Kolare
Jagodina village (~396 pop.) in Levač uplands; birthplace of commander Stanko Arambašić (1764); agricultural hinterland draining toward Morava industrial corridor; 2026 faces continued demographic contraction.
Kolare exists because the Levač region's rolling hills between the Great Morava and West Morava rivers offered agricultural land suitable for Serbian settlement during Ottoman recessions. The village sits in Jagodina municipality, in terrain that produced both crops and revolutionaries. In 1764, Stanko Arambašić was born here—a military commander who would lead a special Serbian National Army under Mustafa Pasha's controversial 'Popular Army' during the complex Ottoman power struggles.
The Levač region historically formed part of Serbia's agrarian core. Unlike the industrial Morava valley floor where Jagodina's cable factories concentrated, upland villages like Kolare maintained pastoral and agricultural vocations. This economic partition persists: the valley industrializes while the hills depopulate, creating source-sink dynamics where young villagers flow toward factory employment in Jagodina and the Great Morava corridor.
The village's current population of approximately 396 represents substantial contraction from earlier peaks. Jagodina municipality absorbed multiple such settlements, providing administrative services while extracting labor and youth. The 1980s plans for a Jagodina-Paraćin-Ćuprija conurbation (including inter-city tramways) would have formalized this urban dominance, but the plan collapsed with Yugoslavia.
In 2026, Kolare's trajectory follows the Levač regional pattern: stable agricultural production but declining population as mechanization reduces labor requirements and urban opportunities attract the young. The village will likely persist as a residential address for Jagodina commuters and elderly agriculturalists, its identity as birthplace of a forgotten revolutionary commander increasingly obscure as local memory fades with the aging population.