Archive for the ‘banat’ Category
The Banat is one of the regions of Europe known as contact zones, where peoples of different ethnicity, religion and language co-existed, and to an extent still co-exist – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes uneasily, as is the case the world over.
Imagined as a Venn diagram, the Banat is perhaps a natural intersection for the Serbs to the west (who had pushed north to escape the Ottomans) and the Romanians to the east. However, there is also an artificial historical factor, caused by the ruling Habsburgs’ intervention and planned settlement of the land in the 18th century and more natural immigration of Imperial subjects in the 19th century. The majority of these were German speakers – they became known as Swabians, although Swabia was only one of various German regions from which they came. In addition to the Germans, the Banat received, among others, Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Swiss and Ukrainian settlers – mostly but not exclusively Catholics (there were also Protestants of different persuasions, among them again many German settlers). And further broadening the mix of peoples in the area were Jewish merchants and professionals, Austrian civil servants, and Gypsy (locally Tsigani or Ţigani) settlements.
Resources and professional genealogical research services for those with German Banater ancestry are well-established. In the wake of WW2, rightly or wrongly, the Germans in Yugoslavia and Romania became persona non grata. The descendants of the Banat Germans now live in Germany, in Canada, in USA and elsewhere and, like all displaced and diaspora peoples, show a keen interest in their roots (roots which, of course, pass through the rich black soil of the Banat and extend beyond it to Baden and Lorraine, Westfalen and Württemberg).
However, Bluebird Research, as well as undertaking German genealogy in Serbia and Romania, can assist with your genealogical research in the Banat whatever the nationality or religion of your ancestors. We work in both Romania and Serbia; we are just as interested in the cultural and social history of the Hungarians and the Slovaks of the Banat; we have a special interest in the Jewish communities, now mostly lost; and in the Serbian Orthodox families, many of which can trace their histories back to “continental” Serbia (for instance to Šumadija), or to Herzegovina, or to Montenegro.
If you have ancestors from the Banat, and would like professional assistance with your family history research, please get in touch with us for a free assessment and estimate of costs. Research is affordable and success rates are generally high.
The Austro-Hungarian, or Habsburg, Empire, also known as the Dual Monarchy, collapsed and fractured during WW1 and new nation states emerged from its ruins, including of course the modest Central European state of Austria itself.
It is difficult to argue against today’s received opinion that empires are bad things and that it is wrong for one people to rule over another. In practice, though, the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire was largely benign. It is true that from time and time, and perhaps particularly although by no means exclusively in areas under Hungarian rule, emerging nationalisms were suppressed; sometimes this was by show of force, but by the late 19th century the Empire had become largely a bureaucratic organism.
The great elegist of the Empire, Joseph Roth, does not attribute the collapse of Austro-Hungary to the rise of Yugoslav and Romanian and Czechoslovak nationalism, but to the overweening pan-Germanic nationalism which was to have such devastating consequences for Europe.
In his 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by John Hoare, pub Granta, 1999), the character Count Chojnicki — a cipher for Roth himself — prophesied before the outbreak of WW1 that “Austria will perish at the hands of the Nibelungen fantasy”1. “It is the Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan-clad Jews from Boryslaw2, the horse traders from the Bacska3, the Moslems from Sarajevo, the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing our national anthem “Gott Erhalte”, while the Germans in the Empire sing German martial and chauvinist tunes. Similarly, the narrator and protagonist, Trotta, writes of the “tragic love which the Crown Lands4 bore to Austria”:
“The gypsies of the Puszta5, the Huzulen6 of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian7 tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna8, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakei9 in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge10, the millers and coral dealers of Podolia11: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria.”
After WW1, reflecting on the demise of Austro-Hungary and the mediocrity to which defeated Austria had sunk, Chojnicki bemoans “the fatheads from the Alps and the Sudeten Germans, those cretinous Nibelungen… It was not our Czechs, our Poles, or Ruthenians who betrayed us, but the Germans, only the Germans, at our very heart.”
- Nibelungen: mythological nonsense popularised by Wagner
- Boryslaw: Boryslav, a small town now in Ukraine
- Bacska: properly Bačka, a region now largely in northern Serbia
- Crownlands: provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Puszta: the steppes of the Alföld, the great Hungarian plain
- Huzulen: the Hutsuls, a Ruthenian or western Ukrainian people
- Swabian: 18th century German settlers in the Banat in northern Serbia and adjacent Romania
- Osman Sibersna: a phrase not properly translated into English from the original German language die osmanische Sibersna but presumably referring to Ottomans of Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Hanakei: the Moravian people of the Haná region around the town of Olomouc, Czech Republic
- Erzgebirg: the Krušné Hory mountain range, also now in the Czech Republic
- Podolia: here western Podolia is meant, being the region around the city of Ternopil‘, now in Ukraine
The Bunjevci do not feature much in Western commentaries on the complexities and controversies of the former Yugoslavia, which is complicated enough in ethnic and religious terms for most observers without going into granular detail.
Sometimes they are described as “Roman Catholic Serbs”, on the grounds that they are Catholic and (mostly) live within the borders of Serbia. However, most of the Bunjevci do not consider themselves to be ethnically Serbian. Because of their affiliation to Catholicism, over time a considerable number have come or been encouraged to think of themselves as Croats. However, a significant proportion of the people regard themselves simply as Bunjevci, a Slavic tribe with roots in Herzegovina who, some time in the 16th or 17th centuries, relocated to the Bačka region of Serbia (the land between the Dunav – or “Danube” – and Tisa rivers in the northern province of Vojvodina) and adjoining Hungary.
Today they form a minority population in the Serbian municipality of Subotica, especially around the village of Ljutovo and nearby Tavankut and Mala Bosna (“little Bosnia”). The villages sit in a wide open flat agricultural landscape under a massive sky with distant horizons. These villages are typical of those of Vojvodina – linear, built around a wide central road, which the traditionally low, well-spaced houses face narrow end on, with maybe an ancient stork’s nest on its traditional telegraph pole. In the yards there is likely to be an ambar, an open drying shed for maize cobs, or a hay rick, or maybe a small old tractor or an ancient bicycle. The villages have at least two names each: for example, Ljutovo is also known as Mérges in Hungarian. At either end of the village, there will be a yellow “city limits” road sign, giving the village name in Serbian in both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts and in Hungarian.
In July 2003, while staying in Timişoara in Romania, I visited the village of Vinga on the main road north to the city of Arad. The most noticeable feature of Vinga is its imposing Roman Catholic church dedicated to Sfânta Treime (the Holy Trinity). The church was built in 1892. What is unusual, beyond its scale in relation to the size of the village, is the fact that it was founded not by Hungarians or Romanians but by Bulgarians. And, of course, that these Bulgarians were not Orthodox but of the small Catholic minority.
The Roman Catholic Banat Bulgarians, such as those in Vinga, arrived and settled in the Banat region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the C18th. They had originated in the Chiprovtsi district in Bulgaria from whence they arrived in Vinga, via the Oltenia region of Romania, in 1741, escaping the Ottoman Empire and taking advantage of the privileges offered by the Habsburgs to colonists in the Banat.
After World War One and the partition of defeated Hungary at the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the Banat was divided between Serbia and Romania, and Banat Bulgarians found themselves of either side of the new border. Some still remain in villages such as Ivanovo and Konak (both in Serbia) and Breştea and Dudeştii Vechi (in Romania), but many have moved to cities such as Arad and Timişoara, removed to Bulgaria, or emigrated to Hungary and USA.
The Bulgarian population of Vinga has dwindled. According to the 1880 Austrian census, there were 3,543 Bulgarians out of a total village population of 4,796 (74%). At the time of the Romanian census of 2002, this had fallen to 512 out of a population of 6,388 (8%) and the Bulgarians are now outnumbered not merely by Romanians but also by Hungarians and Roma.
As well as Romanians and Serbs, there are Croats, Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks and Ukrainians, among others, on both sides of the current Serbian-Romanian border and the Banat remains a fascinating ethnically mixed supranational region.