BALKAN GHOST TOWNS

When dreams turn to dust... notable across the Balkans are McMansions built by locals now working in the UK/EU. Ostentatious, gaudy and, now, often abandoned.

Home sweet home… imagine doing the dusting! A Balkan McMansion.

GUEST POST: NICK NASEV’S AN AUSTRALIAN-BORN, LONDON-BASED LINGUIST & TRANSLATOR & AN EXPERT ON ALL THINGS BALKAN. I’VE OFTEN RELIED ON NICK’S ADVICE WHEN IT COMES TO THE POLITICS & CULTURE OF SOUTH EAST EUROPE, SO I’M HONOURED TO HAVE HIM CONTRIBUTING TO THE YAK. NICK’S ABOUT TO LAUNCH HIS OWN ‘STACK: NICKIPEDIA - DO CHECK IT.

“When we retire, we’re going back to the village”.

The dream of many a migrant, including my father, who in the 1970s had left Yugoslavia for some adventure and ‘become a cowboy like John Wayne’ in faraway Australia. Oh, was he disappointed once he stepped off the boat and choo-choo.

More than 50 years later, our wannabe cowboy has a very comfy life in Australia, sans much yeeha these days. Doctor’s visits, jigsaw puzzles and watching Turkish soap operas dubbed into Macedonian on satellite TV is as exciting as it gets. Visiting his birthplace and the house where he grew up in, gone ever since my grandparents passed away, is just too arduous. Well, the 24 hours to get there and the jet lag only get worse as we age.

As a translator who works with Balkan Slavic languages, I often travel to the countries where these languages are spoken. In the summer of 2024, I was in the eastern reaches of Serbia – average temperature: 38 degrees Celsius. I had some free time, so in a last-minute decision (the best types,) I decided I'd head off to the point where Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania meet. That’s how I roll. To get there, I had to turn off the main road from the town of Negotin to the Bulgarian border and go down a heavily pot-holed path dangerous even for Balkan standards, to the final village before the border. But when I arrived in this village on the edge of nowhere, I immediately noticed two things.

The first was...

The houses in this village are beyond huge. I mean, they could be seen from space!

Now, I've seen mega-mansions such as the ones throughout Romania and in Soroca, Moldova, built and owned by their Roma populations, but this was not a Roma village. The houses were not as gaudy (OK, some are) but they’re just as large, with the biggest ones having up to 30 (!!!) bedrooms and are up to five storeys high!

This house is just "average" in terms of size!

The other thing I noticed about this village was...

It was almost devoid of people!!! Had the raptures happened and I’d been saved? Very unlikely, but it sure seemed that way.

Missing were the aspects that make a Balkan village lively: the old men sitting around drinking rakija (plum brandy) and talking politics, a battered tractor or Yugo (the car) passing by or having to make way for stray chickens. No, none of that. There weren’t even evident shops or services. Truly a case of ‘last one out, turn off the lights!’

Eventually, I spotted some signs of life – mainly old people sitting in their yards. They’ve been left to look after these monstrous buildings. But where, then, are the owners or would-be residents of these houses?

As could be seen from the car plates of the few cars in the village, Vienna mainly, but in general outside Serbia.

These huge houses are usually only occupied briefly in any given year. They are, however, testimony of a few things: the concept of belonging, return (but ultimately never happening), nostalgia, displaying "success" and stubborn one-upmanship.

While these concepts and their physical manifestation as the ancestral hearth ("ognjište" in Serbian) are very much a product of not just the of migration experience in Balkans but also worldwide, the extent that this was on display in this village was at a level I've never seen before.

But this village was not unique… the further I travelled around the region, the more near-empty villages with huge houses I found.

So why have such houses, if hardly anyone is living in them?

These buildings are known as 'gastarbajterske kuće'(‘gastarbeiter homes’), mostly owned and financed by people who left these poor villages in the 1960s and 1970s to go work in western European countries desperate for low-skilled workers. As the name suggests, they were ‘guest workers’, i.e. temporary residents, who were to go back to their homelands once they were no longer working or needed. There was no chance for them or their children to gain citizenship of their host countries.

This was not one-sided though; official Yugoslav discourse at the time constantly iterated that these workers as ‘temporarily working and living’ abroad, something by the 1990s became an ironic euphemism considering many of them had been ‘temporarily’ abroad for decades. In such an environment where the Gastarbeiter were made quite clear that they were and will always be outsiders, investing in a place to return was not only a practicality but also a much needed incentive for these workers to persevere the harsh conditions they endured.

However, circumstances have changed. Western European countries have since revamped their citizenship requirements, ensuring most are no longer Gastarbeiter but Bürger (citizens), with children and grandchildren born, raised and educated in the ‘new country’. Their offspring then don’t share that same belonging to the ancestral country as their elders.

Gastarbeiter houses in eastern Serbia. The one of the left is for sale, with its primary selling point being it claims to be ‘legalised’, i.e. have planning permission, something most other similar building lack.

So: why are these empty house so big?

The longer the original owners are away from the village, the bigger the extended family becomes. At first, the need was to accommodate only the immediate family, and for many in such villages in the 1950s to 1980s, having three or more children was quite common. Upon becoming adults, most of these children would leave the village for greener pastures. Then they would have children, so more bedrooms were added for when they’d all come to visit the grandparents left behind. And then the grandchildren would grow up, get married and have children… meaning more bedrooms.

With families being widely dispersed, often across Europe and beyond, the ancestral home becomes the centrepiece and meeting point for family gatherings and celebrations such as weddings or major religious holidays, or in August when most of urban Europe shutters up for the month and heads off on holiday and/to where they came from. This common holiday period often becomes the one time of the year where families can reunite in the home village. That’s the practical side.

A newer factor is greater accessibility. In the 20^th Century, poor roads, relatively low car ownership, long and delayed bus and train trips (and prohibitively expensive airfares), alongside most Gastarbeiter not earning much, made any trip to the home village a costly and time-consuming undertaking – but a special event, nonetheless. Recent decades though have seen Gastarbeiter earning more, and driving better and bigger cars down expanding motorways through control-free borders… until arriving at the notorious Horgoš crossing (the border between Hungary & Serbia and often a bottleneck).

Here’s a merry ride through one such village - huge houses yet no people about.

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The biggest change has been low-cost carriers, ferrying people from numerous western European airports at a fraction of the cost than before. The result is that people can, and do, visit more often.

But there are also more superficial and less dignified factors at play. Villages are hotbeds of gossip, judgement, pride and prejudice. On top of that is the expectation for people who’ve left the village to show how successful their move has been. And what better way to demonstrate this than having a bigger house than your neighbours? Out of inat, that quintessential Balkan trait of illogical stubbornness, the one-upmanship bursts out of the genie bottle:

“Dragan thinks he’s so much better than everyone else because his house has four storeys. Well, I’ll show him! My house will have five storeys!”

The result?

Ever bigger houses. More bedrooms. More garages. More ostentatious furnishings. More more!

While these villages may no longer be permanently populated physically, communities continue to live virtually on social media networks, particularly on village- or region-based Facebook groups, connecting former residents worldwide and replacing the local village square as the place for the latest hot gossip.

Now, I know you’re probably wondering… who’s paying for all this? I mean, building a big house requires a big budget, and since similar houses in the countries where these migrants live and work are usually the domain of people engaged in less-than-legal enterprises, then surely that’s what’s happening here too?

Well, yes, there’ll always be those types, but the overwhelming majority of the owners are average people working manual jobs, often pulling long shifts while living frugally in cramped, rented flats in the outskirts of depressed industrial cities.

Not talked about though is the massive environmental impact the construction and maintenance of these mega-mansions have. The Balkans are not that great when it comes to garbage disposal, where too many rivers are strewn with plastic bags, and fly-tipping is the norm. Construction comes with massive waste, whether it be excess concrete, broken tiles, empty paint cans, package waste… you name it. So it’s sad to see what once were fertile fields on the outskirts of villages are now rubbish dumps with vast piles of construction waste, like this…

McMansion mess: village outskirts covered with construction waste

One of the many reasons why I'm fascinated by this whole phenomenon is this: the house in Macedonia next door to the house my father grew up in watching cowboy films, is also a mega-mansion. The family lived in Vienna (there it is again) and the mother and father were putting in long shifts doing manual work to pay for building their dream house “back home”. They had the same plan as everyone else: when the time comes, they and their (Austrian-born) children and grandchildren will go back to live in the village. But when the father finally retired, even the mother, let alone the children and grandchildren, who can hardly speak Macedonian, had no interest in leaving their nicely established lives in Vienna.

Not willing to give up on his prime investment and dream, the husband turned his back on his family and returned to live in the huge house on his own. The nerve! Tongues in the village couldn’t stop wagging over this scandalous act. He didn't last long, unfortunately, and died a couple of years later from self-neglect and loneliness, leaving behind what once was an impressive building painted in baby blue but now is a ruin that no one wants.

Zorica Markovic’s Austria is an anthem: here she sings a typical migrant blues lamenting how Austria’s taken away her life and left her house in the village empty.

While these houses once represented a focal point for families to reunite, they are now places which cause separation. I once met a Kosovar Albanian woman in London who had lived in the UK most of her life (no, not Dua Lipa or Rita Ora). She was married to a Brit and expecting her first child, but she told me how her parents were about to retire and eagerly waiting to move back to Kosovo. I asked her will they want to be living there on their own away from their grandchild? How will she cope not having gjyshja (“grandmother” in Albanian) to provide babysitting on call? Also, would her parents be able to deal with the threadbare Kosovan health system and life-crushing bureaucracy?

She said that's something she's been warning them but who’s to listen? Many people who idealise this retirement in their place of birth, only realise too late how different they’ve become having lived and worked in countries away from their birthplace, with expectations of what are considered acceptable behaviour and practice at odds with their old-but-new compatriots. The logistics and reality often eventually outweighs the dream.

The biggest question is this: if no one is living in these houses and are unlikely ever to be fully occupied, then what will become of these houses in the future? Often the children and grandchildren of the owners of these buildings have never lived in Serbia. Their only experiences of the village were initially ( as children) joyous - a place of summer holidays or family gatherings - with the safety of the village providing opportunities for frolics unavailable back ‘home’. But that excitement turns to boredom as they become older.

Later, as adults who have lived all their lives in cities in Western Europe, there’s no interest in wanting to uproot everything and ‘return’ to a village with no people in a country that is practically foreign to them. For the owners of these empty houses, trying their luck to recoup their losses by selling these palaces is futile – no one is interested in buying, so the future looks likely these villages will continue to be ghost towns. Not unlike those that were once the settings in the cowboy films my father used to watch.

If there is any part of the village that is growing in numbers, it’s the cemetery. As in life, so too in death: it’s all for going all out and one-upmanship here is taken to the grave. The final resting places for families are often huge crypts mimicking the style of the ghost houses the deceased once owned.

If Balkan villages are emptying of people, their graveyards often find the former residents returning for a final time. They now get tombs to match their McMansions.

Like the cowboy that my father wanted to be, these empty monuments to family, belonging and superficial wealth, ate my dust as I headed off into the sunset. Driving out of the village was once a painful goodbye for those who no longer live here. Today, these villages with their empty mega-mansions left me amazed at what lengths people would go to prove that they’ve ‘made it’, as well as the power of belonging. They say home is where the heart is, but it needs more than that, especially when the soul from these places have long gone. I wonder for all these people: was it all worth it?

The late Džej Ramadanovski here sings his Ljubenica (Watermelon) song, as featured in Kusturica's film Black Cat White Cat - it has the lyric that for his love interest he'll buy her "three houses bigger than America." A very Balkan dream!

Text & photos by Nick Nasev

https://www.nicknasev.com