civil society and spurred its speedy rise to an administrative, communal, spiritual and cultural centre. In 1786 Sombor became the seat of administration of the Bacs-Bodrog County. As early as 1759 the Serbian Orthodox Community founded, and provided funds for, the four-grade Grammar School. Four years later a Latin school run by the Franciscans was also opened. Opening the ‘Norma' (Norm) on May 1, 1778, Avram Mrazovic laid the foundations for the training of teachers, both of the Serbian and of other South-Slavic nations in the region. It is on this school's tradition that the present-day Faculty of Education rests. The town's urban structure has since 1763 been dominated by the superior outline of the Holy Trinity Church that the Sombor Franciscans built next to their 1743 seminary, while the Orthodox believers had the Church of Saint George built in 1761, and that of Saint John the Baptist towards the end of the same century. On the present-day Holy Trinity Square the Grassalkovich Palace was erected in 1763 to house the imperial domain management charged with the colonization of the Germans. Up
	1844-2003 The nineteenth century was especially prosperous. Although with a delay, the tide of enlightened absolutism brought about the opening of a Hungarian and a Serbian reading room, in 1844 and 1845 respectively. With its first printing shops started in the 1850s and 1860s the town entered the world of Gutenberg's galaxy. In the second half of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century a number of papers and magazines were being published in Sombor: Ipar (Economy), Školski list (School Paper), Bacska , Bacvanin (A Native of Backa), Sloga (Concord)... At the head of a list of literary periodicals in Serbian were Prijatelj srbske mladeži (A Friend of Serbian Youth, 1866–1867) and the distinguished paper for youth Golub (Pigeon, 1879–1914), in which many a great figure of Serbian literature made their start (Vojislav Ilic, Jovan Ducic, Aleksa Šantic, Miloš Crnjanski etc). In 1880 Sombor saw the short-lived publication of Dr Milan Jovanovic Batut's magazine for health education Zdravlje (Health). Following in their footsteps today are Somborske novine , the magazine Dometi , and modern electronic media.  In the domain ruled by Sombor's spirit and soul the paths of our heritage and contemporaneity cross each other. Either born at Sombor or greatly contributing to its spirit were Vasilije Damjanovic, the writer of the first arithmetic in Serbian, Nikolaj Simic, the writer of the first logic, Ivan Jugovic, one of the founders of the Belgrade Great School, Josif Šlezinger, the father of Serbian secular music, Jovan Hadžic, the poet and one of the founders of the Matica srpska, the patriarchs Samuilo Maširevic and Georgije Brankovic, the composer Petar Konjovic, the writers Veljko Petrovic and János Herceg, the painters Juhász Arpád and Milan Konjovic… It was at Sombor that the poet Laza Lazarevic wrote his greatest verse, the poem of repentance Santa Maria della Salute ,. In our day Sombor is a municipality and the seat of the West Backa County, which also includes the townships of Apatin, Kula and Odžaci, with a total of 216,000 inhabitants according to the 1991 census, and an area of 2,386 sq km.  The municipality of Sombor itself is 1200 sq km in area, encompasses fifteen villages and 16 larger farmsteads, a total of about 100,000 inhabitants, half of them constituting the urban population. Up