Live With The Dead to Beat The Rent………………………….

To Beat the High Rents with the Living is to Live with the Dead

by Elysia McMahan

Do you find yourself constantly complaining about the cost of living? What if you could live for free?

Taking into consideration the intersection of poverty, sometimes the world’s poorest are  made to live in unlikely living environments.

The International Business Times reports that a 43-year-old homeless man from Serbia has been doing just that for the last 15 years – in a cemetery.

Bratislav Stojanovic, a former construction worker, decided to take up residency among the dead after getting robbed on numerous occasions by others living on the streets.

How does someone who lives in a cemetery all alone spend their time?

In a place with minimal interference or distractions, Stojanovic spends his days scavenging for candles and food scraps in the garbage. The candles enable him to stay warm on cold nights and he is happy that he has a place to rest where nobody bothers him, not even the police.

“I had a friend who also lived at the cemetery, but he left as his grave was damp,” he told the International Business Times. “I had a girlfriend, also homeless, but she’s gone. She died, but it is nicer to say that she’s gone,” he was quoted.

What appears to be a dark and lonely existence has become the norm for Stojanovic.

“I was afraid in the beginning, but I got used to it in time. Now I am more afraid of the living than of the dead,” he told Reuters. After so many years living as an outsider on the burial grounds, starving worries him more than anything.

He feeds on scraps he finds in the city’s dumpsters, which apparently isn’t all that bad. “It’s amazing what people throw away,” Stojanovic says.

Living with the dead may seem like quite the lifestyle adjustment, but Stojanovic is not the first one to make his home in a cemetery. Last year, Oddity Central reported about an Argentinian woman who moved into her deceased husband’s mausoleum because she couldn’t bear not being without him.

And in Manila, there are nearly 10,000 homeless people living as cemetery dwellers. The population has become so large, that’s it’s almost a small village within itself.