Barosevac

Baroševac exists because the Kolubara Basin's lignite reserves needed mining infrastructure—and because some villages get absorbed into industrial operations rather than destroyed by them. This settlement in Lazarevac municipality sits atop one of Europe's largest lignite deposits: 2.2 billion tonnes of brown coal that generates over half of Serbia's electricity. The Kolubara mining complex, which began with the Zvizdar pit in 1896, eventually expanded to include the Baroševac pit itself.

The transition from agricultural village to mining infrastructure happened gradually. When open-pit mining began in earnest after 1952, surface extraction consumed landscapes village by village. Baroševac became one of the named pits in the Kolubara system—alongside Fields A, C, E, G, Tamnava-West, and others covering 80 square kilometers. The geology explains why: in the Neogene era, this region was a bay of the Pannonian Sea, and millennia of vegetation deposits created the lignite seams now being extracted.

Today, the Kolubara complex employs 11,907 people in mining and 2,039 in power generation—making EPS the largest employer in Serbia. Baroševac's residents live amid the machinery of energy production: excavators, conveyor belts, the thermal power plants at Veliki Crljeni and Obrenovac that burn the extracted coal. By 2026, the village's future depends on Serbia's energy transition: whether lignite remains the backbone of national power or whether EU accession requires a shift away from coal.