Brajkovac

Brajkovac exists because the Kolubara Basin's lignite reserves needed more than mines—they needed housing for workers and roads for equipment. This village in Lazarevac municipality sits 58 kilometers south of Belgrade, in the heart of Serbia's coal country. The Kolubara mining complex that generates over half of Serbia's electricity extends across this landscape; villages like Brajkovac provide the human infrastructure that keeps the excavators running.

Lazarevac municipality's identity is inseparable from coal. The first pit opened in 1896; by the 1950s, open-pit mining transformed the landscape. Fields A, C, E, G, and others consume 80 square kilometers of territory, village by village. Brajkovac has so far avoided absorption—its location apparently outside the current extraction zone—but the logic of surface mining means that every village in Kolubara exists on borrowed time.

The energy transition poses existential questions. EPS (Electric Power Industry of Serbia) employs nearly 14,000 people in this basin alone. EU accession will require reducing coal dependence. By 2026, Brajkovac's residents face the same uncertainty as the entire region: whether the Just Transition funds being discussed can provide alternatives to an economy built on burning brown coal, or whether villages that survived 130 years of mining will empty when the mines finally close.