A social phenomenon developing in southwestern Serbia, where Serbian men marry Albanian women.

More than fifty Serbian men from the municipalities of Sjenica, Novi Pazar and Tutin have during the past year married Albanian women, mostly from that country's region of Scutari.

The mountainous area of Serbia has largely been depopulated due to harsh living conditions, with women migrating to towns in search of education, work and partners there, while men have traditionally stay to tend to their land.

Now, when they increasingly face a life with few opportunities to find wives and start families, local matchmakers have decided to bring together Albanian women and Serbian men, an unprecedented but apparently successful idea, happening against the backdrop of ethnic turmoil and hostility in the nearby province of Kosovo.

The parents of the Albanian girls first visit the families of their future sons-in-law, before they give consent to the marriage.

The girls are Christian, although Catholic, but that doesn't seem to bother local Orthodox priests any more than it does their husbands, the newspaper reports.

Many couples already have children, who will hopefully grow up in a region with less tension, where their mixed ethnicity will not make newspaper stories and bring reporters to their doors.