Librarianship in the municipality of Backa Palanka

Librarianship in Bačka Palanka began back in 1869, at a time when cultural and spiritual life in general in this area is increasingly gaining a spiritual character. During this period, societies appeared that procured books and gave them to their members to read. A Serbian reading room was soon established with the aim of social, fraternal and friendly mutual understanding and pleasant entertainment, which will be materially supported and educated in reading books and newspapers.

The library thus became a place where sermons, lectures, evenings dedicated to personalities and events were held. In this rich scope of work, the founders and members of the Serbian Reading Room did not miss any opportunity to manifest their patriotism and always shared the fate of their people.

During the Serbian-Turkish war in 1876, the Reading Room in Backa Palanka through its members, it collected donations in Serbian homes for the poorly equipped Serbian army, and a large number of young people went to Serbia to help the liberation struggle. At the same time, the literary fund and membership were constantly enriched. Until 1938, the Serbian Reading Room had 109 members, and until the Second World War about 250. The fate of the literary fund in the period 1941-1945 was tragic. Some of the books were burned by the occupiers, and about 5,000 books were in inadequate premises. The result of paintings for old books.

After the liberation, the National Library "Veljko Petrović" changed its location several times. Along with solving the problem of accommodation, the library successfully followed all modern trends in librarianship, developing its activities on the entire territory of the municipality of Bačko Palanka. All forms of work with readers are applied in order to popularize the book and its use and to gather as many readers as possible. Today, the National Library "Veljko Petrović" is a very important cultural institution in the South Bačka district and one of the most successful. The literary fund has over 135,000 publications. The library has 13 branches in the surrounding villages and supervision of thirteen school libraries: Čelarevo, Despotovo, Pivnice, Silbaš, Parage, Mladenovo, Karađorđevo, Obrovac, Tovariševo, Gajdobra, Nova Gajdobra, Neštin and Vizić.

According to its development, it occupies a high place in Vojvodina.
The library has:

  • Department for Adult Users
  • Children's department
  • Native collection
  • Science department
  • Old and rare book department
  • Antique and
  • BookbinderThe purchase of books during the year ranges from five to ten thousand, which is above the national standard. In the last five years, the number of users has increased by close to 10% and now has close to 12,000 to 65,000 inhabitants. The number of read publications is close to 120,000, and the number of events is over 100 per year. In the popular action "Reader's Badge", the children are champions in reading books in the Republic of Serbia for the third time. The library is the organizer and host of the Festival of Ecological Theater for Children.

The long tradition of librarianship in Bačka Palanka is the best indicator that the book has found its true soil and climate here.

Libraries are places to look for all the answers, places with a tradition, but also ways to discover the future. Libraries are magic in which the past gets the outline of a memory, where words are kept from oblivion, and where under the cap of heaven every beauty finds its place.
The National Library "Veljko Petrović" in its long and fruitful duration, in a time that is not subject to division into past and future, can boast of the fact that it has been named after Veljko Petrović for almost half a century.

Veljko Petrović (1884-1967) - poet, narrator, essayist, art historian, man woven from fragments of the land of Vojvodina, the rays of the sun and the blue of the Bačka sky. Isidora Sekulić spoke about him like this:

"He is the word of the earth. He swore to play and courage, to spend his life and roll the dice. He promised the country that his being would be endless in it, that in his novel he would celebrate simple things and narrate hot kindness and great danger… Mr. Petrovic writes a modern short story and gives us the modern life of the middle and lordly class of Serbs in Hungary, often in Bosnia, and sometimes lines from the life of other branches of our people. "

Veljko Petrović was born in Sombor, on February 4, 1884. He finished high school in Hungarian in his native Sombor, and has been studying law in Budapest since 1902. At the same time, he was a cadet of the first Serbian college, Tekelijanum. He started publishing his first songs in 1905. He edited literary magazines and newspapers; in 1911 he emigrated to Belgrade; participated in the Balkan wars as a war correspondent; in the First World War he withdrew with the Serbian army and spent the war in Geneva.

Every year, on February 5, on the day of Veljko Petrović's birth, our institution solemnly celebrates Library Day. Then we want to show our successes: how many of our members have read books, how many new ones we have acquired, how much we have tried to succeed in accomplishing our tasks.

Our Library has taken on the task of reminding the entire Serbian public, waking them up and pointing them to the most valuable things that the Serbian nation has produced. Veljko Petrović deserved eternal peace, but not oblivion.

"After the centenary of his birth (1984), Veljko is mostly silent about. Sensitive and vulnerable - and that's how memories see him… she found him, here is an unpleasant posthumous half-silence. Others and different ones are read and studied, more poetically relevant, or those repressed and misunderstood, completely unseen in life… Veljko Petrović's prose - in the exuberance of his world and the miraculous subtlety of expression - deserves new users and interpreters. ”(Dr. Slavko Gordić)