serdi

The Serdi were an ancient Thracian tribe inhabiting the central Balkans in antiquity. The core of their territory lay around the city of Serdica, the site of modern Sofia in western Bulgaria, and their name is the probable source of that city's later name. They are recorded by ancient geographers and historians, including Strabo and Ptolemy, as one of the Thracian groups living in that region during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.

In the late Republic and early Empire, the Serdi came under increasing Roman influence as Rome extended its control into Thrace. Serdica developed into a major urban center under Roman rule, eventually becoming a colonia and a hub of administration and trade. The tribe was gradually drawn into the Roman provincial system, with Latin and Greek inscriptions replacing Thracian on many public monuments.

Linguistically, the Serdi are assumed to have spoken a Thracian language, though little is preserved. Ethnographically they are considered part of the broader Thracian world that included Getae and Dacians in neighboring regions; borders between these groups were porous. By late antiquity, the Serdi as a distinct political community disappear from the historical record, their identity subsumed into the larger Roman and Balkan populations. The legacy of the Serdi survives primarily in the toponym Serdica and in the archaeological and epigraphic record of the early Roman city.