“They greet each other by saying: “Sretno!” (“Good luck!”) – “I’ve already been living here underground for ten years, so you can see what I look like. I sleep here, I eat here, and I only come out every eighth day,” wrote Milan Šenoa, a Croatian writer and travelogue author, in his travelogue Six Kilometers Underground, after visiting the mining town of Siverić, a former mining settlement in Dalmatia, in southern Croatia.
More than 130 years later, we too arrive in front of the mine in Siverić – or rather, what remains of the mine. And of Siverić itself…
Today, you will find descriptions of Siverić as “a small settlement near Drniš, at the foot of Mount Promina.” But not so long ago, it sustained itself and the surrounding area. Once, the local mines attracted investors from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Italy, employing nearly two thousand workers. Mine managers built themselves villas and gardens. Workers constructed the railway to Šibenik. Freight wagons thundered by amid the clatter of ore being dumped. At the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Siverić was a place of bustle – clinking glasses, mud, class contrasts, and the coexistence of sweat and perfume.
And today, it greets us empty. Silence. A bus stop where no one is waiting. A few abandoned stone houses. Collapsed roofs and broken windows, with tree branches threading their way through them as if rummaging through memories, offering comfort. Bullet holes around the windows. Online, it says around 420 people live here. Where are they?
We pass by the old post office building, which looks as though it might collapse at any moment. Is there still anyone left to send a letter or a postcard to? At least from the diaspora, from some faraway country? In 1904, a villa was built here for the mine director, perched on the hill directly above the mine. It included apartments for distinguished guests who came to Siverić on business, as well as a wine cellar stocked with expensive bottles. They say it was surrounded by an arboretum cared for by as many as three gardeners, and that the director even kept a small zoo.
Beside the villa, a modest sign reading “Rudnik” (“Mine”) points toward a narrow, grass-covered path — a trail easily overlooked, leading into a world hidden from sight. Into the underground that built and produced for others, for empires and villas, for cigars smoked on balconies by those above, who never once felt the underground beneath their feet.
Sweat, Rails, and Kisses
We walk downhill on foot, like pilgrims to a forgotten industrial shrine, toward a wide grassy clearing. At first glance, what catches the eye is an old, rusted skeletal locomotive. Around it lie ruins: collapsed walls, the remains of workers’ dwellings, the entrance to the mine sealed with a padlock. From the black belly of the mine, in the middle of the June heat, cold air pours out – refreshing and slightly frightening, almost inhuman. The darkness is dense, so we cannot see how far the mine extends, but a sign nearby reveals that it once stretched for kilometers into Mount Promina. Because of its rich coal deposits, it was called the “golden mountain.”
The inhabitants of this area had always mined surface deposits for their own needs, but serious exploitation began in the 18th century. First came the Venetians, then French artillerymen, followed by the Viennese banking family Rothschild. From 1873 onward, the mine was taken over by the Italian joint-stock company Società del Monte Promina. At that point, Siverić – alongside the mining town of Labin in Istria – became the most important Adriatic coal mine in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and the most developed industrial center in Dalmatia. This is also evidenced by the visit of Emperor Franz Joseph I, who toured the Siverić mine in 1875 to see what it was that his subjects were digging up.
Coal from Siverić powered factories, steamships, and locomotives across Europe. Because of it, the Siverić–Šibenik railway line was built in 1877. This enabled coal to be transported by sea as well – to Trieste, Venice, Rijeka, Odessa, Alexandria, Corfu… Thanks to the mine, the wider Drniš area developed as well: in addition to the railway, a hydroelectric power plant was built at Roški Slap, and Siverić and Drniš received public lighting. Inside the mine there were two tracks: one used to bring in timber, the other to carry out the extracted ore. At first, the wagons were pulled by horses, but after electrification in 1909, they were replaced by electric locomotives. Electric lights burned above ground, while underground people worked under conditions that belonged to the Middle Ages.
And in that darkness – love. In the memories of local miners, gentler details remain: as women unloaded the wagons, everyone knew which one worked on which, so admirers and sweethearts would send them messages stuck to the front of the locomotive. Near the entrance to the mine, the remains of the former changing rooms and baths can still be seen. That was where miners changed into their work uniforms, at least at the beginning of the shift. By the end of the day, because of the heat, they most often remained in their underwear – exhausted, dusty, and soaked with sweat.
They Had No Schooling, but They Knew What Injustice Was
The roar of locomotives, the thunder of wagons on the tracks, the screech of metal against rail, the murmur of well-to-do wives sipping coffee on the verandas of villas above the pit that devours – all of it would have drowned out workers’ cries and sighs, had there not been those who wrote them down. The miners’ hardship, names, the dead, strikes, and chronologies of resistance… all of this has been preserved in the literature I used, and I list below the text. My thanks to the authors for their effort.
At the end of the 19th century, miners in Siverić worked shifts of up to twelve hours a day, down underground where there was no light, no protection, no wages, no pensions, no workers’ dignity. Not infrequently, instead of money, they were given vouchers – and sometimes not even that. Wages would simply fail to appear. Workers’ class consciousness had not yet matured. Exhausted and uneducated, they found it hard to organize – much to the benefit of the managers in their hilltop villas and the owners in top hats in Trieste.
Only at the beginning of the 20th century did organized strikes emerge, first in Siverić and then in the nearby mine at Velušić, a nearby mining settlement. By the outbreak of the First World War, around ten such strikes had taken place, involving anywhere from one hundred to as many as a thousand workers. When, in 1904, mine director Stegl had water brought to the fountain in the landscaped garden in front of his villa, he left the village thirsty, without water. And that was the last straw.
At first, the management refused to negotiate with the workers – on the contrary, they threatened to shut down the mine and issue dismissals. However, more and more workers joined in, and the news reached the regional center of Split, the socialists and workers’ associations, and the newspapers. The pressure bore fruit, and management agreed to concessions: the Siverić mine received a clinic and a kitchen, funds were allocated for the repair of workers’ housing, schools, and communal needs. Soon after, the workers formed their first trade union organizations.
In the press of the time, sharper tones also began to appear. In Crveni barjak (The Red Banner) of March 15, 1912, it is written:
“This mining region is truly an ancestral land of misery, hunger, and injustice. On this small patch of earth lives a people of martyrs, mercilessly tormented by everyone; all exploit and crush them, and before everyone they have been powerless… Everyone found their own fortune in the poverty and suffering of the mining workers. Here stand capitalism, the mining gods and the shareholders, who suck them dry to the very last drop of blood. What has happened and is still happening in that mine to the detriment of the workers could not be written down even in a hundred thick books…”
The author concludes that, “if there were even a little justice left on this earth,” the directors and shareholders would long ago be sitting in prison.
The position of workers deteriorated further during the First World War: food shortages and rising prices led to hunger, while the labor movement weakened due to conscription and mobilization. Particularly harrowing is the story of Ivan Matić, known as “Vidačak,” a local labor activist from Drniš, who was found dead in 1934 in a transformer station in Velušić – on the very day he was supposed to meet with striking miners. The mine management cited a storm and a lightning strike as the cause of his death, even though there had been no bad weather that morning. In 1959, a memorial plaque was erected at the site. Perhaps it still exists, or perhaps – like so many things in this country – it has been overgrown with vegetation and forgotten.
When the Music Stopped
During the Yugoslav period, the mine operated as a company called Dalmatinski rudnici uglja (Dalmatian Coal Mines). Its headquarters were located neither in Split nor in Zagreb, but right there in Siverić. That was when the peak was reached: nearly 1,800 workers produced 200,000 tons of coal annually. The main consumers were the industrial complexes of Split and Šibenik, as well as the railway. It was, as the famous Yugoslav rock band Zabranjeno Pušenje would say, “a good time.”
In Siverić, sports and music associations were active; the cinema screened films several times a week; a new school was opened; young people gathered at dance halls, and secret romances drew visitors even from nearby towns such as Drniš.
Today, the ruined building still bears the sign “Zabavni klub Tonko” (“Tonko Entertainment Club”), but the music has long since stopped playing. The cinema on Miners’ Street stands empty and decayed. The entrance to the Ribasso pit, one of the mine shafts, was closed – like the entire mine – back in 1971. That was when coal extraction ceased due to the exhaustion of the deposit and the shift to new energy sources.
On the stripped and empty buildings, traces of bullet holes from the war remain. During the Croatian War of Independence, Siverić was occupied and fell under the control of the Republic of Serbian Krajina – a self-proclaimed Serb entity during the 1990s war. From this area, columns of thousands of women, children, and elderly people set out toward the Zagora. They spent the war years in exile, scattered along the Adriatic coast, while under mortar fire and tank shells, their homes, villages, and what remained of the mining infrastructure were disappearing.
And when the war ended, and when Siverić returned to Croatian control, it was met by a new crew. One that, with one hand on the heart and the other deep in the pockets of state-owned companies, stripped everything that remained during the period of privatization. Today their mouths are full of talk about holy war, homeland, and brave defenders – but no one comes, no one sends help.
During the golden hour, the only sound echoing through Siverić was that of our car. It was hard to tell whether everyone was asleep or whether there were hardly any people left at all. By the roadside – a leaning building, the old public school from 1875, in whose desks the Croatian composer Krsto Odak once sat. Perhaps Dado Topić as well, who was born in Siverić in 1949 under the mad name: Adolf. Today, there are no desks left in the old school, and no children. As if someone had taken away everything that was worth anything, leaving behind empty classrooms filled with melancholy. Doors ripped from their hinges, windows shattered. Underfoot, weakened floorboards creak, and above one’s head, beams and slats hang ominously like protruding tongues. The stairs lead into darkness.
After the war, there was talk of opening a mining museum, but the idea clearly never took hold. It is only a matter of time before the building collapses. At the entrance to the school, someone has written in red letters: “HDZ knows.”
HDZ is the ruling political party under whose leadership Croatia gained independence, but also the party held responsible for the plunder of state assets during privatization, systemic corruption, and much of the social and economic devastation that has marked life in independence.
In the End, There Is Always: Sretno!
Today, when we read histories written and romanticized by the victors, the Austro-Hungarian period is often presented to us through images of perfume, lace gloves, salons, and waltzes – a picture of a “golden age” fluttering around us like an illusion we long to approach. As if everyone had been invited to the same table.
But while some sat in Viennese salons, others – here – were digging. While toasts were raised above with fine wines, the people below struggled with typhus, hunger, emigration, and usurers. Croatia was not the core of the Monarchy, but its periphery. Cheap raw material, cheap labor, in the service of foreign capital. Nor was the Monarchy itself Europe’s pinnacle: its GDP per capita lagged behind other powers, only marginally above that of Russia.
We forget who carried history on their backs, and it is hard to admit that we were closer to those who remained silent than to those who wrote. Harder still is the fact that even today things are not much different. After independence, in the freedom and democracy that were promised, Siverić lost two-thirds of its population. Once hoch Vienna and the image of European progress; today, political–business cartels draped in stories of patriotism. Once, miners on minimum wages; today, pensioners in empty villages and young people in Ireland. In both cases, the people served – to work, to die, to remain silent and endure.
That is why it is important for Siverić to preserve the other side of history – the one not written in ink, but in sweat. It is embodied in the figure of the miner Mate with a cigarette in his mouth. In the newly arranged trail that circles the mine and teaches us about its workers and their solidarity. In the muttering of the remaining residents: “We are not a village, as some say! We were an industrial power!” In the song:
“Siverić, old memory of mine, you were the cradle of miners.
Siverić, you were once a town, Siverić, life was good to us…”
And on the pitch of NK Rudar, above whose facilities the symbol of the hammer still stands proudly, alongside the old miners’ greeting: “Sretno!”
Siverić is a story of those who built the country – without champagne, without recognition, without ceremonial speeches.
But with pride – and a hammer.
