Pliva River Watermills

Where the Pliva river spills from one lake into the next, a cluster of small wooden huts sits right in the current, with water rushing beneath and between them. These are the mlinčići, the little watermills of the Pliva, some seventeen to twenty of them crowded onto the natural barrier that divides Veliko Plivsko Lake from Malo Plivsko Lake just outside Jajce in central Bosnia. With their weathered timber walls, the narrow channels fanning out between them and the green lakes on either side, they have become one of the most recognisable images of the town.

The mills served the farmers of the valley, who brought their wheat here to be ground into flour. Their busiest period came under Austro-Hungarian rule, and local families went on using them until the Second World War and, in some cases, afterwards. The site was also a gathering place, where people came to wash clothes and fetch water while the grain was milled. Most of the huts no longer work, but they are kept in repair, and in 2009 the Pliva lakes and the mill complex were together declared a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The setting explains why the mills are here at all. The Pliva, only about 27 kilometres long, flows over a bed of tufa between the village of Jezero and Jajce; mosses, algae and bacteria slowly deposit calcium carbonate into barriers that grow about a centimetre a year, holding back the water in a chain of lakes and low cascades, much as at Plitvice in Croatia. A few kilometres downstream the river reaches Jajce, the fortified hill town that served as the seat of the last kings of medieval Bosnia, and drops 22 metres over the Pliva Waterfall into the Vrbas. The first hydroelectric power station in the Balkans was built on the same river in 1899.

Getting there

The watermills stand between the two Pliva lakes, reached by the old road about 5 km west of the centre of Jajce. The town of Bugojno is about 37 km away. Banja Luka International Airport (BNX) is about 66 km away.