Miloš Savčić (Svilajnac, 26 July 1865 – Belgrade, 9 March 1941) was a Serbian politician, businessman, engineer, banker and entrepreneur who was one of the richest Europeans of his time. Savčić served as Minister of Construction, Mayor of Belgrade, advisor, and manager of numerous economic facilities in the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He is considered to be one of the most influential Serbs of his time.
Early life and education He was born in Svilajnac, in Resava, on 26 July 1865 (Old Style) to Teodor and Jelena Savčić.Свилајнац: Добротвора заборавили али уживају („Вечерње новости“, 17. март 2016) His father was a well-to-do merchant.
In his hometown, he finished both elementary school and high school, and in Belgrade, in 1885 he graduated with a B.Sc. from Velika škola. For his post-graduate studies, he went to Germany and enrolled at the Technical University of Munich. In 1889 he graduated from the master's program in Civil Engineering. His professor was Carl von Linde.
Engineer in Munich After completing his studies, at the invitation of one of his professors, who taught roads and railways at the polytechnical institute, he remained in Germany for two more years, working on the construction of the Royal Bavarian State Railway. As a young Serbian engineer, such a job was a rare opportunity to gain a solid practice. However, as a foreign citizen, he could not become a civil servant, he could only work as a contractual employee.
He first worked on the expansion of the train station in Munich. In the beginning, he was engaged in surveying the terrain, based on his recordings, other engineers made a study, then marking all the buildings and curves, and when the construction of facilities began: sewers, intersections with trams, electrical plants and a 30 km long railway, he worked as supervising engineer on the construction of one of the bridges, on which reinforced concrete arches were made for the first time. Upon completion of the work, his task was to review the entire study, which had previously been prepared by his colleagues.
After that, they hired him to make an extensive and detailed study, because of which he travelled all over Bavaria, and he had assistants in the business, to whom he showed the recording and tracing of the terrain. This job brought him a lot of success and recognition. Although he was a young engineer, he worked as a senior engineer, with twice the salary, which was the reason why some of his fellow senior engineers looked down on him with envy.
For a while, he worked in the department for switches, on the method of centralizing switches, according to the "block system".
Return to Serbia In 1891, owing to his mother's death, he decided to leave his job at the Royal Bavarian State Railway and go back to Serbia. At that time, he was supposed to move to Paris and work for Gustave Eiffel, who gained world fame after the construction of the famous Eiffel Tower. Since the job was supposed to start in May next year, in order to use his free time, he went to serve his military service, which by law should have lasted five months or less, in case he passed the officer's exam earlier. However, he failed the practical part of the exam, where he was given the task of marking a triangle on the field, and since he solved the task in an engineering-tracer way, instead of according to military rules. As a result, he had to extend his military service and cancel his contract with Gustave Eiffel.
After completing his military service, in 1893 he got a job in the Municipality of Belgrade. After a year, he decided, with the financial help of his father, uncle and brother, to start his own business, opening the Engineering and Architecture Office in Belgrade, together with a friend from Munich, the architect Gaspar Becker, in 1893. At that time, opening his own design company was a completely new initiative, which caused skepticism among family and friends. Also, the state did not have enough funds for major technical works, such as roads, railways, sewers, bridges, therefore, his firm initially devoted itself to making housing projects. In addition, private deals were concluded without complicated procedures, without fees, certificates, or cadastral plans. Larger contracts were made by ordinary letter, while smaller ones were based on oral agreements and a handshake.
He was hired for his first job by Luka Ćelović, who asked him to make a plan for a private house in Karađorđeva Street in Belgrade. He was hired by rich merchants Jovan Jovanović Šapčanin and Milan Pavlović, and cassation judge Milutin Marković, all for the purpose of building private family homes. After Becker's death in 1896, he collaborated with architects Danilo Vladisavljević and Milan Kapetanović.
Construction of a slaughterhouse in Belgrade One of the biggest problems in Serbia at the time was the closure of the Hungarian border for the export of live pigs, under the pretext that the pigs were allegedly infected or suspected of being infected by the disease of some sort. During 1895 alone, the border was closed three times, and a similar situation was repeated in the following years, forcing the Serbian government to begin the struggle for economic liberation from Austria-Hungary.
A slaughterhouse in Belgrade of the Serbian Joint-Stock Company for Slaughter and Processing of Livestock (1906) was built according to the project of Miloš Savčić. All this was done in the fight for economic independence during the Customs War imposed on Serbia by Austria-Hungary. Everything had to be done to expedite the products in the most efficient manner. Sausages longer than a meter and thicker than a muscle, raised and clenched fists and knives, united citizens, butchers, peasants, guardsmen, workers, and in the background special wagons of the Serbian state railways transported meat in ice to their destination as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The first solution was to export meat products instead of pigs, which could be exported to other countries as well as Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, etc., without the risk of spoiling the meat. For that reason, the Serbian government passed the Law on State Aid to Slaughterhouse Companies in 1895, and the newly established Serbian Joint-Stock Company for Slaughter and Processing of Livestock in Belgrade decided to hire Savčić to study the organization of slaughterhouses in Austria and Germany. During 1896, he submitted a recalculation and the following year received the right to build a slaughterhouse, which became one of the most important state projects. The opposition, led by the president of the Association of Engineers of Serbia, Todor Selešković, opposed the favouring of Savčić and his company, demanding that more experts be sent abroad. However, the slaughterhouse (later named "BIM Slavija") was built in 1898, along with the buildings for the stock exchange, post office, telegraph office, workers' apartments, smokehouses, cold storage, barns, etc., with a layout that provided for all possible extensions. which led the public to conclude that Savčić had done the job very successfully. In addition, the entire complex played a significant role in the struggle for economic independence during the Customs War, when Serbia emerged the winner. After the construction of the slaughterhouse, his public reputation and trust in his work jumped. Due to his acquired reputation, conscientious work and initiative, Savčić was considered by many institutions as an advisor, associate or direct contractor. A year later, he invested the capital acquired from this company in the shares of Belgrade Transport Bank and was elected a member of its Supervisory Board, and then the Board of Directors.
The Steam-powered Sawmill Working at the slaughterhouse, he quickly became aware of Serbia's economic dependence on foreign countries, especially the import of timber construction materials from Austria-Hungary. For that reason, he considered it necessary to build a lathe (tool and dye operation), which would lower the price of this material on the domestic market. His intention was for the Belgrade Transport Bank to provide money for the construction of the lathe, but he initially encountered great resistance from the bank's Board of Directors. In 1901, he persuaded the board to allow his associates to construct Belgrade's first steam-powered sawmill. The management finally approved his proposal on the condition that Savčić accepts personal liability for any losses. Two years later, the first major steam-powered sawmill in the Kingdom of Serbia was built on the banks of the Danube, which was constantly expanding its capacity until the outbreak of the First World War.
One of the biggest problems of the sawmill was the question of procurement cheap timber because lumber initially arrived from abroad or procured together material on the domestic market. In 1902, the bank received from the state the right to exploit the forests on Tara near the rivers Derventa, Crni Vhr and Zvijezda, and the material was brought by rafts on the Drina, Sava and Danube, to the canal that had a sawmill (Serbian: strugara) in Belgrade. The canal in Belgrade was built to make the material easier to pull out of the rafts because, in the beginning, ox power was used to pull it out. Initially, the cutting was done manually, but later motorized machines began to be used, and over time, the machining plant was enlarged.Since the forest on Tara lay on a wasteland, on very steep slopes, intersected by gorges and gorges, it was not possible to transport the material to the Drina, Savčić, with the help of German colleagues, designed a special cable car. The cable car was built in two stages. The first stage, 6,010 m long, with a drop of 800 m, and passing through two tunnels in the rocks, 56 and 26 m long, was built in 1908. Tunnelling is done in winter, and construction materials for the building lift are transported from Belgrade by wagon, sled and on foot. There is a distance of 400 m between the small and the large tunnel above the Drina valley. The second stage, 3,860 m long, was a 380 m ascent. The speed of the load moving by the cable car was regulated by a hydraulic brake regulator, and the load was moving due to its own weight without driving force. Section for the exploitation of forests in the Tara and the way the material was brought cited as an example of rational overcoming natural obstacles.
The Turning operation in Belgrade became one of the most successful wood processing companies in the country and employed between 120 and 280 workers. Thanks to it, Serbia became an exporter of timber instead of an importer of timber.
Insurance company "Serbia" In 1903, he became vice-president of the Belgrade Transport Bank, and two years later the bank changed its name to Prometna Banka. There Savčić urged the board members of the bank to create its own construction department. Once established (1906), it had acquired a small fleet of river dredges by 1909. They provided sand and gravel for the construction industry. One of the bank's shareholders became King Peter I Karađorđević. At the idea of King Peter I, in 1905, through the Board of Directors of Prometna Banka, "'Serbia', the first Serbian insurance company" was opened, ie the first insurance company in Serbia (except for the insurance department of the Belgrade Cooperative, which already existed). Shares with the ordinal number from 1 to 300 were also bought by King Peter I, which helped the idea of realizing such a society. From the very beginning, Savčić was in the management of that company and actively managed its affairs.