Novi Bečej is a small town that, before liberation, was considered a town with about 7,000 inhabitants. And when you consider that many of its residents engaged in literature over a period of just about 30 years, and most of them wrote poetry, it can be boldly said that there was a real poetic school in Novi Bečej. Especially when you take into account that a group of the local youth at the time, part of its young intelligentsia, wrote poems as if by some mutual agreement, and some even by an explicit agreement — so much so that they almost literally formed a genuine poetic school.

In his manuscript “The Great Swimming Day,” Branislav Kiselički writes about the start of the competition on August 29, 1943:

Banat, a vast and fertile plain, but densely dotted with swamps and river branches, became a hub of migration for various peoples in the second half of the 18th century. The indigenous peoples, Serbs and Hungarians, were greatly reduced after the Austro-Turkish wars and the plague epidemics, and the vast areas were empty.