Kaluđerica (Serbian Cyrillic: Калуђерица) is a urban neighborhood of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in the municipality of Grocka, and is an urban extension of Zvezdara.
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Kaluđerica is the westernmost settlement in the municipality of Grocka. It is located 8 kilometres east of central Belgrade (44.75° North, 20.57° East), and stretches in two fork-like urban formations between the road of Smederevski put to the north and the Belgrade-Niš highway to the south. The settlement is built in the hollow (micro valley of the Kaluđerički potok creek), with a specific microclimate, so out of all parts of Belgrade Kaluđerica is often the foggiest and the first one to have snow in winter. In modern Serbian, word kaluđerica means a nun, though the name was probably derived from the word kaluđer which means a monk (kaluđerica - a monk's place).
Kaluđerica is one of the fastest growing settlements in Serbia. According to Census of 2002, Kaluđerica had a population of 22,248 and an estimated 23,481 on December 31, 2005, and being classified as a rural settlement (village) it would arguably be the largest village in the Balkans. However, most of the houses are built without the necessary building permits, so population is presumably much higher, especially after the wars in former Yugoslavia and the influx of the refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo and Metohija (journalists often nickname Kaluđerica the largest illegal settlement in Europe). Both Belgrade's City Public Transportation Company (GSP) and the Telekom of Serbia, based on the number of people using their services, estimate the population between 45,000 and 50,000. News reports of 75,000 inhabitants cannot be hold as true.
Kaluđerica, in urban sense, grew with Belgrade, that is, with its most eastern part Mali Mokri Lug on the north, along the Smederevski put, and Veliki Mokri Lug to the south, divided from Kaluđerica (that is, from Kaluđerica's section of Klenak) by the highway. Population of Kaluđerica:
Kaluđerica is 3 (or 5) times more populous than its municipal seat, Grocka. A motion of annexing it to the city municipality of Zvezdara is rejected by the Zvezdara municipal assembly, as the problems of living in Kaluđerica are enormous and, from this point, seem to be unsolvable.
Significant part of settlement of 100,000 is built without any permits and plans, and for that part none of the communal problems is even remotely solved. Kaluđerica is notorious by its lack of sewage (which during strong rains spills over in the streets) or transportation (short and bending streets, with only one straight street in the settlement, and only one bus line of the public transportation, 309). With a total lack of control in the settlements expansion, in few cases it even happened that someone builds a house in the middle of the street, disconnecting it.
As Kaluđerica rapidly developed, several distinct sub-neighborhoods within the settlement were formed. Those to the north, along the Smederevski put, are mostly named after the kafanas which formerly were the only features on the road before the settlement expanded.