Facility Bora Marković and Zabrežje Steam Power Station
Zabrežje is a small village which is a part of Obrenovac, one of Belgrade's remote municipalities. This small village hides an interesting historical gem - an old steam powered electric power station. The engines were of traditional piston design, produced in Germany by Babcock & Wilcox company. The history of this station starts at the very beginning of the 20th century (some sources state 1903 as the year it was built), and it provided power to the residents of Obrenovac. It was later acquired by local entrepreneur Aleksandar Simović, who integrated it with his industrial complex (approx. 1923). Simović, for whom is claimed that he was the bearer of Albanian Commemorative Medal and French Legion of Honour, was a man with vision. As a person he was remembered as being kind to his employees, and professionally his industrial accomplishments greatly helped the development of this region.
The end of WWII turned the tables for many influential people from the past Kingdom of Serbia as communists took power, and Simović was no exception. At the end of the war in 1945, he was convicted for collaboration with the enemy by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and was executed by a firing squad. His industrial estate was nationalized, and integrated into the large state-owned agricultural processing company PKB (Poljoprivredni Kombinat Beograd - Agricultural Combinate of Belgrade), under the name of Factory "Bora Marković" (named after a war hero of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia). The factory continued to use the steam power station for its needs (mostly wood processing). In later years (approx. 1980) the modernization of electrical power grid finally put the old power station out of use.
The collapse of Yugoslavia was followed by gross mismanagement of state owned industry. The wood processing factory struggled until 2006, when its bankruptcy was declared. It met its utmost demise through one amongst the many similar catastrophic privatizations carried out by the post-Milošević government of Serbia. It was sold to Slaviša Purić, who followed an established template of buying state owned companies and selling their property (materials, machines and infrastructure) to scrap. He was arrested on number of occasions for financial abuses and irregularities associated with various privatizations. Most probably no one will never know where the property of this factory ended up.
Today (2015) the small steam power station is gone, the only thing left is the crumbling building. Despite the state protection which was imposed onto it and additional initiative of the local residents and the nearby thermoelectric power plant Nikola Tesla, the old station was cut in pieces and scrapped. When I visited the site I met an old man who worked at the factory, and who also witnessed the dismantling. The station had a large, heavy central flywheel that turned the belt that rotated the power generators. It weighted approx. 40 tonnes, and was driven by two steam engines positioned at its sides. It appeared to be too large to be taken out through the door, so the scrappers had to cut it into four pieces and take it out that way. Considering the average price of scrap iron of only 0.15 Euro/kg, we could imagine a this historical monument. Today all that is left of it are some sad looking, greasy, charred holes in the floor of the decaying building.
A news article related to the privatization
