Geographically lying in the heart of the Balkan peninsula, the small town of Svrljig is acting as the capital of a relatively small Serbian land surrounded by exactly 38 villages that are, demographically speaking, living their lives on the edge of extinction. In just half a century, the human population of the area is more than halved, with more and more 'haunted-like' villages containing more empty houses than those with smoked winter chimneys, in which more people die than are born. The past of the area went through numerous changes over time and was pretty colorful, to say the least. Like everywhere else, ever since the written literacy spread its wings only millennium ago, the history of Svrljig is pretty well documented ever since the great Schism of the 11th century, and we pretty much know what it was like to live here down to that time. But history goes even further in the past—to those times we know little about and all we have is a ruin here and there we can tr...