Djala, sixty thousand empty houses: the village as indicator

An aunt of my late mother lived, until last year, in a village not far from Backa Topola, alone, in the house in which she had been born in 1933. When we asked her on one visit how things were in the village, she replied with a sentence I often repeat: “There is no problem with the village; it is only that we are not in it.” A ninety-one-year-old woman summed up in nine words what sociologists and demographers struggle to formulate over dozens of pages.

Her sentence came back to me when I read a Radio Television Serbia report on the village of Djala in Vojvodina, where, according to a local woman, only the old are left, some in their late nineties, while of children in their generation only six live in that street. The same story repeats in Mokrin, Lugavcin, Bajkovac, in Serbian, Vojvodina, Sumadija, eastern Serbian, Zlatibor villages. A Politika report (“Serbian villages emptied long ago”) mentions a figure of more than 50,000 empty rural houses, which means as many extinguished households with land and livestock. Other analyses, by very strict methodology, speak of nearly 60,000 such empty units.

Pivot to the sociological level. Djala is not Djala. Djala is a name that denotes a phenomenon. In rural sociology this is called “post-agrarian depopulation”, a process in which villages are dismantled not because agriculture is mechanised (mechanisation requires people, only fewer), but because the entire support infrastructure of the village (the shop, the clinic, the bus line, the school, the corner) withdraws to the municipal centre, and then onwards to the larger urban centre. When that infrastructure withdraws, the young have no reason to stay. When the young leave, the infrastructure has no reason to exist. The circle closes.

The figures that confirm this are not new. The Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia published that in the period January-November 2025 the negative natural increase stood at minus 32,374 inhabitants, with 53,283 children born and 85,657 people deceased in total. In the first quarter of 2026, the same source’s data show 14,166 live births and 25,566 deaths, meaning minus 11,400 in just three months. The projections of UNDP’s study “The Multi-Layered Nature of Depopulation in Serbia” by Vladimir Nikitovic (UNDP Serbia, 2022) suggest that the Serbian population, of just under 6.6 million in 2024, could shrink to 5.2 million by 2052. A difference of 1.4 million over 28 years is the equivalent of the combined population of Belgrade and Nis.

What Serbian society loses when it loses the village

I could now slip into a technocratic vocabulary, but there I would lose what matters sociologically. The village in the Serbian cultural imagination was not merely a productive place, it was also a place of social reproduction: of rituals, language, collective memory, of forms of solidarity that urban life does not reproduce. Djordje Tasic, Sreten Vukosavljevic, later Cvetko Kostic, Ratko Bozovic, and contemporaries such as Mina Petrovic in her book “Transformation of Cities, Toward the Depoliticisation of the Urban Question” (Institute for Sociological Research, Faculty of Philosophy, 2009), described the village as a “second system of social integration”. A second one, not a secondary one. When that second system breaks down, the first (urban, market-driven, atomised) takes over all responsibility, but not all functions. There a deficit emerges that is not visible in the statistics.

A concrete example: village funeral customs ensure that older people, especially those who have remained alone, have someone to call at the moment of serious illness or death. In the city, when an eighty-year-old is left alone in a flat in Vozdovac, the network does not exist. This produces the phenomenon of “silent deaths”, already written about in Serbian media (Vreme, on several occasions in 2024-2025), which city authorities only partly record. It is an example of how urbanisation without a rural network is not compensated for by an urban network, but by a void.

Now I must, as in previous columns, bring in the counter-argument. There is a reading according to which the depopulation of villages is a rational economic process, the consequence of modernisation, and any attempt to halt it is “rural nostalgia” that does not fit the reality of the European economy. Every European country has gone through, or is going through, a similar phase. Italy, Spain, Portugal have their own “repopulation” programmes for villages, with varying degrees of success. By that logic, the Serbian political discourse about “saving the village” is sentimental, not efficient. Partly true. The difference between Italian and Serbian depopulation lies in speed and depth: the Italian village has been losing population for decades, the Serbian one is losing it in years. The Italian village is simultaneously integrated into the tourist system, into winemaking, into culinary branding. The Serbian village has, with a few exceptions, no comparable secondary economy. The difference in speed means the difference in the possibility of timely response.

I return to my mother’s aunt’s sentence. “There is no problem with the village; it is only that we are not in it.” A sociologist who hears this must take both halves of the sentence seriously at once. The first part is politically inaccurate (there are problems with the village, many of them, from infrastructure to pensions to education). The second part is sociologically precise: without the population, the remaining problems have no subject. A village without people is not a village with problems, it is a territory without function. As long as Serbian political discourse does not learn to separate those two dimensions, “aid to the village” will remain a budget line spent on asphalt no one will walk on.

Djala is a metaphor precisely because it is not an exception. In November this year the Statistical Office will publish new annual data on natural increase, and they will be, as for the past eighteen years, negative. The fact that we will comment on them for a week, and then forget until next November, is also part of the same sociological story. What the statistics do not react to public attention with, public attention in time stops reacting to with statistics. From that cul-de-sac one exits only when the name of a village starts to be written as a warning, not as a reportage.