Ville en bois
Mećavnik developed as testimony to the idea that anyone who once had his own home – can always have one.
As one of the many people who didn’t return home after the war of the 1990s, whether because everything they had had been stolen and their house burnt to the ground, as was the case with my family, or because they disagreed with the politics of the time, the decision was made and a new home was built right here. Life was started afresh here on Mećavnik. Standing strangely like an island surrounded and defended by its older brothers from winds and storms, this hill became the place where, first in our dreams during a break in filming on Life is a Miracle, and then later in reality, a little town made of pine clapboards.
The main inspiration was the ancient town of Ephesus, one of the first to have an urban core, something the towns of today lost sight of long ago as they continue to sprawl unplanned and orderless with no-one knowing how or where they will end. And it was for this very reason that Mećavnik was built, a medieval fortress defending itself from all the forms of poison that attack society. Its defences lie in cultural pursuits and the production of organic food! At Mećavnik, there is a juicery, but also a barn with thirty cows, while vegetables come from Barakovac, not far from Mećavnik, from the very gates to the Beli Rzav Canyon. On Iver, one of the peaks of Mt Tara, below Zborište, which stands guard over Mećavnik, the first ski resort in Serbia to have an artificial snow-making system was also built, and there, in the summer, two hundred sheep graze on the resort’s lush grass.
