Bocevica
Lazar's agricultural hinterland—Bočevica fed Kruševac's medieval fortress, now depends on the city's industrial survival for its own.
Bočevica exists because the Rasina District needed villages to work the lands between Kruševac and its surrounding monasteries—and because every medieval capital requires agricultural hinterland. This village in Kruševac municipality sits in the shadow of Prince Lazar's 1371 fortress, part of the network of settlements that fed and supplied the medieval Serbian capital before the Battle of Kosovo.
Kruševac was built from 'krušac'—the round river stones abundant in the West Morava and Rasina valleys. The surrounding villages including Bočevica provided more than construction materials: grain, livestock, labor, and the agricultural surplus that sustained a royal court. After 1389, when Kruševac became the capital of vassal Serbia under Lazar's widow Milica and son Stefan, this agricultural network kept functioning even as political independence faded.
The Ottoman centuries transformed but did not eliminate such villages. The city fell in 1427 and remained under Turkish rule until 1833's final liberation during the Second Serbian Uprising. Bočevica survived as villages do: anonymously, persistently, defined by proximity to more important places. By 2026, the village's future tracks Kruševac's fortunes—whether the city's industrial base (rubber, chemicals, machinery) provides employment that keeps surrounding villages inhabited, or whether demographic gravity continues pulling residents toward larger cities.