Kosmaj

The Story Behind the Place

Kosmaj’s woods hid people in every bad century: Roman mines and villas worked its foot, the medieval Serbian state built its monasteries here — Pavlovac was founded by despot Stefan Lazarević around 1417, Tresije about the same time — and after the Ottoman conquest the mountains kept the monasteries alive as raiders’ refuges and monks’ retreats. In WWII the Kosmaj Partisan Detachment formed in these woods in 1941; its fighting retreat and near-annihilation became one of Serbia’s central war stories, and in 1979 the sculptor Vojin Stojić raised the memorial on the summit meadow — a split concrete spire, 35 metres tall, that reads as a flame, a wingspread or a broken line depending on the angle. The whole mountain was declared a protected landscape in 2005.