VILLAGE DE KRUPA NA VRBASU

This village of 1,200 inhabitants (Крупа на Врбасу) is the main stopover in the Vrbas valley. Located next to the Greben fortress, it's also a departure base for rafting: crews set off here for a 3-hour descent to Karanovac, 15 km downstream. The village owes its name to the River Krupa, which flows here into the Vrbas after a series of waterfalls 100 m long. The setting is very bucolic, with log cabins and a restored old corn mill. There are picnic tables and the Krupski Slapovi restaurant. A 3 km path leads to the source of the Krupa, past the wooden church of St. Nicholas (1735). Just south of the waterfalls, above the village, the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Krupa na Vrbasu (Manastir Krupa na Vrbasu/Манастир Крупа на Врбасу) is open to visitors. Dedicated to St. Elijah, it was founded in 1317 by Serbian monks from Croatia. Destroyed four times in the ^20th century, most recently by the 1969 earthquake, it was rebuilt in the 2010s. Above the village, 12 km to the east, a Bosnian army barracks occupies the site of one of the worst detention sites of the last war. This was the Manjača Bosnian-Serb concentration camp (Koncentracijski Logor Manjača), where between 4,500 and 6,000 Croatian, Bosnian and Bosnian-Croat detainees were held between 1991 and 1995. A thousand men and women never returned.