We had a nice watermill.
It milled the grain well.
And now it is silent,
It chatters no more.
Our watermill is dead.
—Rada Džonijeva, “Umrela vodenica” (2010)1
In the summer of 2020, I brought a friend to Topli Do, a decaying village on the Serbian part of the Balkan Mountains massive. As he watched the two rivers meet, the red rocks, and the sheep grazing nearby, Stevan was on the verge of tears. “This place is out of this world,” he said, mesmerized. “We, city dwellers, we are so disconnected from nature; it is as if we live some parody of life.” Indeed, with its lush greenery, emptied old houses, and stunning waterfalls, Topli Do seemed as the most otherworldly escape a pandemic summer could grant. Stevan called it a “hidden gem” while his teenage daughter photographed an old shepherdess. But as the woman refused to greet her, and Jeeps with urban tourists arrived, Stevan's feelings became more fraught. “Pristine nature is becoming a privilege these days,” he said, while noting how the rediscovery of the place does not necessarily please the village residents. “You can reach some more common places, but living here will soon cost much.”
I start with such a twist of perspectives to zoom in on the heterogeneous affordances that rural depopulation evokes in the Balkan hinterlands. As Dace Dzenovska (2020) argues, “emptiness” is never an innocent description. Instead, it is a process in which places lose their formerly constitutive material elements, a way of seeing that casts such evacuation as the loss of a familiar way of life, and a subject to competing claims over how the place should be governed. In the Balkan Mountains, emptiness is marked when people say planina je napuštena (the mountain is deserted) or sela su prazna (the villages are empty). The shared point of reference is the countryside's prior boom, after which the present looks like a grand dying out—an assemblage of rural depopulation, crumbling infrastructure, and a return of forest where pastoralism was. But while all agree that the mountain has been abandoned, what this means depends on whom you talk to. For the villagers, vacant houses and overgrown forests index a history of destruction that they know from their own biographies and decisions on where to spend old age and die. For right-wing ideologues, emptiness is nothing short of the ruination of presocialist peasantry and a chance to restore private property on new terms. For environmental activists, both perspectives are valid inasmuch as the local rivers continue to flow: the mountain's plenitude eclipses the voids imminent in hydropower. And for the visitors, the place is full of value as long as its ruined houses and pristine waterfalls can be turned into distinctive Instagram posts.
As the articles in this special issue argue, social actors can value emptiness as a loss or as an opportunity, while offering different propositions for its future (Introduction, this issue; Dzenovska et al. 2022). Different subjects attach themselves to different material affordances and historical echoes—the many “empty” and “plenty” a place can have. Sites of decay can be experienced as fetishized ruins or as contingent rubbles, but they are always emergent, heterogeneous constellations (Gordillo 2014). In this article, I explore this multiplicity of claims made on a place that has become a symbol of the region's decline and a center for various initiatives to revive it. Importantly, I follow both the consensuses that the prism of rural emptiness conjures and the conflicts it masks. Where do different gazes regarding village depopulation overlap, I ask, and where do they clash? And what happens when voids become reoccupied?
What I offer is a story of diverging voids and competing abstractions. One concerns capital as a Great Abstractor that extracts value from its material surroundings, while worshipping “Nature” as if it were devoid of human history (Fraser 2021). It is precisely this evacuation of sociality from environment that reduced the climate crisis predominantly to the question of carbon dioxide emissions, in the dominant renderings of the Anthropocene (Moore 2016). In the Balkans, such a reduction has recently facilitated the predatory capture of rivers as a source of hydropower—a green “transition” that has echoed many preceding ones. But for the popular “river guardian” movement I describe here, a decrease in emission levels seemed less urgent than an actual degrowth that plagued their depopulating lands. Gathering around water's vitalist imagery (Muehlebach 2023), they rose to protect local rivers as a source of “Life itself” in a world seen as on the brink of extinction. It was in the name of such total, environmental reproductive justice that new repopulation and conservation initiatives started, promising a return to the Balkan Mountains for both humans and non-humans alike.
And yet, as that “Life” was being revived, a multiplicity of lives came to mark it. For it was not only energy investors who were attracted to the seemingly empty Balkan Mountains. From ecotourism developers through to adventurous urbanites and villagers scraping by, a variety of actors came to depend on their distinctive environments. Such spatial capture was followed by a temporal othering—a form of expert reasoning that sought to save the place while redefining who its future torchbearers should be. This boiled down to the old villagers, who were at once seen as exemplars of local difference and as about to expire. And despite it starting with ecopopulist pluralism, the mountain revival has ultimately sneaked in another quasi-universalist subject—urban, male, middle-aged, and middle class. The defense of Life muffled particular lives; it filled in voids but created new erasures; and it shifted from a capitalist abstraction to an ecopopulist one.
It is this emptiness within emptiness that interests me here: how voids can lead to political ruptures, and how they can cement the status quo. Following various groups who seek to “bring life back” to the mountain—villagers, activists, festival organizers, livestock breeders, and newly settled urbanites—I show how their practices simultaneously open up and close that life's multiplicity. I call this “filling in while emptying out”: an evacuation of subject positions through the very efforts made to restore them. As they seek to revive the “dying” countryside, I argue, various groups selectively affirm and erase ways of life still thriving in it. Efforts to restore life thus inevitably pose the question of who is presumed to be dying out in the first place—whose death is to be marked, and whose taken for granted. Such duality reveals emptiness as a problem space that is necropolitical inasmuch as it is vitalist. In effort to sustain and redirect vital flows, I argue, revivals are never simply about filling a void. Rather, they are a world-remaking contestation for defining who can survive and who is anyhow destined to expire.
Battling total degrowth in the Balkans
Someone is deliberately drying up Serbia. Someone is deliberately evicting Serbia.
—Aleksandar Panić, protest speech in Pakleštica, 2018
Over the last three decades, the Balkans have experienced a critical demographic decline (Judah 2019). Bulgaria is the fastest shrinking state in the world, while the former Yugoslav region has officially lost more than a quarter of its population since 1991, with a further fifth projected to disappear by 2050. But the depopulation of Southeast Europe cannot be explained in terms of a “second demographic transition” (the drop in both mortality and natality that occurs after development). Instead, it is the postwar and postsocialist de-development and de-modernization that has caused involuntary infertility, lower life expectancies, and “intense aging” of the region (Blagojević-Hughson and Bobić 2014: 533). Southeast Europe's uneven inclusion in the EU has resulted in a mass outmigration of youth, which has placed increased reproductive pressures on those who remain behind (Hromadžić et al. 2015; Thelen 2015). And despite pronatalist campaigns against the “white plague” of low natality, national welfare policies have not eased the crisis in social reproduction (Jansen and Helms 2009). Welfare and jobs have been redistributed along partisan lines, turning large swathes of the population into a labor surplus. In this context, Larisa Kurtović (2021) has argued, fears over depopulation mark not a continuation of national biopolitics but rather its very limit. At a point in which past dislocations and present dispossessions combine, she suggests, the shrinking of Bosnian towns now conveys an expulsion of sociality—a sense of life becoming unlivable, a feeling of being driven out.
If such expulsion has long undergirded regional politics, it has acquired new valences during the latest “energy transition”. Aside from aiding the global commitment to decarbonize, green energy has been lauded as fostering market competition, in line with other policy adjustments orchestrated by the European Union. Small hydropower plants were less capital-intensive than solar and wind farms; they could be allocated to an extensive network of the ruling parties’ clients, and they also resembled the Yugoslav socialist modernist projects of building big river dams (Djunda 2021). But despite emitting no carbon, new hydropower has resulted in a wave of green grabs. Small hydropower plants rely on water speed, entailing that rivers and streams are to be channeled into pipes. This results in depletion of the fish and freshwater—a loss of residents’ means of subsistence, on the one hand, and a secure gain for private investors on state feed-in tariffs, on the other. River struggles across the region thus became symbols of peripheral displacement, with accusations that citizens are being turned into “ecological refugees” by their own governments. The state-led, market-driven energy transition turned into an extractive frontier marked by power asymmetries, obscure bureaucracy, and violent enforcement (Djunda 2021; Kurtović 2022; Rajković 2020, 2022a, 2022b; for green transition elsewhere, see Franquesa 2018; Howe and Boyer 2016).
What is more, inequalities of the energy transition overlapped with those of demography. As rivers and streams flow fastest in the mountain areas—where the population has dwindled the most and old villagers rely on agriculture and pensions—the small hydropower plants became concentrated in peripheral areas, depopulated hinterlands, and communities marginalized from political life. It is their semi-agrarian, aged, and often impoverished residents that came to be seen as both the living frontiers of environmental predation and the prime forces for saving the commons. In Serbia, the rebellion's epi- center was Stara planina, or the Balkan Mountains—a mountain range spread across parts of Serbia and Bulgaria. The literal translation of its name being the Old Mountain, Stara planina is a nexus of age and environment in its own right. It lies in Serbia's southeast region, which has experienced the highest levels of depopulation for decades. But Stara also boasts the largest volume of rivers, streams, and waterfalls in Serbia, and is deemed as one of the most biodiverse areas of the entire Balkans. Its indexes of multiple ages—canyons dating back to the Jurassic, carnivorous plants, and cave churches built by Byzantine monks—further enhance the special role the place has in Serbian national history. Set in the province that was among the last to be liberated from the Ottoman Empire and is a center for Šop and Torlak groups—an ethnic mélange said to be spreading in border zones of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia—Stara has long been imagined as the Balkan's ancient, a remnant of a premodern, pastoral way of life. Its highlanders have long been depicted as more freedom- loving than their lowland compatriots, bound to no one but the harsh mountain environment (Brunnbauer and Pichler 2002).
It is this intersection of multiple pasts and material affordances that the energy transition unraveled in these mountain abodes, as sites encompassing both the ruins of industrialization and alternatives for a postindustrial future to come. Topli Do became iconic in this regard. It shared the destiny of many other villages in the Balkan Mountains that, after the national liberations of the nineteenth century, became peripheralized border zones, and places of labor surplus to be pulled to towns (Brunnbauer 2004). In truth, its economy actually rose during the twentieth century with the advancement of dairy farming, hard cheese (kačkavalj) production, and a military border post. But all this had faded out by the 1980s. An autochthonous breed of sheep, pirotska pramenka, was lost in socialist amelioration policies, and most of the village youth left to seek industrial jobs in towns or abroad, in line with Yugoslav labor migration trends at that time. By 2019, Topli Do had about thirty residents, most older than 65—a seemingly pitiful image of rural flight, a soon-to-be-empty place ready to yield value for the hydro-capital.
Topli Do's defense was orchestrated by Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Defend the Rivers of the Old Mountain) an organization that allied villagers with activists. Its core membership was from the nearby town of Pirot, but it overlapped with the villagers: many Pirot residents had family origins on the mountain or were attached to its natural bounties as hikers, fishermen, or mushroom foragers. The activists drew on a long heritage of contestation in the nearby village of Temska, where plans for hydropower had been resisted since the 1980s. In Topli Do, they urged the villagers not to sign consent forms. Nonstop barricades were organized on the local bridge, with a warning for the investor, “Josić, you will not pass.” Dozens of videos were posted daily on the network's Facebook group, which grew to over one hundred thousand followers. An image of old village women at a barricade went especially viral—an image that was partially staged, but resonant nevertheless. “People's ecological uprisings” were held, with visitors, donations, and help pouring in from all over the country and abroad (see Figure 1). And after nine months of struggle—including two physical altercations with the investors’ construction crew—the hydropower projects for the entire mountain were finally dropped by the district's parliament. Topli Do came to be viewed as an autonomous eco-zone, an inspiration for grassroots rebellions elsewhere in the country.
“People's Ecological Riot” in Topli Do, 2019. Photo: Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
“People's Ecological Riot” in Topli Do, 2019. Photo: Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
“People's Ecological Riot” in Topli Do, 2019. Photo: Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
What made this case so resonant, I argue, was a particular gaze on depopulation as a wholesome expulsion of life. For it is not only the Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić who campaigns “for the future of our children”, while lamenting that there will soon be no workers in the country (Petrović-Šteger et al. 2020: 22). The demographic panic also rises as a critique from below, amid sights of empty villages, ruined factories, piped rivers, and the youth moved abroad. Dying out seems to be total. Thus, if planetary overgrowth has been the key idiom of global climate discourse (Haraway 2018), it is the specter of an actual degrowth that lies at the heart of Balkan visions of the apocalypse. Here, human depopulation and nonhuman extinction are seen as parts of the same affliction, and the capital-colluding state is accused of being the main depopulator and extractor alike.
The investors’ real aim—one of the movement leaders, Aleksandar Jovanović Ćuta, claimed—was not the electricity, but the water and minerals. Both the socialist and postsocialist regimes, he argued, have urbanized people to make them docile, while grabbing the soil's wealth from the emptied countryside. Such vision of depopulation as theft, and emptiness as planned, mobilized widely. It spoke to mountain villagers for whom rivers were a source of ancillary subsistence, urbanites seeking to escape precarity by returning to farming, and all those who equated “free rivers” with “free people” resisting Serbia's neoliberal authoritarianism more broadly. So when Jovanović declared, “First we will defend the rivers, then we will revive the mountains,” his call resonated across different classes and generations alike.
Topli Do soon became a symbol of pristine nature, forgotten heritage, and grassroots environmentalism. What had once seemed a picture of rural flight—emptiness as a catastrophe of infrastructural decay and demographic decline—became a precious potentiality. A number of conservation projects appeared, as did affluent urbanites buying local land. In the summer of 2020, the village recorded fifteen thousand tourist visits. Such development seemed to finally satisfy yearnings to revive the area and kickstart its economy. Gone seemed the dead water mills described in local poems; now decrepit houses were being renovated, while the old village women sold their entire batches of cheese to the fascinated urbanites. But many became suspicious of such a revival. What would happen to the local way of life now that its “backwardness” had been rebranded? And what would become of the Balkan Mountains?
Life and its abstractions: Extinction, emptiness, erasures
“All environmental issues are reproductive issues,” Giovanna Di Chiro argues, “environmental struggles are about fighting for and ensuring social reproduction” (2008: 285). Such reproduction is both expanded and embedded—it is not bare life but entire “ways of life” that are guarded (Hoover 2018). Accordingly, it is crucial to recognize that the mobilizations over Balkan rivers are not simply possessive or nationalist but are struggles for environmental reproductive justice in their own right. For it is more than ruin fetishism and rural nostalgia that drive people to roam the Stara Mountain, photograph its waterfalls, and buy its shattered houses. Instead, rural decline has emerged as a metonym of the region's wider dying out (izumiranje), with mountain rivers imagined as the last shared substance—as something that unites different generations and species in a common struggle.
In 2020, for example, the river guardians endorsed the demands of (predominantly young) digital freelance workers who, after the state tried to tax them, went to streets with slogans like “I don't want to emigrate.” They gave center stage to Serbian medical workers who claimed they were perishing at the world's highest rate in the pandemic. Activists also spoke out in the name of endangered river crabs and trout. Many supporters came from the urban middle class, and they worried for their children's health amid air pollution; other supporters included retirees, who blamed state economic policies for their children's migration to the EU. The waterscapes were being buried, many claimed, and so were various forms of life around them (see Figure 2).2 Insurgent networks of river guardians formed to prevent the extinction of both humans and non-humans, with slogans such as “I am not giving my river for your mortgage” and “For rivers, till death do us part” (Za reke do izginuća).
“The people who sleeps as others take its rivers, will wake up in a desert.” Protest leaflet by Odbranimo reke Stare planine, 2019.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
“The people who sleeps as others take its rivers, will wake up in a desert.” Protest leaflet by Odbranimo reke Stare planine, 2019.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
“The people who sleeps as others take its rivers, will wake up in a desert.” Protest leaflet by Odbranimo reke Stare planine, 2019.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
But who gets to fill this void? While the literature on environmental reproductive justice movements is growing fast, attention to their inner frictions is scant. This is the case despite the fact that indigenous groups have their own hierarchies that command how the symbolism of a common cause is mediated across uneven social positions (Igoe 2005; Li 2000). A similar insight comes from studies of rural “authenticity”, which enacts its own exclusions (Pospěch et al. 2021). And as multispecies scholars have pointed out, a focus on one particular environmental assemblage can lead to the erasure of other possible ones (Tsing 2017). So if depopulation and environmental degradation were able to conjure “a certain kind of political surplus that feeds bigger dreams and desires” (Kurtović 2018: 45), then whose aspirations have taken the center stage? Who is the subject, and who is the object of emptiness in the Balkan Mountains’ eco-demographic revival?
Importantly, the movement transcended the concerns of those directly affected, or what is dubbed as the “environmentalism of the poor” (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997). Instead, it united multiple afflictions into a single wound, shaping a certain “environmentalism of malcontent” (Arsel et al. 2015). Such a generalization of struggle begs the question of how different participants mark equivalences between their diverging positions. Elsewhere, I have offered the term ecopopulism: a way of organizing that pits the “people” against the “elites,” constituting the former as the defender of life while depicting the capitalist state as the spreader of death (Rajković 2022b). To say that the protests are ecopopulist is to point to populism's ability to connect heterogeneous demands into “chains of equivalence”, with ecology being a means to bind particular discontents into a broader, pluralist universality (Laclau 2005). On this reading, capital's ability to constantly reproduce itself through surplus value is countered by life's own desire to expand and persist—by cattle searching for water, rivers flowing from one generation to another, and ancestors passing the land on to their future descendants. The ecopopulist cause thus confronts capitalist abstractions of value by creating its own counter-abstraction, that of Life itself (Rajković 2022b).
But how is this struggle to sustain Life embedded in concrete, uneven lives? As Mouffe (2018) points out, populist universality is ever provisional, in the sense that one element in a role of representing others can always be contested by another. The heterogeneity of such “empty signifiers” is echoed in ethnographies of “emptiness” more broadly, which, as the articles in this special section show, is never a lack of things but a state of becoming, when past forms have dissolved and new ones are still emerging. “The shift from emptiness as a loss (e.g., undoing of modernity) to emptiness as an opportunity (e.g., beginning life anew),” Dzenovska and others argue, “is a site of the political, that is, a moment of decision about the place of the present in a framework of meaning that gives form and direction to life” (Introduction, this issue). Put differently, every attempt to restore life is also a struggle to channel it—just as any attempt to articulate populist reason is a battle to fix it.
For my case here, this act of giving form (to life and to the multitude speaking in its name) becomes most visible when people seek to agree about what kind of death is happening. Precisely because emptiness occurs as something concrete (village depopulation) and as a more general negativity (a grand “dying out”), the crucial question concerns whose death is to be marked, and whose is to be taken for granted. Extinction is never in the abstract, van Dooren et al. (2017) argue, because the disappearance of a species relates to millions of singular beings whose succession of lives and deaths constituted one lasting totality. But if any extinction story is to be effective, we may add, it needs to go beyond such singular losses to conjure a more general image of Death as a passing of a certain form and way of life as such. So, in the next section, I ask what is stressed and what is left out of that negative abstraction. Whose visions and livelihoods take center stage when people say that the mountain has become dead, empty, and dry, and whose worlds get erased in the seemingly neutral quest for its revival?
The death and rebirth of Topli Do
Under Midžor, an empty village, with no urrow in sight:
Deserted houses, vacant cradles.
Old pictures and grandpa's words
A pure river that heals my soul.
People left, the rocks remained,
Oh Topli Do, come to life once more.
Saint Petka, you the patroness
Of Topli Do and the border,
Bring new generations back to the hearths of their great-grandfathers.
– Predrag Tošić Peda, Himna Toplog dola3
The anthem of Topli Do—written by an older local who sang it while playing the accordion—featured regularly at protest assemblies. His lyrics referred to the loss of toplodolski život, a local way of life, and the mention of a border post and patron saint would alienate some outsiders. And yet, these lyrics also invoked a feeling of a common predicament, where nearly everyone could agree that their ties to rural ancestors have been cut. It is this affect of death and resurrection, of a far-grander emptiness to be countered, that has continued in recent initiatives for Topli Do's revival—the Festival of Free Rivers and Mountains being one of them.
The festival has been guided by Srđan Cvetković, a man in his fifties who was born in Topli Do but who grew up in the north of Serbia. Srđan, a revisionist anticommunist historian whose academic work is dedicated to uncovering the victims of the “red terror,” has acted as the village revival's ideological profiler. His collaborator is Miljan Stojanović, a man in his thirties who grew up in a nearby town but whose mother is from the village. During the struggle for the local rivers, Miljan orchestrated the barricades with an authority lubricated by diverse forms of capital he had amassed as an urban entrepreneur and the son of an army officer. Miljan has been a member of Defend the rivers of Stara planina movement, but also acted as an independent ally. He registered his address in the village and became its president, thus deciding on how donations would be channeled (for the reconstruction of roofs, toilets, the marking of waterfalls, etc.). Miljan also built a motel, and he was the main tourist host in the village. These two men represented the two faces of the revival: a return to presocialist glory and a chance to become an ecotourist ethno-attraction.
In August 2021, I stood in the visitor crowd waiting for the festival to be opened (see Figure 3). After the crowd photographed a villager passing by with his sheep flock, Srđan opened the event by commemorating an earlier reconstruction. In 1876, he told us, the villagers refused to pay taxes to the Ottoman soldiers, beat them, and fled behind the mountain peak. Three months later, they saw smoke: Topli Do was burning to the ground. Villagers decided to renovate it from scratch. The contemporary revival is faithful to that earlier resurgence, Srđan told us, with the church being the first object to be reconstructed once again. His photo exhibition The Rise and Fall of Topli Do channeled this resurrective spirit further.
Srđan Cvetković (center) at the opening of festival in Topli Do. Photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
Srđan Cvetković (center) at the opening of festival in Topli Do. Photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
Srđan Cvetković (center) at the opening of festival in Topli Do. Photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
Importantly, Srđan situated the rise in the presocialist era, and the fall in the socialist period. On his view, the idea that outside capital developed the countryside was a misconception: economies of scale emerged autochthonously by capitalizing on the trade of local dairy products across the border. Here, Srđan's story centered on Dimitrije Mladenović – Mita Gaga, the exporter of sheep cheese in the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia. One of the wealthiest locals—an industrialist, politician, and friend of the Serbian King—Mladenović featured as an exemplar of the national bourgeoisie who came from the countryside. Beside photos of shepherds, visitors could see his domineering portrait, his predicament symbolizing the fate of Topli Do more generally. For the communists who came to power after World War II did not only dispossess Mita Gaga, Srđan lamented, they also dismantled the local economy more generally. State investments were gradually withdrawn, and when built, the roads served only for the people to leave the village for good. To argue his case, Srđan pointed to photos of old villagers from the 1990s.
We then came to a panel with photos of the recent barricades against hydropower investors. Srđan praised the rebellion but was careful to frame the revival as going beyond mere conservation. “The rivers will keep flowing. We defended them, and that is an important part of it,” he said, “but without a revival of the village folk, that defense would be in vain.” For unlike in the nineteenth century, Srđan argued, Topli Do now had no human capital (ljudstvo) to restart with. Only the old people remained, he said, and most of their descendants would not return from towns. This is why the autochthonous status of toplodolstvo has to be widened now, he suggested, to all who want to settle there. Such an opening up of an “indigenous” identity placated the crowd, who were mostly from the metropoles of Belgrade and Novi Sad. No villager was invited to comment, and most remained on the fringes of the crowd as women chatted on benches and men drank in front of the store. This was despite the fact that the festival had staged their own history: through a 1936 documentary that showed the pastoral economy in all its past magnitude (the rise); a television program about the killing of a local monarchist officer by communists after World War II (the fall), and a documentary titled The Kingdom of Waterfalls Is Being Born Again, about the recent projects of the village reconstruction (the revival). There was no mention of other villages on the mountain, nor of the struggles against hydropower that continued elsewhere in the country.
The festival culminated with a competition for the best landscape art, which included drone photography, 4K videos, and other amateur works about the Balkan Mountains. Most entries focused on scenes of “pristine” nature—rivers, waterfalls, and mountain peaks—with no humans visible. Others occasionally included old peasants with their horses. Such rural nostalgia and the postmaterialist worship of wildness blended well with the right-wing rearticulation of village heritage that Srđan strongly advocated. His wife screened a video titled My Summertime Holiday, which, narrated in English, reminisced about an extra vacation the family had in Topli Do after returning from the seaside. This included singing Lykke Li's song “I Follow Rivers” with shots of their daughter playing with a donkey. Villagers mostly absent from footage, one of the final lines was, “Despite Covid, we had great fun.” What started as an ecopopulist restoration of the local way of life, then, also blended with an urbane, middle-class, “ecotourist bubble” (Carrier and Macleod 2005).
Deciding what can survive
The festival appropriated local heritage while turning residents into mere bystanders. It refuted the privatization of water while simultaneously condoning the privatization of land. It used emptiness to depoliticize local resentments with capital while remobilizing an older, anticommunist lament. But again, I am interested here in what kinds of deaths were marked, and how the place's further life was channeled through that. “The privatization of society is our biggest problem,” an older villager of Topli Do told me back on a river barricade in 2019. This man was disgusted by the hydropower investors and thought that water should be shared. This belief that privatization was the real killer had surfaced that same year when river guardians commemorated the death of Dragan Ilijev, their comrade from the village of Rakita, whose illness was aggravated by police intimidation. Or the death of Srđan Đošić, the youngest “river brother” who was hit by a car thief. Just two years after that, the festival focused on the expropriation of Mita Gaga—the very first pre–World War II investor in hydropower—and the killing of the monarchist army member Dušan Petrović Boroš. By focusing on their, rather than on activists’ perishing, the festival equated the fall of Topli Do not with a tragedy of the commons, but with the collapse of a capitalist, royalist society. But the organizers were not only deciding which deaths mattered. They also determined what lives were still possible. And if the village anthem asked for new generations to return to their great-grandfathers’ land, Srđan deemed this unlikely: the only future Topli Do could have was through new blood settling in.
This argument of sustainability—deciding on the place's future by distinguishing what can survive—features in all revival initiatives. The most valued regional “brands”—pirotski cheese, sheep, and kilim—are rediscovered on the cusp of their extinction, with experts claiming that they can be saved only by new people and innovative practices. After the House of Culture in the village of Dojkinci was renovated, for example, Danijela Milovanović Rodić, a professor from Belgrade University who guided the project came to speak about future options. Landscapes, old people, ancient crafts—these are the symbols of the Balkan Mountains, she said while pointing to photos on the walls around us. But the past will not return, she continued, and the only future the place has is in ecotourism and organic food production. Like Srđan, Danijela was selectively remembering and forgetting what was still alive and well in front of her. For the products of supposedly dying crafts, banice (a type of local pie) that the old village women made, were all around us, and the university staff ate them with great gusto. Still, the old villagers were not invited to ask questions and remained alone in the room to dance to an accordion—a living testimony to the dying tradition, as it were. Meanwhile, visiting students took selfies at a nearby waterfall.
Such erasure is conditioned by the wider political economy of revaluing Balkan peripheries, which proceeds as a classed capture of space. For it is not only the energy investors who see the local land as terra nulius, ready to yield returns for capital (Djunda, this issue). They also attract the middle classes, who now—due to urban pollution, the pandemic, and the digitalization of work—yearn to abandon cities for greener pastures. This, in turn, interlocks with villagers’ desires to squeeze value out of ruined infrastructures and abandoned landscapes (cf. Dorondel and Şerban 2020). As a result, the environmentalism of the poor (treating the environment as the basis for one's reproduction), the environmentalism of the malcontent (treating the environment as a symbol of a wider political struggle), and the environmentalism of the rich (treating the environment as a pristine outside) coexist at the very heart of the revival. Dreams of reproduction, commoning, and privatization develop side by side.
Furthermore, Balkan environmentalisms in- herit the teleology of postsocialist reforms, including their temporal otherings. Previously, the push for Europeanization progressed through discourses of “Balkanism,” which alochronically posited the region as still in the past and in need of catching up with the West (Todorova 1997). But once the market transition became an exhausted trope, both the civil society NGOs and protest groups used the same temporal patterning to describe what needed to be done to the local environments. The green transition became market transition 2.0, and “energy talk”—depicting the Balkans in terms of their obsolete energy practices and irresponsible pollution (Knight 2017)—became a commonplace among policy experts and lay citizens alike. Local green initiatives thus mix traditionalist desires for a return to a preindustrial past with expert voices who look to Germany's solar panels as a blueprint for a “civilized,” sustainable normality. This, in turn, leads to a disagreement over ecology's temporal axis, posing the question of what should be done with the mountains. Should they be conserved as they are? Or reformed for a green future to come?
Finally, these two processes—the class encroachment into an “empty” space, and its sig- nification as overcoming the problematic past—merge with age as a mediating factor. This is because the urbanization of peasants followed a “bimodal economic pattern” (Matić 2009: 167) where the younger generation produced food for market exchange, or moved to towns, while older family members continued subsistence production in the countryside. Recently, urban retirees have settled back in the villages to restart small agriculture and farming. Struggles for rivers thus pitted not simply the rural poor, but the older rural poor against the energy investors. But while heroizing the old, the movement was far more prone to iconize the young. Children featured on images of pristine waterfalls or empty deserts as if they were something that the very Nature wants (as one newspaper put it, “If we retain youngsters, the storks will return too”). Such pronatalism echoed local laments over “empty cradles,” and yet it erased the aged realities of the countryside (see Figure 4). And it also failed to recognize that power was now in the hands of the middle-aged, who could claim that both the past and the future were on their side.
“Be a hero, save the rivers”, a protest leaflet featuring a child and a waterfall. It is hanging in front of a local store where older men drink. Temska, 2018, photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
“Be a hero, save the rivers”, a protest leaflet featuring a child and a waterfall. It is hanging in front of a local store where older men drink. Temska, 2018, photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
“Be a hero, save the rivers”, a protest leaflet featuring a child and a waterfall. It is hanging in front of a local store where older men drink. Temska, 2018, photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
“The mountain will inevitably change,” Minja, a 60-something river guardian from the village of Temska once told me. “But the really important question is: who will come?” As we sat on her balcony, Minja was both proud that local rivers had been defended and apprehensive about what such victory would bring. She did not care much about whether new arrivals were insiders or outsiders, and whether they invested or subsisted on the land. She seemed rather interested in seeing with whom she could live, age, and die well. Her stories suggested that profiteering obstructed such a desire, with mature women being the biggest losers. An older woman wanted to sell goat cheese at a local food fair, Minja told me, but the village chief asked her to pay a huge tax. A middle-aged river guardian needed urgent help for her ailing son, but was refused by a greedy in-law. An urban couple fell in love with the mountain and wanted to retire on it, but they were chased away by the locals boosting the house price. Thus, what started as a battle in the name of intergenerational solidarity—“grandmas fighting,” as it were, for rivers and children not yet born—seemed to have produced new generational erasures. The needs of both the old and the young became forgotten by those who claimed to channel them.
A history of filling in while emptying out
The Balkan Mountains revival can be seen as a process of filling in while emptying out. For as they battle rural depopulation and seek to bring life back to the countryside, revivers selectively preserve and erase that which is still thriving in it. They muffle the voices of residents in their various stages of aging, with their complex political histories, and with lived orientations to the environment. For example, there is no indication of villagers’ reliance on pensions and overfishing, or of their partial alignment with the ruling parties. Rather, they are depicted as either ecologically noble (in activist narratives) or as remnants of the presocialist countryside (in right-wing historical accounts). Residents are forced to see themselves through a frame that is supposed to work in their favor, but that very much removes their own voice—and mourns their passing ahead of time.
This process repeats a longer dynamic of the simultaneous inclusion and silencing of the Balkan peasantry. If Srđan's story was persuasive, for example, it is because it spoke to the resentments of a class that the Yugoslav Communist Party viewed as destined to be urbanized or to die out. But ironically, the communist exclusion of peasants bore similarities with precommunist, nationalist policies of abandoning the mountains, which happened alongside peasants’ official heroization. In the nineteenth century, for example, Balkan peasants supported national liberations as a way of retaining access to land that the property transformations of the Ottoman Empire threatened to dispossess them of (Stoianovich 1992). But the result was an even more alienating, exploitative bureaucracy of the new nation states. Novel power asymmetries got obscured by official historiographies, which elevated peasants into mascots of state sovereignty while eliding their more ambivalent voices. One source of such ambivalence was rural flight itself, which did not simply emerge from state abandonment of the countryside, but through a dynamic interpenetration of capitalist processes in towns and villages alike. The perfect example of such dialectics in Topli Do was, in fact, Mita Gaga: a capitalist who had accumulated his wealth through family business in the countryside, only to create the largest factory in a nearby town that attracted the village labor surplus. Caught between rural overpopulation, undeveloped agriculture and the fragmentation of land tenure, village paupers migrated to towns well before the communists came to power. “The peasant's political triumph led to his economic ruin,” Mark Mazower (2000: 35) argued. “Flight from the land was inexorable, hindered only by muddy roads and the lack of prospects elsewhere.”
But such evacuation was never simply spatial. It also erased earlier environmental orientations on the mountain. When we focus on the latter, we realize that what seems full and for whom depends on a classed and generational perspective. Take the mountain greenery: what appears as a pristine bounty to an urbanite eye is, in the villagers’ eyes, a sign of the ruination of past ways of life. In early socialist Yugoslavia, millions of goats were culled and their husbandry banned in order to support the wood processing industry. The “Old Mountain” became reforested and full of valuable export commodities. But the villagers perceived this as the erasure of their decades-long attempts to cultivate the rocky land. As one town dweller whose mother was from the village of Rsovci told me, “The forest has come to the village and it has swallowed everything.” A similar dynamic happened when the nearby village of Zavoj was flooded by avalanche in 1963, thus conveniently making room for a large hydropower dam. Stereotypical representations of the “Zavoj catastrophe” include an old woman looking at her submerged village, a eulogy for tradition to make space for the young, urban, electric future to come (see Figure 5). But as a writer from Zavoj put it, while gazing at the water, what appeared empty was actually full of scenes from a past life. Outsiders could not see it: “Their eyes only detect emptiness, a picture made of silt, mud, and personal associations” (Minić 2007: 62).
An older peasant woman looking at her flooded village of Zavoj in 1963. A photo by Božidar Manić – Žoli (Historical Archive of Pirot).
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
An older peasant woman looking at her flooded village of Zavoj in 1963. A photo by Božidar Manić – Žoli (Historical Archive of Pirot).
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
An older peasant woman looking at her flooded village of Zavoj in 1963. A photo by Božidar Manić – Žoli (Historical Archive of Pirot).
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
If some revivers want to be faithful to such past erasures, this does not mean that they cannot commit new ones. Saško, a man in his late thirties, is one such returnee. After a personal crisis, he settled in his late grandfather's village and started a family there—a decision no one had made for over 40 years. “See those pines over there?” he asked me, as we were herding his sheep. “Those used to be pastures.” For Saško, returning to a land overgrown in thorns and shrubs (see Figure 6) meant honoring his late grandfather's wishes, a chance to revive the local heritage, and above all, following God's wisdom in the End of Times. God made the mountain empty to punish the unfaithful ones, he believed. But unlike in Sodom, God did not annihilate it: he only made it neglected (zapušteno), Saško said, so that it could be rejuvenated later with “new blood”. Upon hearing this, an older village dweller who was helping us construct a shepherd hut interfered. “It wasn't God that emptied the mountain, it was people,” he said. “It was Tito and the communists, but it was also your own grandfather. Didn't he tell you, ‘Excel in school, so that you don't overwork yourself in the village’? As mine told me to always move downstream, never upstream.” I understood his comment as a refusal to participate in one more erasure of local history as lived. The mountain has been made empty, the man agreed, but local people have been active, if uneven agents in that process—subjects, as well as the objects of the emptiness that surrounded us.
Meadow turned into shrubs after village got empty, Gornji Visok, 2022. Photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
Meadow turned into shrubs after village got empty, Gornji Visok, 2022. Photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
Meadow turned into shrubs after village got empty, Gornji Visok, 2022. Photo by Ivan Rajković.
Citation: Focaal 2023, 96; 10.3167/fcl.2023.960106
The subjects and objects of emptiness
Everything is empty in the Balkans—except the powder keg.
—Dragutin Minić Karlo
The challenge that “empty” spaces pose is that they are, in fact, overdetermined. A vision of an empty dwelling can bring us to a conclusion that it is empty of conflict, too. Such erasure can work on different scales, imposing a hegemonic gaze on one even if it proceeds as a counterhegemonic act on another. In the Balkans, the uneven effects of global decarbonization are countered with critiques of regional depopulation; the overgrowth of planetary consumption is glossed as an actual degrowth of local Life, which, in turn, is most indexed in the abandoned mountain countryside. But such a view is also universalizing: the narratives of the “death of the village” unevenly mark concrete deaths and concrete lives. One can thus say that both extraction and struggles against it produce connected, yet different abstractions of the environment. In order for a rural space to appear full of value, a whole range of presences need to be emptied out.
When a certain form of life becomes a source of capital, Donna Haraway (2018) argues, many beings and patterns of living get simultaneously eradicated. She calls this a double birth and a double death—a grand disappearing that is inherent to all value frontiers. And precisely because rebirths imply passings, I would add, it is of crucial importance to see both the positivity and the negativity that the work of channeling life implies. Aleksandar Vasov, a large-scale cattle breeder in his fifties, is an exemplar of such ongoingness. When I told him that I am interested in how life is “coming back to the mountain,” he looked at me in pity. “Life is not coming back,” he said. “What little is left of it will soon disappear.” But this is not necessarily bad, he added, for other people will come and realize what the place has to offer. They will replace us just like our ancestors replaced those before them, he said. In this statement, I see someone who is both a subject and an object of emptiness. Aleksandar is a filler of the void—who does an immense amount of work in reviving autochthonous livestock and musical traditions on the mountain—and yet he is aware that his world-remaking projects will be surpassed in the future, as did those before him. To regenerate a world, then, means to account for the erasures this enacts. Life gets a form by the deaths it marks—and those it chooses to disregard.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the activists of Odbranimo reke Stare planine and the residents of Pirot, Dimitrovgrad, and Stara planina for letting me into their daring lives. This research has been supported by the University of Vienna and the JESH Outgoing Stipend of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, while the article was finalized during my stay at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade. All mistakes are mine.
Notes
Translation is mine.
For an even more striking image of river as life amid the death of war destruction, see Hromadžić (2022).
Translation is mine.
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