History
Serbs arrived in Belgium as war refugees and as labor migrants. When a major wave of economic migrants set out from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1925 to Western Europe, a number of Serbs went to the Benelux countries. The statistics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia record that Belgium had about 6,000 Yugoslav workers at the time. Half of them worked in the area between Maasmechelen and Herstal. The largest Yugoslav colony in Belgium in the 1920s was in Seren, Province of Liège, because many factories were concentrated there around the mining basin.
After the World War II, according to the report from the embassy of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 2,000 Serbian immigrants arrived. The second wave during the 1960s and 1970s saw another 3,000 Serbs arriving in Belgium. As Belgium closed its borders to labor in 1974, the influx of Serb immigrants halted. According to data from 1989, there were 5,537 Yugoslav nationals in Belgium, out of which some 80% of them were from Serbia.
Since 2011, the Serbian community in Brussels with help of the Serbian embassy has organized an annual ceremony where Manneken Pis is adorned in a traditional Serbian folk costume. [2]
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