The Watermill Stankovic
- Natasha
- 7 hours ago
- 8 min read
Flour right off the millstone and a proverbial new lease of life for the Stankovic watermill and their flour manufacturing small business in Serbia
The watermill Stankovic used to be fully functional on the river Расина (Rasina) for more than 200 years though the last miller was Granddad Zivko who would do all the chores around it up until the year 2000. After the grandson returned to his place of birth from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, the brotherly union and the determination of these three close-knit generations gathered together to set the centuries old millstone in motion and to start the high quality flour production again. This is surely a sign that the traditional Serbian watermill has not run its course. They shared their life experiences with us here below.
After living in Belgrade for ten-odd years, when the COVID pandemics began, Marko Stankovic, who is a programmer by profession decided to return to Brus, a small place in Serbia and continue his life in this picture perfect hamlet of his birth Тршановци (Trsanovci) with a keen desire to invest his hard earned and well deserved money into the watermill business owned by his family, which back in the day used to deliver dozens of sacks of flour to the whole village on a regular daily basis.
photo credit VODENICA STANKOVIC
They are unsure as to how old this water mill is exactly but the watermill has been around for more than 200 years and even perhaps 300 years. Its location is on the Расина (Rasina) River. It is owned by the Stankovic family , that is , it does not have too many owners but three families in total, which makes it a fortunate occurrence which enabled the watermill to be refurbished without far too many technicalities - says Marko.
Our host Marko goes on to say that the watermill was made during the age of the Ottomans and it used to be fully functional until the year 2000. The last person to have worked in it was his grandfather Zivko.
photo credit VODENICA STANKOVIC
Many generations of our family members were born and bred in this proverbial neck of the woods , for more than six or seven generations in succession who used to live here. The watermill existed even before our family arrived in this village, so they bought it off from the Ottoman Turks upon their arrival. At the very beginning the watermill belonged to the whole village but over time our family would buy it off bit by bit and now we are the sole owners - Marko tells their story.
However, after the granddad Zivko passed away, there was nobody to work in the mill. Years of neglect have taken its toll inasmuch as when Marko returned to the village of his birth , the watermill was dilapidated and fallen into ruin. But he was not to be stopped enroute to fulfill his dream - to get the old mill of which his whole childhood years were a part and to restore its service.
The truly authentic appearance of the watermill is not merely due to the nostalgia they felt. Its foundations are built from the local stone, its floor is made of rounded wooden pieces, and the walls are made of chopped wood. The generations of the locals put the food on the table for their family thanks to this watermill.
The idea to refurbish the watermill was not new but had been there for years, though they put some more thought into it in the past couple of years. When Marko got back to Тршановци (Trshanovci) from Belgrade, the capital, everything seems to have fallen in its place during the summer of 2020. So they began refurbishing the watermill. "My grandfather , my uncle, my father and I agreed on what to do and started a small business which was rather demanding. Still, we managed to bring the watermill in its working condition in a matter of one year "- says Marko.
The preservation of the authentic appearances was their main priority , primarily due to the preservation of the 200 year long tradition. However, later on they came to fully understand that that authenticity in effect is highly functional as well. All the building materials used to be way more carefully selected in the past. Each piece used to be in its place with a good reason, so that besides tradition its authenticity has proven to be highly practical - Marko goes on to explain "High quality flour is vitally important , given that bread is eaten on a regular daily basis . Three mighty millstones are the main part of the watermill. Thanks to the cold grinding of the whole grains of cereals, flour does not get warm. In this way all the vitamins, minerals and nutritive values are preserved. The smell and the taste of this flour is far more pungent than the flour which is produced by conventional grinding. "
The Stankovich's family manufacture as many as seven different types of flour.
· ''We have started with the corn white flour and wheat flour and then we went on to add the yellow corn and rye flour, and then the buckwheat , spelt and barley. Our customers have shown interest in the oat flour and flour made of proso grain or proso millet, though we have not included it in our offer yet ''- Marko explains.
For all those who do not know what proso grain is here is a definition from the dictionary :
Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum), also known as broomcorn, common, or hog millet, is a highly nutritious, drought-tolerant, short-season ancient grain used for human consumption, livestock feed, and birdseed. It is gluten-free, rich in protein, minerals (magnesium, phosphorus, manganese), and fiber, and has a low glycemic index.
Our host Marko explains that the capacity of the watermill is pretty high compared with the others in the region. ''One of the main reasons for that big capacity is the quantity of the water we get from the Rasina river as well as the considerable experience gained for hundreds of years in the millstone adjustment and the grinding process. Depending on the cereals, 70 kg - 120 kg of flour can be ground per hour, which means that 500 kg-800 kg can be ground per one shift. This caters for our needs for now. The watermill has three stones. One is working at the moment, the other one is functional, and the third one is to be renovated later on. When we cover a bigger market share and get more customers and then in doing so we employ more workers for more than one shift, we will be reactivating the other two millstones.'' - says Marko
For now, the Станковић (Stankovich) family purchase the cereals from the local producers, whilst buckwheat and spelt grains are mostly delivered from the town of Сјеница (Sjenica) and from Војводина (Vojvodina) up north in Serbia. Their customers are not only the end consumers, but restaurants and bakeries аre as well . They package their goods into sacks from 1 kg up to 25 kg and they have also began selling in bulk. As Marko points out, all packages have barcodes, nutritional values and a declaration which abide by the Serbian legal regulations.
It is worth mentioning that we get a high number of customers from Vojvodina who tend to notice the difference between the grains from our region and from theirs. First of all, because cereals are treated less here and in general the soil is less exposed to a variety of pernicious chemical preparations - says Marko. They have had a greater demand for flour than they expected.
Having been new to the market, they did not know what kind of demand they would get. The original plan was to do deals solely with the wholesale customers. However, since they set up their business during the pandemic, they opted for retail sales as well. It turned out to be a very good business decision, as it has shown there was a greater demand for high quality flour than they could have imagined. However,they needed marketing and advertising. In order to inform the wider public about a particular product, one needs to make hefty investments in adverstising and sales. There is a great deal of distrust among customers in the market out there before the moment they make the first purchase, but then they get reassured and become our regular customers. We don't blame anyone for the distrust they might have. Simply, there is a number of flour producers in the market who claim one thing, and then it turns out that the product is something else. Our greatest challenges are logistics and transport. The idea was to deliver flour to each customer, which turned out to be impossible as the number of customers increased. Currently, we deliver most of the flour via the national post offices, with which we have a fairly good cooperation - explains Marko.
In addition to direct sales, this hardworking family is also making deals with a chain of retail shops where their flour can be purchased . Marko tells us that they currently cooperate with about 30 shops throughout Serbia.
- We mostly sell flour to wholemeal shops and homemade food stores. We have not invested too much time and resources in the wholesale chains, so there is plenty of room for development in the future - says Marko.
At the end of the conversation, we asked them about their future plans.
We do have a lot of ideas and plans ahead of us as to how to expand our business. After a little more than a year of being in business, we have surely gained invaluable experience. As for the retail , we should definitely improve the content on social media, we have provided some basic training for our customers in the area of flour manufacturing and consumption such as the benefits of flour use and we have familiarized them to the manufacturing process. There is still plenty of work to be done in the field of wholesale, such as broadening the network of our customers, perhaps establish cooperation with the distributors etc. Since we have acknowledged that the demand for this type of flour definitely exists on the market, we are about to invest in a storage space for cereals, packaging and storage of flour to name but a few.
We must understand that for centuries the rivers locally have fed mills here, though the mills’ uses have evolved over the centuries to cater for the ever changing needs and markets. We are continuing the long, regional tradition of imaginative reinvention to suit the times.
Marko told us how nowadays, each summer weekend, the otherwise hushed and unchanging, steep-sided valley, where the mill-race has run for so long, is alive with rumbling sound of the millstones coupled with the voices of passers-by again because this is a place where tourists seldom tread. This is a region so loaded with history that every new small business development is bound to unearth new treasure or traces of past peoples who lived or crossed ways here.
In conclusion we can only wish them a good luck and that all their plans rippled with entrepreneurial energies come to fruition so that the door to their watermill never gets locked again so that their millstones keep turning for many years to come. We are sure this newly-refurbished mill will bring both history and small business to life again.
N.B. adapted and translated from https://agrosmart.net/2022/05/05/brasno-sa-kamena-i-novi-zivot-vodenice-stankovic/ by teacher Natasha Serbian with Natasha
if you wish to order their flour just follow this link https://www.vodenicastankovic.rs/products
Alternatively, if you wish to start your journey of learning Serbian for Foreigners, feel free to get in touch with me
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