Mokra Gora

Mokra Gora means "Wet Mountain"; local legend says a passing army camped here and found its firewood too wet to burn. For centuries it was a scattered upland village on the route between the Užice area and the Drina valley. Its modern story begins with the railway. During the First World War the Austro-Hungarian occupiers began a line across the Šargan pass to link Serbia with Bosnia, using Russian and Italian prisoners of war; in 1916 a tunnel collapse killed between 150 and 200 of them, and work stopped.

The new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes resumed the works in 1921, designing the figure-of-eight loop that lets the line drop 300 metres in a short distance, and the first train passed through in January 1925. The narrow-gauge line formed part of the main route from Belgrade to Sarajevo and the Adriatic until it closed in February 1974.

A society to bring the railway back was founded in 1994. The state took up the plan in 1999, the Šargan section was rebuilt by 2003, and an extension to Višegrad followed in 2010. Kusturica built Drvengrad in 2003–04, the area became the Šargan–Mokra Gora Nature Park in 2008, and in 2021 the UN World Tourism Organization named Mokra Gora one of the best tourism villages in the world.

The village's cultural life has been shaped above all by the film director Emir Kusturica, who built Drvengrad, also called Küstendorf or Mećavnik, as a set for his film Life Is a Miracle and then kept it as his home and a place for workshops and seminars. Its streets carry the names of figures he admires, among them Nikola Tesla, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Diego Maradona and Ivo Andrić, and since 2008 it has hosted the Küstendorf Film and Music Festival each January, a deliberately informal event without a red carpet that has brought directors such as Jim Jarmusch to the mountains.

Older traditions are Orthodox and rural. The village has several churches, including one dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and a small wooden church built in 2011 with the blessing of both the Serbian and Russian Orthodox churches, a memorial to everyone who worked on the railway, the prisoners of war who died included. Families keep the slava, the household's patron-saint day, and the village holds its own homeland days. The railway itself, with its restored 1930s-style carriages and the train nicknamed Ćira, has become a point of local pride.

Mokra Gora is a village of the city of Užice and had 393 inhabitants at the 2022 census, a number that has fallen at each of the last three counts. The houses are spread over a large area, about 55 square kilometres, from around 460 metres on the valley floor to the 1,544-metre summit of Zborište on Tara.

For decades the main employer in the area was the Kotroman chemical works, which lost most of its market after the break-up of Yugoslavia and went bankrupt. Tourism has largely replaced it. The Šargan Eight carried 88,000 passengers in the 2019 season, and the area around the line has grown into a tourist complex of inns, a small ski area, walking paths and picnic grounds.

Life follows the seasons. Summer and autumn bring coach groups and weekend visitors to the station and Drvengrad, while in snowy winters the train runs only part of the line and the village is much quieter. The valley sits on a large deposit of nickel-rich iron ore, which gives many of its mineral springs their unusual chemistry.

Mokra Gora eats like the rest of the Zlatibor and Užice country, which is dairy and smoked-meat territory. Kajmak, a rich clotted-cream dairy product made by slowly boiling and simmering milk and skimming off the cream, appears on almost every table, and west of the Great Morava it is considered at its best. A popular breakfast is komplet lepinja, the "complete flatbread", with kajmak, egg and roasted meat drippings. Proja, a cornbread made with corn flour, is eaten with kajmak and ajvar.

Smoked meats are the area's speciality. Užička pršuta, smoked beef, pork or mutton from nearby Užice, and Zlatibor's own smoked ham are served sliced as a starter, with Užice bacon alongside. Sarma, minced meat and rice rolled in cabbage leaves, and gibanica, an egg and cheese pie made with filo pastry, are among the national dishes cooked at home.

Visitors eat mostly at the restaurant in the station building, in Drvengrad and at a restaurant cut into the rock at Šargan at the top of the line. Rakija, the fruit brandy of the Balkans, most popularly of plums in Serbia, may be served alongside coffee, and home-made versions can be considerably stronger than the usual 40 per cent.