One mountain, two villages, and a familiar story of emigration. In many rural parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, young people are few and far between.
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As All Saints’ Day approached, Dubravka Jurisic sat down in her home in Straza and counted its residents.
She ran a finger down the handwritten pages where for years she has kept a record of births, deaths and who lives where in this village on the slopes of Mount Majevica, in the far northeast of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reaching the end, she declared: “Seventy-one people currently live in the village.”
That’s less than half the number counted the last time Bosnia held a census, in 2013. Then, authorities registered 188 residents of Straza, part of Srebrenik municipality, though census totals can include Bosnian citizens who have lived abroad for years. In January 2017, Jurisic made her own count: 138.
Between 1991 and 2013, the population of Srebrenik municipality as a whole shrank from 40,882 to 39,678. The town of Srebrenik itself grew by roughly 1,400 residents. The villages, in other words, are emptying faster than the town.
Those who remain are, by and large, elderly. While Srebrenik municipality is majority Bosniak, Straza is Catholic Croat. Many of its residents hold Croatian passports, easing their departure since Croatia joined the European Union in 2013.
“Before the war, there were about 100 unmarried young men in the village,” said Jurisic, 52, referring to the 1992-95 war in Bosnia during the collapse of federal Yugoslavia. “Today we don’t have a single one.” According to Jurisic, the youngest resident is already a teenager.