The Deliblato Sands Have Been Burning for a Month

The forest has been burning for weeks, with smoke reaching Bela Crkva – a report from southern Banat

Állítsd be a Google‑t, hogy a BALK mindig kéznél legyen!

The most credible estimate appears to be that at least 3,000 hectares of forest are still burning in the Deliblato Sands of southern Banat. More than 9,000 hectares have already been reduced to ashes since July 22, when the first, smaller fire was detected.

I had already seen Facebook posts from friends who live in the area, but even I did not realise that the forest planted here since the 1800s had been burning continuously for several weeks. It only really caught my attention when my partner, Aco, and I decided that instead of going to the Danube Delta — a trip postponed until next year — we would spend this August weekend in his hometown, Bela Crkva, in Banat, where he was attending a primary-school reunion.

I started looking for news about the fire and soon had to conclude that Serbia’s public and pro-government media had once again lived up to their reputation. Until last week, Belgrade-based RTS (Radio-televizija Srbije, or Radio Television of Serbia) had run more stories about Aleksandar Vučić’s campaign tour around the country than about a fire that had meanwhile grown into an ecological disaster. Even since then, it has continued to blur the facts.

The country’s three most-read tabloids — Blic, Informer and Kurir — still do not consider the story front-page material, nor do the once more reputable Danas or the daily Politika. When the fire is covered at all, it is played down and/or wrapped in conspiracy theories. Even on August 21, 2026, a month after the first fires broke out, only Insajder TV, N1 and the independent Mašina news portal are following events on a daily basis.

In the days before we leave, I talk through the unfolding events with a friend who moved to Australia thirty years ago, squeezing our conversations into the windows allowed by the eight-hour time difference. She is the first to draw my attention to something increasingly mentioned in locals’ Facebook posts: the firefighters’ efforts may have been undermined by the neglected state of the forest firebreaks. Back in the 1980s, she and I had worked together as volunteers maintaining these forestry clearings.

According to official statements, not a single residential building has burned down. People on the Serbian internet tell a different story: according to them, the 1977 Čardak educational centre, also known as ORA Deliblatska Peščara, was destroyed by fire in the Deliblato Sands. It survived generations of children from Vojvodina coming here on holiday, refugees from the wars in Croatia in the 1990s, May Day excursions and countless visitors — but not the present neglect. One user on X pointed out that children came here not only from Vojvodina, but also from Belgrade and Šumadija.

I am reading on Wikipedia now that until the end of the 1980s, work continued on stabilising the sand, creating firefighting routes and repairing roads. During this period, the Čardak settlement was built for the volunteers taking part. Originally intended as a tourist and sports facility, it was gradually neglected and, from the 1990s onwards, was used to accommodate refugees from the Yugoslav wars.

It was later converted into an educational and recreational centre. In March 2020, local authorities decided to use it to house Middle Eastern migrants who had arrived in Vojvodina. Following protests by local residents, the decision was reversed within a week and the complex was instead designated as a Covid-19 quarantine facility.

The Wikipedia entry only indirectly hints that the Deliblato Sands eventually suffered the same fate as virtually everything else in this country that, for whatever reason, has fallen outside — or never entered — the sphere of interest of those who make political decisions.

On the morning of August 20, Aco and I set off from Mali Iđoš. The previous evening we had learned that the fastest route — motorway to Belgrade, then through Pančevo to Bela Crkva — had been closed near Kovin. So we head instead towards Zrenjanin, travelling through Lazarevo, Sutjeska, Sečanj, Boka and Plandište before reaching Vršac.

Near Boka, I start photographing the enormous plume of smoke rising high into the sky south of the road. Then we realise that the smoke has completely obscured the tower that normally dominates the landscape from the hill above Vršac, built on the site of the medieval Érdsomlyó fortress. Suffocating smoke hangs over the town, and we hurry onwards through Straža, Jasenovo and Crvena Crkva.

Only just before Bela Crkva do we finally leave the all-enveloping cloud of smoke behind. Over the following days, depending on Banat’s notoriously changeable winds, it will return with almost clockwork regularity to blanket Bela Crkva as well.

Bela Crkva could only be reached by taking a considerable detour (Source: Google)

Perhaps nothing says more about the town today than the fact that by the end of the summer holidays barely 2,000 inhabitants remain. At the time of the 1991 census, around 12,000 people lived here.

There are also Czechs in the nearby dead-end village of Češko Selo. For years, they were the first to leave for work in the Czech Republic, followed by practically everyone else from the surrounding area. Few of them return, just as few of the Vojvodina Hungarians who obtained Hungarian citizenship eventually come back.

It is 37 degrees Celsius in the shade. At least once a day the town disappears under smoke for several hours, yet every table is occupied on the terraces of the cafés that remain open along the main street, amid crumbling houses. Business is booming at the lakes, still the town’s main attraction. Synthetic folk music blares from the speakers, beer flows from the taps, and fleets of paddleboards and pedal boats bob on the water.

Aco stops to talk to every second person we meet. The fire invariably comes up. News travels by word of mouth, demonstrating once again what a mistake it is to underestimate the power of social media:

— In Grebenac, residents protected the houses on the edge of the village themselves, using equipment they had bought from hardware stores.

— In Šušara, the fire is already threatening the cemetery.

— The public broadcaster only started seriously reporting on the fire after the Ilyushin firefighting aircraft arrived from Russia.

— One of Vučić’s cronies has been building wind farms for years and has already set his sights on the Deliblato Sands as suitable terrain, which is why they are now allowing it to burn.

— It is not only the forest, the trees and undergrowth that are burning. Peat deep beneath the surface is also smouldering, which is why the fire keeps flaring up again in unexpected places.

Previously on BALK

European firefighters join the battle against the Deliblato Sands wildfire

— Several volunteer teams from the surrounding area were turned back by police and told they had no business being anywhere near the fire — even though there are too few local firefighters and much of their equipment is outdated. Last week, volunteer firefighters who had travelled from Kać, near Novi Sad, were actually sent home, while the official line was that there was nothing to see here: Father Vučić would protect his loyal subjects.

— Last week, they were still more inclined to let these centuries-old forests burn while waiting for Russian assistance, because that fitted the ongoing election campaign better than asking the EU for help. Yet by this morning, August 22, that has finally happened. One Romanian and one Slovak helicopter, two Czech helicopters, 24 German and 15 Romanian fire engines, and more than 100 firefighters are now expected to join the operation.

I listen to the locals. I read the reports I can find online. I watch the enormous cloud of smoke towering above us. I read the pleas for help posted by our host’s daughter, a woman in her twenties who, together with her friends, wants at least to help behind the lines but is not being allowed to do so.

And I am left with the same impression I had two years ago, at the time of the disaster at Novi Sad railway station.

Once again, years of neglecting public responsibilities have led to catastrophe. What had not already been stolen was handed over to the pockets of cronies, relatives and friends. Nobody is responsible for anything. In this country, people have been able to kill with impunity for decades — because it is not only the 2023 school massacre, and not only what happened at Novi Sad railway station, that should count as killing.

This fire is killing too. They are killing our environment through negligence, incompetence, greed for money and hunger for power.

The Deliblato Sands are not simply a forest. They are one of the last major forest-steppe-wetland ecosystems in the Carpathian Basin. What is burning here is irreplaceable biodiversity that took centuries to develop.

Previously on BALK

Deliblato Sands: Tepić says the fire is not the only destructive force

The habitats of saker falcons, eastern imperial eagles, the Banat blind mole-rat and European ground squirrels are being destroyed or placed at risk. Larger animals — deer, roe deer and wild boar — can flee the flames, but younger individuals of protected species perish deep inside the reserve.

The flames are consuming rare and strictly protected wild orchids, around twenty species of which grew here, alongside Banat peonies and white wormwood.

Junipers and smoke trees are disappearing, along with downy and pedunculate oaks, Austrian and Scots pines, and the acacias planted to stabilise the sand. The surrounding wetlands — the confluence of the Danube and the Nera and the southern fringe of the Sands — were added to the Ramsar Convention’s list of wetlands of international importance in 2006.

Now the survival of this broad stretch of the Danube, filled with islands, sandbanks and marshes, is itself being called into question. It has provided crucial resting, nesting and wintering habitat for hundreds of thousands of waterbirds, including wild geese, ducks, herons, cormorants and eagles.

Serbia, like its neighbours, has for years been in a region increasingly exposed to accelerating climate change. Heatwaves are lasting longer, droughts are becoming more extreme, and the risk of ecological disasters continues to grow.

Under such conditions, a serious state invests not in fighter jets, but in systematic prevention and early-detection systems. It tightens regulations and introduces measures designed to protect nature and prevent disasters like this one.

Instead, the Serbian regime operates a system in which millions of euros are poured into glorifying those in power, controlling the media and financing gigantic investment projects.

Related article

Vučić in the Deliblato Sands: only one “field toilet” burned down

One need only recall the Serbian government’s lithium and boron mining project with Rio Tinto in the Jadar Valley near Loznica a few years ago. Ecological disasters like the one that threatened the Jadar Valley — halted in time thanks to civic resistance — cannot be solved with election slogans, party loyalty, or daily allowances and sandwiches handed out to vulnerable people.

Would it be excessively optimistic to expect the Serbian government to update its understanding of the world, take the new climatic reality seriously, and redirect resources to where they are genuinely needed?

Before, through the familiar medieval habits of governance, negligence, destructive logging, the ruin of rivers and one bad decision after another, they quite literally turn the country into a desert.