The village of Smoljinac, around 100 kilometres east of Belgrade, in a fertile plain along the Danube river, is home to around 1,800 people, many of them elderly.

As in most of the region, a majority of its younger population went to work abroad in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly in Austria, sending remittances that allowed village to prosper.

"Over 70 percent of the village population is abroad," said Milomir, a Smoljinac-born mechanic from the nearby town of Pozarevac.

Over a million Serbs are currently living and working abroad, thanks to waves of emigration between the end of World War Two and the 1990s. In 2015, remittances to the Balkan country amounted to 9.2 percent of national output.