‘I didn’t desecrate the grave I live in, it was already open’

With a thin pink quilt pulled around his shoulders and three rusty metal coffins to keep him company, Bratislav Stojkovic is spending another freezing night inside a tomb at a long-forgotten municipal cemetery in the southern Serbian city of Nis.

He and his friend, Aleksandar Dejic, are the only two living tenants of the “Old Cemetery”, once known for its precious, intricately carved tombstones, which have long since vanished.

“I have never stolen anything. I did not even desecrate the grave I live in, it was already open,” he says.