Despotovac

The Story Behind the Place

Despot Stefan Lazarević — poet, legislator and the last great ruler of medieval Serbia — built Manasija between 1407 and 1418 as his burial church and the final monument of the state that fell with him in 1427. The fortress-monastery then sheltered the Resava scriptorium, where monks copied the classics of Serbian and Slavonic learning; when the Ottomans took the valley, the school’s scholars fled to Wallachia and Russia, carrying Resava’s manuscripts with them. The monastery’s walls held as a frontier post through the Ottoman centuries; the church, damaged by lightning and quake, was restored repeatedly, most thoroughly after 1946. The village of Despotovac itself grew in the 19th century around the Resava river mills; the coal and timber of Homolje gave it its town charter in 1893, and the cave — known to locals for centuries — opened its first tourist paths in 1954.