Bresnicic
261 people in Toplica's depopulating countryside—Bresničić persists 20km from Prokuplje, too small for policy attention, too stubborn to vanish.
Bresničić exists because southern Serbia needed villages to farm—and because 261 people (2002 census) still do. This small settlement 20 kilometers from Prokuplje sits in the Toplica District, part of the depopulating southern Serbian countryside where agriculture persists but population does not. The landscape here was once part of Moravian Serbia under Prince Lazar, then the Morava Banovina under Yugoslav kingdom; now it's simply another village losing young people to cities.
The Vinča cultural group settled the wider region thousands of years ago, and the settlement logic hasn't changed: arable land near water in defensible terrain. But what made sense for subsistence farming makes less sense in an economy where Prokuplje itself is a minor regional center and Niš draws the mobile workforce. Bresničić has no major industry, no significant tourism, no obvious competitive advantage beyond the persistence of families who have farmed this land for generations.
By 2026, Bresničić faces what rural Serbia faces everywhere: the question of whether communities below 300 people can maintain schools, healthcare, and infrastructure—or whether they gradually become weekend-home zones for diaspora returning to ancestral property. The village is too small to attract policy attention, too persistent to simply disappear.