Morphological characteristics of skeletal muscles of autochthonous breeds of chickens are very important for meat quality and comparison with current hybrids for intensive production. The autochthonous breeds used in the experiment were Sombor crested and Banat naked neck, both sexes. For the purposes of morphological examination, tissue samples were taken from the thigh muscle (m. biceps femoris) and muscles of the breast (m. pectoralis profundus) of 5 male and female animals of each breed. After a standard histological procedure for conventional light microscopy, samples were stained with hematoxylin - eosin. After the processing of the samples for the histochemical analysis, samples were stained with the enzyme succinate - dehydrogenase (SDH) with the aim of determining the presence of different muscle cell types (red, white and intermediate). Morphological parameters, in this study, were diameter of muscle cells, nucleocytoplasmic ratio of muscle cells, volume density of connective tissue within the muscle and the presence of red, white and intermediate muscle cell types. Comparison of diameters of muscle cells thigh and breast muscles between Sombor crested and Banat naked neck have showed that kind of muscle, race or gender have no significant effect on the differences in this parameter. There were no statistically significant differences in the nucleo-cytoplasmic ratio of the volume density of the connective tissue of muscles. Red muscle cells were, in both autochthonous breeds, significantly more represented in m. biceps femoris than m. pectoralis profundus. The results of this study indicate that no differences were observed between autochthonous breeds in morphological parameters for examined breast and thigh muscle
