EverLoveLocks

Where love locks started: the bridge in Serbia and its legend

By James Auble · · 3 min read

Most people meet love locks on a famous bridge in a big city. The story most often told about where they began is smaller than that: a footbridge in a Serbian spa town, and a love story from the First World War.

This is a legend. Nobody has a record of the first padlock, and the details change with the teller, but the outline stays the same.

The legend of Nada and Relja

The town is Vrnjačka Banja, in central Serbia, and the story goes that a local schoolteacher named Nada fell in love with a Serbian officer named Relja. They were engaged. Then Relja was sent to fight, and the war took him to Greece.

While he was away, he met a woman there and fell in love with her. He broke off the engagement. Nada never recovered, and she is said to have died of heartbreak.

The young women of the town took it to heart. They began writing their names and their sweethearts' names on padlocks, fastening them to the railing of a small bridge where Nada and Relja used to meet, and, in the way of the story, hoping their own love would not meet the same end. The bridge became known as Most Ljubavi, the Bridge of Love.

A poem helped

A poem is tied to the same story. The Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović wrote "Molitva za ljubav" ("A Prayer for Love"), and locals still point to it. You will find it quoted in guides to the town.

How it spread

The habit moved well beyond one small bridge. A lock is an easy symbol: you close it, and the key is gone. In Rome, the Ponte Milvio filled with locks in the 2000s, helped along by a popular Italian novel in which a couple fastens one there. After that came bridges in Paris, Cologne, Seoul and plenty of towns that had never heard of Vrnjačka Banja.

Each place added its own version. Some couples throw the key into the river, and some write only initials. What stayed was two names, one lock and a promise made in public.

Why it caught on

It's a cheap ritual that anyone can do. A lock, a marker and a railing are enough, and afterward you can go and look at the result.

It also had a cost. Railings buckled under the weight, which is how it ended in Paris, and many cities now ask couples not to attach anything. Vrnjačka Banja itself is a reminder that the original custom was modest, one bridge in a town where people knew each other.

What stays when the metal goes

Take away the steel and the cutters, and what people wanted is easy to name: a visible, shared mark that says "we were here, and we meant it," somewhere both of them could return to.

That is the idea behind EverLoveLocks. The lock carries your initials and a date, it hangs on a bridge that doesn't corrode or get cut down, and you can both visit it from wherever you are. You can look around the bridge before deciding.

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