Donji Milanovac

Donji Milanovac has been relocated twice—once by politics, once by technology. In 1830, Prince Miloš Obrenović ordered the flood-prone settlement moved 2 kilometers downstream, creating Serbia's first architecturally planned town by 1832. In 1970, the Iron Gate I dam construction forced a second relocation 6 kilometers further downstream; the old town disappeared beneath Lake Đerdap in 1971. Today's Donji Milanovac is effectively a third settlement, built atop the physical erasure of its predecessors.

The town sits in the Veliki Kazan gorge, where the Danube narrows from 2,000 meters to just 170 meters wide while dropping 90 meters deep—a geological compression that made the Iron Gates critical for navigation and hydroelectric potential. The Romanian-Yugoslav joint venture (1964-1972) created what was then the world's 10th-largest hydroelectric station, permanently drowning the Ada Kaleh island and displacing 17,000 people across the region. Fifteen kilometers upstream, archaeologists rescued Lepenski Vir—a Mesolithic site dating to 9500-6000 BCE—before the waters rose, relocating selected stone-age structures to enclosed displays near their original location.

Modern Donji Milanovac functions as the gateway to Đerdap National Park (established 1974), with tourism replacing fishing and transport as the primary economy. The Iron Gate dam interrupted sturgeon spawning routes, eliminating traditional fisheries. By 2026, the town's trajectory depends on whether Đerdap's nature and heritage tourism develops sufficiently to sustain the community—or whether the twice-relocated settlement experiences a third transformation as regional depopulation accelerates.