Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible

By Jelena Kovačević

Photo: Emilija Josipović

The year 1968 was written into world history by students. In the history of Bajina Bašta, a small Serbian town that is now on the border, it was written by a group of boys, the oldest of whom was nineteen. They did not simply demand the impossible. They made it happen.

That same year, those boys began building their place in the world in the middle of the Drina River. On a rock encircled by the cold river, with its rapids and whirlpools, they built a little house from sandwich panels they had taken from a collapsed company shed. It quickly became a refuge for different generations of young men and women, and the place from which they set out on their first swimming strokes and first kayak strokes. The idea of founding a kayak club in the town was also born on that rock. The little house, however, did not last long. By the end of 1969, the Drina had carried it away, and it entered history as the first house.

The very next year, they built a new one, this time from sturdier material, rough planks. Because the planks quickly dried and warped in the sun, they papered the house inside and out with old film posters. They managed to protect it from the sun’s rays, but not from the river. That same year, it was destroyed.

For the third house, built in 1971, the people of Bajina Bašta kept fighting the Drina until the early 1980s, retrieving it and setting it back on the rock each time the river carried it off. In the end, they had to let it go with the current. The fourth house met a similar fate.

Having learned from earlier attempts, they placed the house built in 1996 on a concrete pedestal. Yet the river proved stronger and carried it away at the end of 1999.

Six years later, the boys from the rock, now grown men, raised the funds and built the sixth house, this time with a concrete footing. It might have held, had the Drina not reached a once-in-a-century water level in early 2010 and swept the house from the rock. In those days, the water rose so high that even the rock could no longer be seen in the river.

Funds were raised once again, and in 2011 the house was built on the Drina once more. This time it came with an innovation: the two sides that take the greatest pressure during floods were fitted with hinges that open when the water rises, turning the house into a tunnel through which the Drina can pass.

After 43 years of struggle with this wild and unpredictable river, ingenuity finally overcame force. The house held its ground on the Drina.

That same year, thanks to a photograph by Irene Becker, the world heard about it. The photograph first became National Geographic’s Photo of the Day and then, in August 2012, its Photo of the Month. Daily Mail and Business Insider wrote about the house, with Business Insider including it among the world’s most unusual houses, while Russia’s Palm Press placed it on its advertising calendar. And so the image of a house on a single rock in the middle of the Drina became an internationally recognisable symbol of Bajina Bašta.

Because of this house, people now come to Bajina Bašta from every corner of the world, especially from as far away as China. Thanks to the house on the rock, a small town on the Drina has become a well-known point on the tourist map. Every year, thousands of people pass by it and pause beside it in boats and on rafts, especially during the Drina Regatta, Serbia’s largest river event.

The House on the Drina is more than an architectural wonder and a tourist attraction. It is a symbol of human perseverance and a message from the Drina that the impossible often exists only in our minds.

Jelena Kovačević | INSTAGRAM