The story
Days of Ludaja Kikinda in Kikinda
Days of Ludaja has run in Kikinda since 1986, making it a four-decade-old fixture of the town's calendar built around ludaja, the local Banat word for pumpkin. Held each year on the third weekend of September, its centerpiece is a competition for the heaviest and longest pumpkins, drawing roughly fifty thousand visitors alongside cultural, folk and gastronomic programming.
Kikinda sits on the flat, fertile plain of Banat in Serbia's northern Vojvodina region, an area whose agricultural identity runs deep enough that in 1986 the town built an entire festival around a single crop: ludaja, the local dialect word for pumpkin.