Opština
Opština ( Serbian Cyrillic општина; plural: opstine / Општине ) is the Serbian name for the local government unit in the countries of Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Croatian and partly Bosnian variant of the term is Općina (plural: Opčine ). The term Opština is most likely translated into German by the term municipality or local authority area. The opstine are usually significantly larger than large German communities. Thus, the municipalities of Serbia often an area of more than 500, sometimes over 1000 square kilometers, and are therefore herein partly with German districts comparable. After published in 2007 Law on Territorial Organization of the Republic of Serbia opstine should generally have at least 10,000 inhabitants.
The opstine are usually from a variety of places. In Serbia, the number of which is on average about 40, wherein including the town of Leskovac include a total of 144 settlements. Only the city Karlovci consists only of a single settlement. Usually, the municipality is named after the largest by population town or city.
The organs of a Opština are the Municipal Assembly (Serbian: Скупштина општине / Skupština opstine ) and the mayor (Serbian: председник општине / predsednik opstine = President of the community).
In Macedonia, the municipalities are called Opština (plural: Opštini / Општини ) refers. The Albanian form is Komuna ( unidentified commune; plural Komunat / Komuna ), the Turkish Belediyesi.
History
In the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, there was, after the number had been reduced to 1965 by merging small municipalities, a total of 471 municipalities (as of 1989), which were called Opština or Općina (Croatia ) or Občina (Slovenia). While some successor states have retained the existing community organization, a larger number of small municipalities were created and introduced as a master device regions, for example, in Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the cantons were associated with large communities in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.