Miloševac, near Modriča
Pekara Miloševac1991–2023
A village bakery founded by Jovo and Julka, and thirty-two years of bread. This page is a small monument to it, and to the time it belonged to.
The dough rises, life punches it down, and it rises again. The second rise makes the best bread.
Slowly, from the top down1991
The beginning
On 14 February 1991, second-hand bakery machines were bought in Austria. They were cleared through customs in Doboj and brought to Miloševac.
The bakery opened on 22 March 1991. Jovo and Julka opened it. Jovo had never worked in a bakery before; the first things he knew about dough he learned from Julka, and the rest by doing it.
This was before the war.
1991–1995
The war years
When the war came, the bakery did not stop. The oven kept working and the bread kept coming out.
Bread from Miloševac went to the hospital in Modriča.
Around 1995, lorries carried it to the reception centre in Bosanski Petrovac, for people fleeing Krajina.
The oven doesn’t ask who you are. It feeds whoever is hungry.
After the war
The school bell and the coins
After the war, a shop counter opened next to the bakery. Julka ran it, and over time the counter grew into a grocery.
In the late 1990s, the bakery prepared meals for refugee children, as part of a UNHCR and CRS project. Later, meals for patients of the hospitals in Doboj and Šamac went out from here too.
Warm kifle and pastries were driven to the schools so that they arrived just as the bell rang for the long break. In the hard years, those morning kifle were what kept the bakery going.
Nothing was thrown away. Stale bread was dried and ground into prezle, breadcrumbs.
At the end of the day, the small change was poured onto the table and counted. The zveka, the coins, was taken to the pharmacy and the market, where change was always short and everyone was glad to see it, and brought back from the church.
Every coin is one thank-you.
2003–2007
The cake shop years
From 31 August 2003 to 30 December 2007, a cake shop worked alongside the bakery, run by Julka. Four years and four months of cakes and pastries.
Then the cake shop closed. The bakery went on baking.
170+
More than 170 pairs of hands
Over the thirty-two years the bakery was open, more than 170 people worked in it and its shops: bakers, drivers, people behind the counter.
Each small dot below is one of them.
2023
The closing
The bakery closed in 2023, after the pandemic years, when Jovo and Julka retired.
After thirty-two years, the oven went cold. A time in the village came to an end.
What remains is what people remember.
With thanks
To Jovo and Julka, who founded it, and to everyone who kneaded, baked, delivered, sold and bought bread here.