Lovas (Hungarian: Hosszúlovász, Serbian Cyrillic: Ловас) is a village and seat of municipality in the Vukovar-Syrmia County of eastern Croatia, located on the slopes of Fruška Gora, a few kilometers south of the main road connecting Vukovar with Ilok.

Lovas is underdeveloped municipality which is statistically classified as the First Category Area of Special State Concern by the Government of Croatia.

[4] Source:[5] The first officially identified archaeological site at Lovas was located on the western edge of the village, at Kalvarija.

In 1939 a Middle Bronze Age hoard was discovered in Lovas and handed to the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, where it is still kept and displayed in the permanent exhibition of the prehistoric collection.

The same construction work revealed an Early Iron Age necropolis in Ante Starčević street.

However, the City Museum in Vukovar keeps a record of Mr. A. Dorn who mentions the "land of Zdravko Plaščević" on Gradac as one of the known archaeological sites in Lovas.

Gold objects, or more precisely jewelry, were placed within a smaller black jar with two handles (a sort of a "kantharos").

The discovered objects were handed to Mr. Viktor Hoffiler, the director of the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb at the time.

Interestingly, a similar hoard of the same dating, but not as rich in deposited objects, was discovered in the city of Vukovar.

More precisely, on the same plateau, but some 1,5 km to the north at Kovači ("Smiths"), the museum's research team discovered settlement remains dating to the same phase of the Middle Bronze Age as the Lovas Hoard.

In addition to these two sites, archaeological remains were identified in 12 other locations (Orlinac, Kragino voće, Brzovac, U mjestu, Staro selo, Čajer, Čot, Šljivici, Gradac, Sveti Mihovil, Srednje brdo - jug and Kovači), dating from the Neolithic to the Medieval period.

The most important was the discovery of the site Kovači, which was, according to the distribution of surface pottery finds, the largest and most significant prehistoric settlement in the Lovas Municipality.

Based on the analysis of the ceramic remains, the site was inhabited during the Copper, Bronze and Late Iron Age, as well as in the Roman and Medieval period.

The finds of Middle Bronze and Late Iron Age pottery confirm that the area was inhabited throughout history.

The validity of the name Staro groblje ("Old Cemetery") is confirmed by the sporadic finds of human bones, which probably originate from destroyed graves.

Trench 2 located at Orlinac uncovered a ditch or a large pit dating to the Late Iron Age.

The earliest inhabitance at Kovači probably dates to the Copper Age, as confirmed by the pottery fragments associated with the Baden and Kostolac Cultures.

The discovered building material, which once belonged to the houses, and the significant amount of half-complete ceramic vessels, textile tools, lithics and metal finds confirmed that the site was once a Bronze Age settlement.

In 2018 the research focused on the northeastern part of the Lovas Municipality, more precisely the area southeast of the village Opatovac.

The chosen area is an elevated plateau bordered by the streams Čopinac on its eastern side and Bečka on the southern.

However, the entire slope following the direction of the stream Čopinac was covered with pottery fragments and small finds from different periods of the human past.

Lovas was almost completely destroyed during the Croatian War of Independence when the villages were attacked by and later invaded by the Serbian forces.

On October 11, a group of 51 Croats was forced to enter a mine field just outside Lovas in order to "clear" it, causing death to 21 of them and injury to another 14.

There, the non-Serb population was mistreated to the extent of atrocity - men and women were arrested and subsequently beaten and molested with any and all instruments at their captors' disposal - from crowbars to knives to electrodes.

The Catholic church of St. Michael in Lovas, a 250-year-old building, was set on fire and later completely destroyed by explosives.

Later, in the center of Lovas, four adjacent family houses were unlawfully destroyed to make way for a new Orthodox church building.

In Opatovac, the oil company INA's dispatch centre was badly damaged by rockets, as was the VUPIK plant Opatovac-Pustara.