Destinations

IN VALJEVO’S PETNICA, A VILLAGE WHERE THERE IS SOMETHING TO LEARN
Reading of Deep Signs
This beautiful suburban village is one of the few in Serbia where the number of inhabitants on each census is growing slightly. It has a research station and a sports center, a water factory and a lake, four archeological sites. It also has miraculous relics of an unknown saint, which the people believe belong to the holy apostle Luke. This village also remembers the teacher who led the construction of the barn from old stone monuments, as well as the communists Sinđelić who gauged eyes on icons, and became extinct. Hopefully it learned to beware of such madness

Text and Photo: Bojana Nikolić

A church, a cave, a research station, a lake, a water factory, a sports center, swimming pools... Petnica, a spacious and hilly suburban village southeast of Valjevo, is famous for many things. The first surviving memory of this village is from the Petnica Psalter, 1488. It used to be called Muratovac, after its sipahi. Today’s name is associated with the cave.
”Petnica has a hilly and flatter part. The rivers Banja, which springs in the Petnica cave, and Pocibrava flow through the village”, our local guides say. ”It is one of the few Serb villages whose population is slightly increasing with each new census.”
In the center of the village, on the hill to which Manastirska Street leads, there is a church. Its yard shares a fence with the Petnica Research Station, founded in 1982, built on church land, south of the temple. The place where the main amphitheater of the station is located today used to be a primary school, although there are no landmarks or information about that. The research station first moved into the school yard.
Next to the road leading to the church, there has been, since 1990, ”Petnica” Sports and Recreation Center. In summer, it is a favorite place of Valjevo residents and visitors. In the harmoniously arranged green rural setting, on almost six hectares, visitors can enjoy indoor soccer, beach volleyball, basketball, table tennis, sunbathing in the natural shade of trees, swimming in the Olympic pool, as well as in three smaller ones. One swimming and two water polo clubs are training here, and a swimming school is being organized. Since a few years ago, there is also an indoor pool, so one can do water sports in all seasons.
Following the typical rural road, we see on both sides of the households, neat yards, beautiful houses, spacious pastures, a small village cemetery. Suddenly, a stunning sight appears before us, similar to when we see the sea from a hill. It is Petnica Lake or Pocibrava, perfectly blended into the surroundings. As soon as the sun rises, there are no days without visitors. Sometimes it is a patient fisherman who tries to catch carp, catfish, common nase, grass carp or some other of the seventeen species of fish, which is how many there are here, sometimes tourists with trailers, sometimes walkers. In summer, many people sunbathe and swim here. Made in 1990, this lake is artificial, with an area of ​​about two hectares. Several species of migratory and wetland birds have settled in the area.

ON THE LAYERS OF MANY CULTURES

There are four archeological sites in Petnica: in front of the Small Cave, in the cave itself, the Zlatar site and the Petnica Monastery.
The first, with an area of ​​less than a hectare, otherwise an old necropolis, is located on the slopes of Rogljević hill, right next to the entrance to the cave. The slopes descend towards the river Banja. We read: ”The first significant research is from 1969, and so far about 280 square meters have been processed. Six basic housing horizons have been identified, from the early Vinča culture, through the Kostolac and Bosut cultures of the Iron Age, to late antiquity. In all periods of prehistory, there was a settlement here, and mostly traces of housing, remains of houses and looms were discovered. Hundreds of thousands of archeological finds have been found, from pottery, stone, metal, bones, as well as seven graves and a spacious cult pit.”
Petnica Cave has been placed under state protection as a natural rarity. It consists of the Great (Lower) and Small (Upper) Caves. According to Jovan Cvijić, there was a channel that connected them. The total length of the entire Petnica cave system is 580 meters. The archeological site in the cave itself was systematically explored in 1995 and 1998. It is located 40 meters from the upper entrance. It is considered to be a sacred place. Remains of a newborn skeleton and ritual traces were found. As soon as we enter the Small Cave, we are in a spacious hall with a vault over 20 meters high. Side corridors, canals and rooms branch off from it. The central room has a rare feature: daylight enters through two natural circular openings in the vault, called ”cave eyes” windows. Hence the name Hall of Windows.
We read: ”It has been established that the Upper Cave was inhabited by Paleolithic man, but also by numerous animal species. Religious rituals were performed here in late antiquity, at the end of the 4th century. In addition to other archeological findings that indicate sacrificial rites, a ritual vessel with an inscription, unique in the world, was discovered. Other findings belong to the Roman provincial and Chernyakhov culture. The Large Cave has an entrance in the shape of an irregular triangle. The river Banja springs in its most remote part. Its name derives from the fact that because its temperature at the spring never changes.”

SILENT TOMBS AND DESTROYED SIGNS

The site of the Petnica monastery consists of the remains of the shrine from the 15th century in which ”the book was written by the student Nikola” in 1488 (Petnica Psalter). It is, as we said, the oldest known written mention of the monastery and village. Today, the phototype edition of Petnica Psalter is kept in the local church, and the original is in the Museum of the Metropolitanate of Zagreb-Ljubljana of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Zagreb. The psalter was written by the Serbian dialect of the Old Slavonic language, with twenty-three lines on each page. ”The text belongs”, experts say, ”to the Athos edition of the Slavic Psalter, created in the monasteries of Mount Athos in the 14th century.” The site is around today’s church. The monastery complex was surrounded by a wall, parts of which were found under today’s residence building and east of the altar apse of the temple. In 1986, walls were discovered in several places inside the gate, probably the original dormitory.
”Today’s temple, in all probability, covers the foundations of a smaller medieval church that was in the center of the then complex”, archaeologists believe. It seems that the inhabitants of the surrounding villages were buried here from the end of the 17th to the end of the 19th century. It is assumed that the necropolis is approximately one hectare around the church.
Several old tombstones have been preserved in the yard, one from the 17th century is in front of the dormitory, while a monument from the 16th century has been built into the foundation. Most of the other tombstones were destroyed by the inhabitants of Petnica in 1934, led by a village teacher, thus paving the local road and building a barn in today’s yard of the Research Station. In the church yard there is a stone bifora with a well-preserved double Moravian interlacing. A part of the arched lintel of an old building is embedded into the south wall of the temple, with the inscription: ”this monastery door”.
The present-day church was built in 1864 on the foundations of the old one and is dedicated to the Assumption of the Most Holy Mother of God. The old temple was looted and destroyed many times; last time during Kočina Krajina (1788). Today’s church is built in the Byzantine style. It is considered a major shrine, because the right hand without the thumb of an unknown saint is kept in it, believed to belong to Holy Apostle Luke. Those relics stand in a small reliquary that opens on major holidays. On St. Luka’s Day or the day before the holiday, they are anointed, and the whole temple is filled with the scent of myrrh. The people used to spend the night in the meadow in front of the church before the Assumption day, when the assembly is held. They believed that this would cure every pain. Bishop Jovan Velimirović (1912–1989), the son of St. Nikolaj Lelićki, was also brought here by his mother when he was a child. He was healed and remained forever grateful to this shrine, often visiting it. The relics were brought to Petnica in 1820 by the priest Alimpije Samouković, who is mentioned by ”the father of the Serbian theater” Joakim Vujić in his Travels around Serbia. They have belonged to the priest’s family since ancient times and were inherited. The family is originally from the village of Petnjice in Drobnjaci, from the Karadžić brotherhood, just like the family of the great Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Two years before the relics were brought, in 1818, Alimpije’s father built a stone church on the ruins. Even after his death, he stayed with his temple: his grave is next to the church.

FAR-SIGHTED AND SHORT-SIGHTED PEOPLE

The former monastery had a large property, more than 1,500 hectares of forest and arable land. Entire families settled on the monastery land. In the 1920s, over 850 hectares were taken away from the church by agrarian reform. The original document of the Austro-Hungarian census of church property from 1916, which states that it was 860 hectares, is kept in Petnica. The period of communist rule was that of suffering for the Petnica temple. Among the people of Petnica, there is a vivid memory of how the neighbors of the church, members of the family of the local communists of the Sinđelić family, shot at the icons and gauged their eyes. Damaged icons were intentionally not completely restored. Traces of violence can still be seen on them today, as a testimony and warning. The Sinđelić family from Petnica is extinct.
The oldest mention of secular education in this area, outside Valjevo, was recorded in Petnica in 1790. It is stated that a private teacher worked at the temple for several years at that time. In the monastery dormitory, in 1816/17 the young were taught by monks. The primary school, built on the church property not far from the church, officially started working in 1818. It was attended by children from Petnica and other villages. The first teacher was Alimpije Samouković, at the same time a priest of the Petnica church. In 1832, he was replaced as a teacher by Mihailo Kovačević, the father and teacher of the historian and academician Ljubo Kovačević. Anthropologist Ljubomir Pavlović is also a Petnica student, and his daughter Ružica is a Petnica teacher. The school initially had three grades, later four. It stopped working due to frequent wars against the Turks, the Balkan and World War I. In October 1941, the building was set on fire by the Germans.
Important teachers are remembered here. One of them is Milan Milan Hadžić, from the Samouković priestly family, important for this area. Hadžić built a new school building in 1898, one of the most modern at the time. He founded a library at the school, with about 800 books, and a reading room. Many of his students continued their education and became professors, lawyers, engineers, doctors... He tried to enroll female children in school as well. Already in the first years of his service, at the end of the 19th century, girls began to attend classes. This far-sighted man died in Corfu in 1916.

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Water Factory
There is a water factory in Petnica. Isotope analysis showed that the water here is more than 11,000 years old. The water is reached through a well 350 meters deep, 110 meters through clay, and the rest is stone (240 m).

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Traces of Prehistory
The Zlatar site is located on the left bank of the eponymous stream, about six meters high. On that terrain, slightly sloping to the south and the stream, the land today is mostly arable. Archaeological reconnaissance was made in 1987 and 1998, when the artifacts of prehistoric and Roman pottery were found in the field. It was concludedthat there was a smaller settlement from the prehistory and the period of the Roman Empire.

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Bees and Vines
In the spring of 2017, a field north of the temple was cleared, which was not known to be a cemetery. Later, after the rains, the skeleton of a woman and children’s skeletons appeared. They were taken to the temple. The following morning, on St. Mark’s Day, May 8, the windows of the temple were decorated with swarms of bees. Father Dragan Jakovljević, the elder of the temple, gave service the bones and poured wine over them. Together they were laid in the ground along the south wall of the church, at the beginning of the apse. Grape vine grew in that place.

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In Books
Anthropogeographer Ljubomir Pavlović, a student of the Petnica primary school, writes in detail about Petnica in the study ”Kolubara and Podgorina” (1907). After exactly ninety years, prof. Dr. Mihailo Šćepanović publishes ”List of Names of Veljevo’s Petnica”, the first monograph providing a complete onomastic picture of a Serbian village.