Поседи Манастира Дренче и Ждрела у Браничеву из Времена Кнеза Лазара
The Estates of Monasteries Drenča and Ždrelo in Braničevo in The Time of Prince Lazar

Summary/Abstract: In 1382 monk Dorotej and his son Danilo, the founders of monastery Drenča, endowed their foundation with a market place and thirteen villages in the region of Braničevo. The location of nine of these villages can be identified (three are still extant), and two more villages can be approximately located. The market place Kula and five villages in the lower reaches of the Vitovnica river formed a spatially unified group, and the other villages which have been identified were not far from them. The estate lay along or between important communications in the Braničevo region, including a stretch of the main road to Constantinople. In about 1379 Prince Lazar issued a charter to monastery Ždrelo (Gornjak) whereby he endowed it with numerous estates in Braničevo. The charter was preserved in a poor late copy, probably from the eighteenth century, which was destroyed in 1942. It is possible that some portions of the text were interpolated into the charter when it was transcribed. These circumstances make it difficult to interpret the evidence it contains concerning the estates bestowed on the monastery. The monastic landed estate included six villages near the monastery in the valley of the river Mlava, five villages near or on the banks of the Danube, one in the area of Venčanica, two villages in the area of Zvižd, and three in the region of Homolje. In addition to that, the monastery was endowed with two fishing posts on the Danube near modern Donji Milanovac. Although distant from one another, each of these holdings was connected with the other estates and with the monastery by good communications. The paper suggests that a number of toponyms quoted in the charter do not stand for the names of villages, as it was previously supposed, but are microtoponyms used to define village boundaries. Both monasteries lost their property after the Ottoman conquest of Serbia in 1459. A number of their villages passed into the hands of Turkish feudal lords (spahies), and seven villages were abandoned.

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