Remodeling an abandoned school launched a project to bring enterprise and people back to a depopulated area.
The village of Pecka shares the same fate as many others in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A place that once had 2,500 inhabitants is now home to fewer than a hundred. Most residents moved to Serbia in the 1960s and 1970s, looking for a job and better living conditions. Only empty houses remained.
“I was born here, I grew up here. I’m still here today. I’m not a peasant, I went to school, but I came back here. And I don’t regret it at all,” Mile Terzija, 68, says, outside his home in the village, around 200 kilometers northwest of Sarajevo. “It’s mine. If you are not from here, you don’t like it, naturally. Especially the city folk. But I was born here, I’m used to it.”
Terzija lives alone. He suffers from health problems – a weak heart and painful hips. His biggest complaint, though, is loneliness. “There aren’t many of us, like there used to be. My generation is already going away,” he says quietly.
With the help of two sticks, he climbs the steep slope from his yard and sits by the road. It’s too much strain to talk while he walks, but he takes risks to see people, even strangers.
“Buses, vans, people, pedestrians, mountaineers, scouts, I don’t even know who is passing by,” he says cheerfully. “Young, old … They stop, ask where the road to the Sana River is. And so I explain it to them. How can I not be glad? … The village is livelier.”
‘Hope Returned’
The people he looks forward to seeing only started coming to the village some seven years ago. Before that, hardly anyone came here. Instead, people left. They went to nearby cities and other countries, running from unemployment, poverty, and war.
There used to be two elementary schools in Pecka, with about 30 students in each class. Now just three or four children live here. The last school was closed in the mid-1980s, and the building fell into disrepair. “No one invested anything there after the last student left. It’s our shame,” Terzija says.
But in 2014, the school building got a new lease on life.
It’s like a “five-star hotel” now, Terzija says. “Hope returned.”
The site is nestled between the source of the Sana and rocks that offer a natural playground for climbers. Twenty years ago, it was the area’s unspoiled qualities that attracted Boro Maric, who often camped by the river.
“We passed through Pecka, we liked the rocks and the environment of the village, which is quite well preserved – that is, there is no new construction. But we didn’t stay anywhere, we just went to the source of the Sana and back. Later, our climbing friends discovered the rocks and started laying out climbing routes,” says Maric, one of the founders of the civic association Greenways.
Maric and around 10 others founded Greenways in 2007 by with the goal of uniting a critical mass of citizens, environmental activists, development experts, researchers, organizations, and entrepreneurs to work towards sustainable development. Bosnia’s Greenways was inspired by the networks of sustainable tourist facilities linked by “green” hiking and cycling trails in many parts of Europe and beyond. The organization also aims to help integrate products and services in this part of Bosnia into regional and European markets, to create new jobs and lay the foundations for responsible management of natural resources.
As part of Greenways’ mission to drive rural development, the idea of reviving the village of Pecka and offering its potential to visitors was born – starting with the abandoned school.
From School to Hostel
“The school was closed in 1985 and until 2014, the building was used for various purposes. It was left to itself. Especially after the war. It was everyone’s and no one’s and then no one cared about it. We found it in a very bad condition,” Maric says.
Just over half of the money needed for the renovation of the old school – about 60,000 euros – and its yard into a visitor center and installing facilities at the Sana’s source came via projects funded by international donors. Around one-third came from smaller donations: members of the association and their families, others through a crowdfunding campaign. The municipality of Mrkonjic Grad, of which Pecka is a part, and private companies also contributed smaller amounts to the renovation.
The center officially opened in 2015, with the first guests arriving that summer. While the original plan was to turn the school into an information point and have visitors stay in accommodation in the village, the organization realized that tourists were looking for more services.
“It turns out that people … come to the springs and want to spend the day there, but in the meantime they are hungry, they want to eat and drink something,” Maric says. Greenways started by offering food and then, “little by little, then we turned [the school building] into a hostel,” he explains.
“We turned the attic, which was not planned for anything, into a dormitory, and the middle floor, which was planned for our office and work space, into a work room, as well as a film screening room. … It took us three years to get the facility to a state where it can fit 15 to 20 people to sleep, work, or simply be there,” he says.
A Growing Attraction
During spring and autumn, it’s usually climbers who visit Pecka, looking to take advantage of more than 120 climbing routes on the rocks around the village.
Visitors like Anja and Christoph Bannow, a couple from Munich. They wanted to go climbing in Bosnia and saw a video about Pecka online.
“Everyone is very friendly,” they say together. Anja goes on, “They wave and greet us. They ask if we want something to drink. Even though we can’t fully understand each other, I think we’re okay … We have many friends who are climbers. We already told them about this place. I think we will come again because it is very nice.”
Marko Nikoletic lives with his wife not far from the rocks. He is 88 and finds it difficult to move.
“It’s nice to live here, but we look forward to when these tourists come,” he says. “I’m so glad when tourists come. They want to buy land here as well. They asked me, but I didn’t want to sell the land.”
In the autumn, Pecka also attracts mushroom hunters, especially since visitor center started running courses on picking and cooking wild mushrooms from the local forest. “It’s been a hobby for 20 years,” explains Maric, who saw the opportunity to offer the courses once the center had the infrastructure to host guests. “Every year in the fall we have two to three weekends, depending on weather conditions. It involves nearly three days of lessons, group work, field trips and so on,” he says.
Two years ago, the visitor center added a dozen or so wooden cabins to provide more accommodation, thanks to an investment by Outdoor Resort Pecka, a company that shares the Greenways mission of sustainable rural development. This made the center attractive to larger groups, from school groups and sports clubs to companies looking to hold team-building retreats or training sessions.
Connecting Tourists and Locals
One of the missions of the Pecka Visitor Center is to connect tourists with the local population.
In 2018, Greenways launched the Pecka Outdoor Festival, a sort of open-doors day for the village. Now an annual event, the festival gives visitors the chance to try canyoning, climbing, cycling, hiking, bird watching, and a lot of activities for children. The goal is to present everything that Pecka has to offer, including the talents of village residents. At a bazaar, villagers display and sell homemade products: milk, cheese, cakes, brandy, woolen socks. Year round, the food served in the center is produced locally. When larger groups are expected, the staff go around the village and buy milk, cheese, potatoes, and other products to spur local production.
“I was just on Ubovica hill, next to the village. There are about 30 houses, only six of them inhabited,” says Pedja Gajanovic, who works at the visitor center. “We encourage them to sell the surplus food they have. I took sour milk and cheese. They are a little lonely. It would be great if we had volunteers to send them, to help them produce food. Then we would buy the surplus and serve it here. It’s a circle.”
According to the center’s figures, between 10,000 and 15,000 people visit Pecka each year. A few years ago, the figure was only in the hundreds.
More traffic motivated local residents to start or expand their own small businesses. That’s how the Grabez family came to run a guest house and restaurant that serves traditional food. Six people can be accommodated in their house, while food is prepared for groups of up to 20 people.
“Guests are most often looking for local food, everything that is prepared in this area – pies, cakes, sausages, barbecue, baking, stews,” Rada Grabez tells us. “We opened our place 10 years ago. Boro from the visitor center pushed us more than anyone to start taking this business more seriously.”
The Grabez guest house is well located, three kilometers from the source of the Sana and close to climbing areas. “The village is much livelier than it used to be,” Grabez says. “And every weekend many people, many groups, buses, motorbikes, cyclists, pass by. The houses in the village are left empty, but I hope for some new life. Many people have started to rebuild their households, to come and return to nature and the village.”
Risks of Success
The rise in the number of tourists also brings with it the danger of over-development.
“We want it to be a green destination. Then we can’t talk about mass tourism,” warns Maric. Greenways was active in the fight to declare the source of the Sana River a natural monument and block further development of a hydroelectric plant that was built there.
“We have protected the sources of the Sana, we want people to see them, but we do not want excessive numbers of visitors to destroy those same sources,” Maric says. “We are aware of the risks and that is why we may at some point have to control the number of people who come there.”
A lot is needed to put this kind of project in place: money from donors, approval from institutions, and acceptance from locals, as well as the dedication of the people who make it all happen.
A shortage of helping hands is the biggest limitation to the further growth of the project, Maric says.
“We bring people together for volunteer work, they are happy to take part for a few days, but we lack people who stay and live with us for at least a few months. We need five to 10 people to realize everything we have imagined. And of course, funds.”
Anyone attempting anything similar would most likely need the help of donors, he says, and even with their support, they would probably need to secure at least 20 percent of the cost from private foundations, a crowdfunding campaign, or corporate sponsorship.
Community Is Key
As soon as the visitor center started posting photos of the village on its social media accounts, positive comments started coming in, Maric says.
“I saw how emotionally and nostalgically people are attached to this village. Then I started to go around the village and photograph old houses. Some houses were being renovated even before we came, but we definitely gave an incentive to people who thought about whether it is worth coming to the village and renovating a house or not,” he says.
According to staff at the visitor center, about 60 houses in the village have been renovated in recent years as owners who moved away long ago decide to spend part of their time here again.
“I left Pecka at the age of 13,” says Dusan Pavalic, a village native now resident in Serbia. “This is my hometown. I used to come here with my son every year. We took a break for 15 years and then started coming again. I renovated the house where I was born. It is love for the village, for my birthplace.”
“There are some who stay here all winter. Some for a month, two, five,” Mile Terzija says. Some returnees spend all their time here, he adds.
Reviving a village is a very complex process. It is even more difficult if you are not from the area, but are an outsider who needs to win local people’s trust.
For this reason, Greenways has never taken ownership of the school building. When the local population needs to use the space – the largest available – they are given priority. Family gatherings are held there, and during elections it serves as a polling station.
“We never wanted to privatize it, even though people told us that our investments exceeded the value of this facility. I take the firm position that this should remain a public facility,” Maric stresses.
Respecting the local community and their needs is crucial to making a project like this succeed, he says.
“The community must be taken care of in every possible way. It is important that they do not feel threatened by anything. It is the only long-term way,” he says. “If you want substantial change in the community, then you have to work together with the community – to preserve what is valuable and bring new values, to create a balance.”
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Vanja Stokic is the editor in chief of eTrafika.net, a Bosnian news outlet.
Photos by Ajdin Kamber.
