Kruščica (Serbian Cyrillic: Крушчица) is a village in Serbia. It is situated in the Bela Crkva municipality, in the South Banat District, Vojvodina province. The village has a Serb ethnic majority (71.38%) with a sizable Czech minority (23.35%) and a population of 989 people, according to the 2002 census.
Names in other languages: Czech: Kruščice, German: Kruschtschitz, Hungarian: Körtéd.
The first Czechs appeared in Kruščica in 1834. Settlers from the first wave of Czech immigrants came from Czech settlement villages in the mountains of the Romanian Banat – from Gârnic, Ravensca, Șumița and Bigăr. Subsequently, Czechs also started moving to Kruščica directly from the Czech lands, mostly from central and south-western Bohemia.[1] Currently (2022), the Czech association in Kruščica operates in the village, which also manages the local Czech cultural house.[2] In the past, there was a Czech school in Kruščica (it closed in 1964), today Czech language is taught by a teacher sent by the Foreign Cooperation House (of course, he also works in other Czech settlements of the Serbian Banat).[3][4] The Czechs there are mostly Roman Catholic, in 1912 they were behind the building of the Church of St. Wenceslas,[1] in which mass is celebrated in Czech to this day.[5]
