Rakina Bara (Serbian Cyrillic: Ракина Бара) is a lake in Sremčica, a suburb of Belgrade, Serbia.

[2][3] Rakina Bara is situated in the limestone pit, in the karstic micro-region called Belgrade merokras.

Before the lake dried out, the major inflow was 170 metres (560 ft) long and brought 20 to 70 L/min (4.4 to 15.4 imp gal/min; 5.3 to 18.5 US gal/min).

Professor Sava Stekić, the chronicler of Sremčica wrote that "newcomers who try fish from the Rakina Bara, will never leave the village again".

[1] The lake was reduced in size as the local population, in order to get more land, illegally dug outflow canals to drain the water and even threw mercury into the sinkhole to erode the land and make the sinkhole wider in order to drain water more quickly.

Households from the neighboring slopes turned their sewage pipes into Rakina Bara emptying their cesspits in the pond.

As the water drains through the earth, it widens the holes in it producing the cracks in the ground already prone to the mass wasting.

Basically digging the land under the lake, it might set mass wasting in motion which would bury the pond completely.

Proposed short term interventions included cleaning of the garbage from the lake and the surrounding area, emptying and closing of the cesspits and ban on building on the slopes above the pond.

Another study from 2012 proposed that the pond should be saved with the construction of the sewage system and by placing Rakina bara under protection.

As for the other proposals, none of them turned into projects, due to either lack of funds (municipality of Čukarica) or the typical bureaucratic "it is not my jurisdiction" attitude (city, communal companies, nature protection agencies).

The creek's route was dredged with an excavator, removing large quantities of clay, garbage and sludge and growths of reed and wild blackberry.

[11] By the early 2020, the sewage system was built for the surrounding houses, so wastewater stopped flowing into the creek and the lake.

However, further steps from the 2007 study (geodetic surveys, chemical analyses of the soil, access road), are outside of the eco-activists' hands and cooperation from the local administration and communal services is needed.

At this point, the ecologists couldn't locate the second water source which feeds the lake, as it got buried in time.