The houses on a mild green slope near Smoljinac are small, with big windows and flowerpots. They look like perfect summer cabins. Only the crosses on the roofs and the obituaries on the doors shed an ominous light on the scenery.
The interior is pretty much the same: a table, a couple of chairs, pictures of the family, the deceased and patron saints. Flowers inside and outside.
The houses - around 100 of them - with white, yellow and baby- blue facades and bright-red roofs, make up a peculiar site in eastern Serbia - the village of the dead.
Villagers from Smoljinac, about 100 kilometres east of Belgrade, happily recall a truck driver who pulled over for a night and in the morning walked to the nearest house to ask for a place to have cup of coffee. The man had the shock of his life when he realised he was stepping on gravestones and knocking on grave houses.
"The poor man thought the entire village died," one villager laughed.
Many other cemeteries around Serbia, and especially near Belgrade, can boast an occasional gravehouse or two. But Smoljinac is the only village with so many houses in one graveyard.
Unlike the City of the Dead in Cairo, where people began living on graveyards as they had nowhere else to go, the Serbian village of the dead is not a product of necessity nor it has any historic tradition. It is just a ways to show off one's wealth or good fortune - usually built by labourers who earned well working overseas.
Villagers say that the custom of building houses instead of tombstones began in the late 1960s when a labourer who had worked overseas returned home and decided to build a magnificent mausoleum for himself.
Soon, others followed. The result is a "village of the dead," an entire cemetery with more houses than tombstones.
Out of 2 500 people living in Smoljinac, more than 1 000 still work in Germany, Austria, Denmark or other Western countries. Their houses in the village are grand, with plaster eagles on the fences, gilded doors and lawns with dwarfs and little fountains.
In front of the houses, luxury cars are parked. A stark contrast to the old houses with barns for corn, small patches of land and old and used cars that pass by occasionally.
"They do not live here, they just come every once in a while to bury their dead," one elderly villager told the German Press Agency dpa. "And those houses just stand empty or old people live there waiting to die."
Smoljinac is among the oldest places in the area. The first mention of the village dates back to the 14th century. In the second half of the 20th century, people began leaving the village en masse in search of a better life.
The money they have earned abroad was sent to their families in Smoljinac to build houses in kitschy "gastarbeiter" (guest worker) style.
Some of the houses are built like small castles od chapels, with towers completely uncharacteristic to Serbian architecture. Others have Greek facade or signs on it like "Dear Mrdza", "Vlada" or family names or even tombstones set on the exterior wall of the house.
Many have a small porch in front for the families to gather on vigils. The porches are filled with candles and plastic flowers. On the glass doors, obituaries and last farewells are posted.
"You can take away the man from the country, but you can not take away the country out of the man," a middle-aged worker, Cira, told dpa
With the global recession, workers abroad stopped building grand houses, but the gravehouses are still being built. The most recent is from 2009. Another is under construction. The deceased are placed below the foundations of the house. The inside is filled with memorabilia.
"In a way it is not such a bad idea," said Kris, a film student from Norway. "If it rains on the funeral, you can always hide inside the house." - Sapa-dpa