The song is the only thing heard today in Miljakovci. Children’s murmurs have been quieter for years, there are no young people, and the only school in the village is now – for sale. Doom, will say Ranko Jovanović, who was among her first students in the 1960s.
”I am the first generation that moved to this school from Gaćan, with teacher Miša Stojanović. There were 73 of us in four classes. The time has come that there is no one now. 00:55 It is a disaster, how can I say, for the village and the whole country,” Jovanovic says.
The school in which there are no pupils is not only in this but in numerous other villages throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina. The one in Miljakovci could get a new owner. The city of Prijedor plans to sell it.
“It is a building that has been abandoned for five or six years, in bad condition, an investor came forward with the desire to start production and invest in that part of the city. When we received positive responses, we put the building up for auction. I don’t know if anyone will come forward, what price he will reach in the end…,” explains Slobodan Javor, mayor of Prijedor.
Estates and hard-working hands are the only resource with which people in Miljakovci provide their livelihood. Today, barely 50 people live in the village. The most persistent guardians of the doorsteps are the most pressed by loneliness
A village full of people, they worked, they sang, the people were happy. Today, everything is closed, canned, you can’t even see a child or anything on the road. You wave your hand, you don’t even know who it is.
Older residents also remember some other times, when the village lived all year round. Today, they neither have a store nor a clinic, and the school has not been working for several years. Without children, the village also dies.
