Negotinske Pivnice
Rajačke Pivnice, a compund of wine cellars belonging to the village of Rajac, located 2 km to the west of the village, along the vineyards, on top of Beli Breg hill. The compound is densely clustered, built spontaneously, following the terrain. Its winding streets go along the irregular shaped cellars, often on both sides and even around them.
Records of the Negotinske Pivnice date back from the mid 19th century but there are no reliable information on the period of their construction. On many of those cellar structures there are inscriptions on the year of its building, which helps in assuming the period when the others were built – the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. Also, we may guess that there used to be some earlier ones, built of wood. Some earlier literature mentions 270 or even 300 cellars. Today there are 166 structures with 196 cellars and 3 distilleries, of which 16 are in ruins and 57 cellars are still used for making wine, while 19 have adopted other functions: taverns, museum display space, exhibitions, etc.
There are several types of cellars, but two basic ones can be distinguished: the ground floor ones and the two storied ones. They are often clustered in a row or in blocks, both the ground floor ones and the stories ones, but there also the free-standing ones.
The lower floor ones are usually stone built of irregular rectangular ground plan. Normally, they are up to 1-1.2 m underground. Entrance to an individual cellar is usually on the side where the hillside slopes down, or if the structure is perpendicular to the land contours, the entrance is made in the long, side wall. If a household is not much well off, a cellar may have lower walls with a smaller size portal set in a rectangular wooden frame with double doors. On the other hand, if a household is well off, the walls may be very high, with monumental portals set in the decorated stone frame. In two-storey cellars, the lower floor was a dug-out wine cellar, while the upper floor was used as a dwelling for the owner or season workers who come to work in the vineyards or wine and brandy distilleries.
The two-storey cellars can be classified into two subtypes, depending on how steep the hillside is. If the slope is steeper, the cellars are often between two alleys. The lower level is mostly dug-out, so the wall at the entrance is about 1-1.2m high, while the one on the opposite side is completely dug into the ground. The upper level is entered from the side opposite to the cellar entrance, directly from the road level. The other subtype are those built on the not so steep slopes, so that the cellar is about 150cm dug into the ground, and the upper floor is accessed by a wooden or sometimes stone staircase. There are only about a dozen of those structures. They were mainly built at the major crossroads or around the central squares, and look like towers.
Along the south-west end of the compound there is a village cemetery and in its centre there is an old one with about 200 old tombstones dating from the 19th century, extraordinarily preserved, quite unique valuable and unique in Serbia. The cemetery tombstones on Beli Breg are in a shape of a monolith cross or a tall column-like stone capped with flat stones. These extraordinary headstones are of yellowish compact sandstone (bioclastic limestone) and almost all the surfaces are covered with relief ornaments. The most common bas-relief motif is a cross displayed in various, quite elaborate ways, combined with letters IS HS NI KA, as the image symbolises the Golgotha Cross, the Crucifixion. Often there are rosettes symbolising the Sun, then a circle, a swastika, serrated ribbons and zigzag lines, simplified and stylised branches, vines, broken lines and slanted cuts, spiral ribbons and shallow arched niches.
Rogljevske Pivnice are wine cellars in the village of Rogljevo, located on a hill north of the village of Rajac, built next to the vineyards. This secondary settlement is between 80 and 110m above the sea level. Its centre is most densely built around the sacred tree and the common table, the folk table and the well.
The compound was formed as if following the structures of a real settlement, so it was on a plateau and like a village has an elongated form. The structures were built along the two, almost parallel main roads that follow the land contour, with several side ones, connecting the main roads. Some of the structures were built in a row, two or more, although there are also the free-standing ones, following an imaginary line of alleys. The cellars could also be accessed from two sides, the main entrance façade, with a monumental portal – along the main road, and from the back, where there are openings for the grape pulp – along the side roads. However, these side roads for one row of structures is often a main road for the second row behind. For that reason, there is a tradition, a rule not to close the access to the openings for the pulp, even if they are not in use.
According to the local population, there used to be more than 300 cellars but many were destroyed in fires or just deteriorated, particularly after the WWII, when the owners left them to the elements. Today, there are about 122 structures, of which 40 are in use for wine making and about 8 have become taverns of exhibition spaces.
The earliest preserved cellars of Rogljevo were most probably built in the first half of the 19th century and one or two storey structures. Both types have the foundation or cellar walls made of broken stone, while the ground and upper level walls are made of wood, dressed planks using the corner saddle notch joints. The wooden part was covered with a mixture of mud and straw – cob, and the hipped roofs with extended eaves were covered with tiles of Mediterranean type. Such cellars were built until the mid 19th century, when the region saw an economic expansion, exporting wine to the West, since at that time phylloxera destroyed many vineyards, in France in particular.
The majority of cellars, 40 of them, were built between 1859 and 1890. Those were mostly large, even monumental structures of vast rectangular ground plan and of substantial height, built mostly of sandstone blocks (bioclastic limestone), with simply decorated but imposing arched portals. Here, in this compound, a great number of cellars are still in their original use.
Štubičke Pivnice – wine cellars of the village of Štubik are located some 5km north of Negotin, on the road to Donji Milanovac, while the main settlement is located 15km up north. This compound of cellars, today numbering only 28 of them, is different from the above described ones. The settlement is somewhat scattered and was built around the regional road cutting the compound in two. These are detached buildings on two hills, unlike the wine cellars in the described settlements which were built in a row. They are mostly of a ground level type with only a few storied ones. They were built on stone foundations with post and beam walls construction with timber frame filled and covered with mud mortar. Their hipped roofs and extended eaves are covered with roof tiles of Mediterranean style. These cellars are quite modest in size than those of Rogljevačke and Rajačke Pivnice. There are no more vineyards in this area so this compound has been deserted.