Majdanpek is a town in the municipality of Majdanpek in the Bor district. According to the 2002 census, there were 10,071 inhabitants (according to the 1991 census, there were 11,760 inhabitants).
Majdanpek is a typical mining town; if it weren't for the mine, the narrow valley of Mali Pek, unsuitable for other forms of traditional economy - it would be deserted, as it was always deserted when the mine stopped working for a long time. Although mining in the place itself lasts, with shorter or longer interruptions, about 7,000 years, today's name of the city is first mentioned in 1560 in a Turkish document, but in the form of Medani Pek. This indicates that in the pre-Turkish period, the mine was under Serbian rule, because the word medani - the well-known Old Serbian name for copper - is basically found in the ojkons "Medani Pek"! Named Medani Pieck, the settlement will appear on European maps, and in other western sources, until the first half of the 18th century. It was then gradually suppressed by a competing Turkish form based on the Arabic word madän ("mine, ore"), which was domesticated in Serbia in the form of majdan with the same meaning. The other part of the name of the city is the hydronym Pek, which, according to the research of the Museum in Majdanpek, dates back to Dorim times. The name of this river can be reasonably connected with the Greek word pékos, which once meant sheep's fleece.
There are historical assumptions that the Greeks, at the end of the second millennium BC, exploited the gold-bearing rivers of today's northern Serbia, among which, as the most gold-bearing, was certainly Peck. And for just washing the gold, the Greeks used sheep's fleece, which they laid in the riverbed. This ancient washing technique, which the Greeks, according to Herodotus, took over from the Colchians, remained among the inhabitants of the valley of Peka until recent times. Today's name Majdanpek is, therefore, by origin a historical mixture of ancient Greek, ancient Slavic and Arabic-Turkish expressions, whose ultimate meaning is: "copper mine on the gold-bearing river" ...
That Majdanpek is at the same time an ancient ore deposit is testified by the localities Rudna Glava and Praurija, which archeometallurgists date to the time of the early Eneolithic (5th millennium BC). Rudna Glava is less than 24 km southeast of Majdanpek, and Praurija is located in the very circle of today's mine.
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