BINICI: Like many of its Balkan neighbours, Serbia is reeling from an inexorable rural exodus, with hundreds of small villages turning into ghost towns as the young move to the cities in search of a better life.
And the authorities in Belgrade are powerless to reverse the trend.
Take Binici, a small village perched on south-western Serbia's scenic Golija mountain and now home to only dozens of mostly elderly inhabitants.
The young have been gradually leaving for the towns, in search of jobs or a soulmate.
The local school once had about 60 pupils. Now it stands empty and abandoned, its facade crumbling and its windows broken.
"The children used to play football and basketball here," sighed Borislav Bubaja as he pointed to a plot of land overgrown with ironweed and wild grass.
Twenty years ago, 200 people lived here. Now the population is down to 40.
"Look, no one lives in these four houses," said Bubaja, a 75-year old retiree. "The old are dead while the young have left for town."
Only reachable by a crumbling cobblestone road, Binici is dying a slow death.
Residents must travel for miles to get medical help and even the nearest shops for basic food and household items are five miles away.
"Farm work is hard and the young seek an easier life in the city. There is nothing to keep them here," Bubaja's son, 43-year-old Ranko, explained.
Father Zdravko, the Orthodox Christian priest whose parish includes nine villages and hamlets in the area, agreed that the region is becoming deserted.
"In the past two years, I had 100 funerals, about 10 baptisms and only five or six marriages. It shows the speed at which this region is dying out," he said.
And Serbia is not alone; many of the countries that made up the former Yugoslavia face the same problem.
Nearly eight million out of the estimated 23.5 million people in the whole of the former Yugoslavia left the countryside for towns between 1950 and 2000, turning a once mainly farming region into an industrialised one, according to data released by the Serbian Chamber of Commerce.
The 1990s Balkan wars that tore apart the former socialist federation just compounded the problem.
Ethnic strife spawned streams of refugees who headed to the new states drawn up along ethnic lines.
Many of the refugees ended up in cities and towns that had the infrastructure to shelter them.
In Croatia, the rural population fell from 48.7 percent in 1991 to 44.4 percent in 2001. Montenegro suffered the same fate.
The only exception is Macedonia, where people chose to remain in the countryside as easier access to food there assured them a better quality of life, according to its Statistics bureau.
In neighbouring Albania, once ruled with an iron fist by communist dictator Enver Hoxha, many villages in the impoverished north and the south of the country, were deserted after the end of communist rule in 1992.
Djura Stevanovic, of Serbia-based Institute for the Study of Villages, said authorities have done nothing to halt the exodus.
"There is no strategy to relaunch development of these regions, or at least to maintain it at the same level," he told AFP.
He estimated that about 50 villages disappear in Serbia every year.
"Fifteen years from now, 700 villages in Serbia will have disappeared," he warned.
Branislav Gulan of Serbia's Chamber of Commerce said revitalizing the countryside required sustainable regional development and encouraging rural enterprise.
Despite all disadvantages, Ranko Bubaja remains close to Binici. He comes every day from the nearby town of Baljevac where he works to help his parents work their land.
His main gripe is that he cannot find a local woman to marry, explaining wistfully that young women want an urban life.
"This village might not be the most beautiful, but I like it. I was born here and I will stay here," he vowed.
Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011
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