Archive for the ‘bosnia herzegovina’ Category
To start the year, here is a selection of eight books recommended for family historians in the English-speaking world with roots in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus:
Armenia
The Crossing Place, by Philip Marsden, 1993. This is subtitled “A Journey among the Armenians”. Marsden travels across the Armenian communities of the Middle-East and Eastern Europe to the Republic of Armenia but it would be wrong to think of this book simply as a travelogue, as it is more a reflection upon the survival of Armenia and the meaning of Armenian-ness in the Old World. Of course it touches upon the 1915 Genocide but equally it highlights the determined persistence and endurance of Armenian life.
Bosnia
Bosnia: A Cultural History, by Ivan Lovrenović, 2001. Most English-language books about Bosnia tend to be written from an outside perspective and to pontificate about the 1992-95 War. This book is one of the refreshing exceptions to that trend and is recommended reading for anyone with roots, whether Croat, Jewish, Muslim or Serb, in this part of the continent.
Greece
Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, by Juliet du Boulay, 1974. I like reading anthropological and ethnographical works for the insight they give into the everyday lives and mindsets of a people. This book covers every aspect of the lives of the villagers of “Ambeli” (a pseudonym), a remote hamlet on the island of Euboea (Evia). There is still continuity despite changing times, and this work will give the family historian a profound sense of the lives of their ancestors in rural Greece and, of course, of how their distant cousins back in the old land continued to live well into the latter half of the 20th century.
Latvia
Walking Since Daybreak, Modris Eksteins, 1999. This is a family story written by a Canadian Latvian academic but, at the same time, a history of Latvia in the first half of the 20th century and a rare view into the lives of the officially recognised Displaced Persons, those individuals and families who for one reason or another found their way into UN relief camps in Occupied defeated Austria, Germany and Italy in the period 1945-52.
Lithuania
The Lithuanians in Scotland, by John Millar, 1998. Unlike all the other books I have chosen for this list, this one is more about the lives of an Eastern European people in their host land than their native land. This book is an easy read and very good on the lives of Scottish Lithuanians and the difficulties they experienced in Scotland (such as anti-Catholic prejudice and being mistaken for Poles). As the title suggests, though, it will not give you much on the home country Lithuania (which was of course part of Imperial Russia at the time of emigration).
Poland
I might have chosen one of several works by the tremendous contemporary writer Andrzej Stasiuk. I have selected Dukla (1997). It’s imaginative non-fiction, reflections on the nature of being in the remote rural and mountainous Beskidy regions of Poland’s Podkarpackie province (once part of the Austro-Hungarian Galicia kronland). There are satellite dishes and there are motor cars, but there is also a strong sense that, beneath the superficial changes of modernisation and despite the impositions of the Communist era, peasant life in this part of the country at the end of the 20th century continued pretty much as was from previous centuries.
Russia
I couldn’t choose between two Great Russian Novels in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. These are Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1959) and Vasily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter (1994). The former is the greater work of art, but both cover a vast sweep of Russian history in the 20th century and capture the Russian experience in all its daunting multiplicity.
Serbia
A Serbian Village, by Joel M Halpern, 1956. This is subtitled “Social and Cultural Change in a Yugoslav Community”. While this might sound like a dry academic book, the author, an anthropologist, writes in fascinating detail about the particularity of daily life, culture and customs in the village of Orašac. Although by the 1950s life in the Šumadija region had already started to embrace modernity, there is still enough of traditional rural Serbia intact to make this book a great insight into the lives of peasant ancestors from continental Serbia.
Traditionally a Muslim marriage in rural Bosnia was primarily a matter of fulfillment of local social customs, not of formal recognition by the state or the Islamic authorities. In fact, nearly always such temporal or spiritual validation of a union merely sealed a fait accompli. In the former Yugoslavia, a couple, once wedded according to local custom, would attend the relevant municipal register office of their district and there obtain a marriage certificate; the civil ceremony was short and required only two witnesses, there were seldom guests present and the couple was simply meeting the legal requirements of the secular state. An Islamic ceremony might then follow in the groom’s home (not the mosque) with the hodža (or imam) blessing the marriage, but a great many couples dispensed with this religious ceremony.
Before WW2, some Muslim couples in Yugoslavia did not bother with the civic ceremony and therefore their marriage was not legally recognised by the state. Instead they would register their marriage with the kadi for the district, who would issue them with an Islamic marriage contract.
The genealogist might wish to note that a Bosnian Muslim marriage might not be legalised until weeks, months or even a year or more after the event (for instance, at the same time as registering the birth of the first child of the marriage, especially when the couple’s village was some distance from the municipal register office).
There was seldom a long engagement. The ideal wedding according to custom would be one at which there was a procession, a communal feast and an elaborate exchange of gifts, and of course this required careful planning which might well extend the engagement period. However, for reasons of expediency and economy, a significant number of brides were married swiftly “through the window” rather than through the door. What this idiom means is that the couple eloped, although not as the term is usually understood in, for example, Western Europe or North America. Often the elopement was an open secret in the village, and the groom’s family and not infrequently the bride’s were aware of the plans; the stylised elopement simply enabled the wedding to take place without the grand fuss of the feasting and the ritualised and expensive gift-giving. In the cases of genuine elopement, the groom would come to his bride-to-be’s bedroom window in the evening and she would steal away into the night. The couple would not be absconding, though – instead, they would go straight to the groom’s family home. The traditional residence pattern in rural Bosnia was heavily patrilocal, meaning that upon marriage the bride immediately took up residence in the groom’s house, which usually meant in her mother-in-law’s house (until such time as the groom had funds to build his own house). After the elopement, male kin of the groom would then visit the bride’s household, bearing gifts, to make peace.
Another facet of Bosnian Muslim relations in rural areas is a customary prohibition against marriage within nine degrees of kinship (this was true of Bosnian Christians as well). Of course not everyone had such an in-depth understanding of their ancestry or the often complex network of inter-relationships in the village, and the prohibition might be more observed in the breach. Nevertheless, the practical effect of this, in combination with the patrilocality, was that in small rural communities most women married outside their native village into the village of their husband. What this means is that the men in a small village tended to be native to it, while a majority of the married women came from outside. This is another feature of Bosnian Muslim life in the smaller rural communities which it is worth bearing in mind when researching your family tree.
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.
Bosnia and Herzegovina – BiH – is one of the few remaining places in Europe which are uncharted and unfamiliar to family historians in diaspora. It is also little travelled by tourists, at least beyond Sarajevo and Mostar and the important Catholic pilgrimage site at Međugorje. Visually the country is immensely stimulating but not immediately understood – it takes a few days to gather and process impressions and thoughts and make some sense of what you are experiencing.
Earlier this month I travelled from the Montenegro border crossing at Šćepan Polje, via Brod, Kiseljak and Vitez to Travnik, then back east through Zenica, Visoko, Sarajevo, Rogatica, Višegrad and beyond to the Serbian border at Kotroman. The most striking visual element is of course the prominence in the landscape of mosques (or džamije in what some guidebooks now euphemistically call “the local language”) and Muslim cemeteries. The latter are often sited on hillsides. The slim white grave-markers or nišani are elegant and, while many are simple and unadorned, others may be topped with a stylised representation of a turban or some other symbol such as a coffee pot. Islam requires prompt burial of the deceased and four or five sample grave-markers often lean together outside the cemetery ready to be purchased and put to use. The clusters of sleek gravestones reminded the childhood reader in me of the Hattifnattar in Tove Janson’s Moomin books.
The country is now divided into different entities, with Republika Srpska largely Serbian and the Federation segmented into a number of different cantons which are predominantly Croat and/or Bosniak (or Bošnjak – as most Bosnian Muslims prefer to be known since the War). However, it is incorrect to think of the country as having been neatly partitioned along religious or ethnic lines, and there is still much more mixing of population than media reports tend to suggest. The notion of cantons has been foisted upon Bosnia as if this borrowing from Switzerland could magic up the many privileges of the Swiss with their Catholic and Protestant religious, and French, German, Italian and Romansh language, harmonies, and their laissez-faire affluent burgher lifestyles. Reality in Bosnia is more complicated and not amenable to facile solutions imposed from outside.
But there is of course much ongoing outside influence. In predominantly Bosniak towns, the flow of money from Turkey and Saudi Arabia is apparent in the form of banks, airline advertisements, and investment in new mosques and medresas. Bosniaks have become re-Islamicised; or, rather, the young are embracing a Muslim identity that would have been foreign to the majority of their parents, grandparents and great grandparents in Tito’s Yugoslavia and even before WW2.
Meanwhile, in most towns in Bosnia the locals seem to have arrived at a pragmatic accommodation with one another’s faiths and nationalities. Mixed marriages were common throughout the former Yugoslavia and the bigger the town the larger their proportion. In the small town of Vitez, the population of which is roughly evenly balanced between Croats and Bosniaks, I ate lunch at the home of a Croat who had married a Slovenian and whose half-Russian aunt had married a Serb. This is the complex reality of Yugoslavia then and of BiH still.
The prospects for genealogical research in Bosnia and Hercegovina vary by place. If records survive, and were not destroyed during the various conflicts of the 20th century, it is usually possible to research Bosnian genealogies if one’s ancestors were Croats, Serbs, Sephardic Jews or, for that matter, Austrian Germans or other Imperial staff resident in Bosnia-Hercegovina during the period of Austro-Hungarian rule. The situation with respect to Bosnian Muslim ancestry is less straightforward, while Gypsy family history is regarded as all but impossible – registration of vital events by Gypsies was rare before the mid- or late 20th century and is unlikely to be complete even today.
Bluebird Research may be able to help you if you are in need of professional assistance with your family history research in Bosnia and is always pleased to hear from those investigating their ancestry in Bosnia. Please feel free to contact us for advice or an opinion on the prospects of success and the likely costs of research.
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
Mary Edith Durham was born in 1863, the eldest child of parents Arthur and Mary Durham. Her father, originally from Northampton, was a consulting surgeon in London. In the English decennial census returns, the family can be seen living comfortably, replete with domestic servants, at 82 Brook Street in the West End (in 1871, 1881 and 1891) and later at 20 Ellerdale Road in Hampstead (1901). Miss Durham received a private education before studying art at the Royal Academy (she is described as “artist, painter” in the 1891 census return) and then caring for her widowed mother.
Miss Durham’s life abruptly took an unexpected course in the early 1900s, when she undertook a trip along the Dalmatian coast to Boka Kotorska in what is today Montenegro. Here she discovered a lifelong passion for the southern Balkans, initially all-embracing but gradually developing into partisan advocacy for the Albanians. She wrote many books and articles about Albania, Montenegro and Serbia, ranging from travel to anthropology to politics.
In August 1931 she published a short piece called “Preservation of Pedigrees and Commemoration of Ancestors in Montenegro”, on the subject of ancestral awareness.
She recalled firstly how she had attended a Montenegrin Orthodox church service on All Souls’ Saturday (Zadušna Subota) at which the members of the congregation handed the priest a list of the names of deceased ancestors to be remembered and prayed for. Durham called the list a čitulja, which means obituary but in this context more accurately a necrolog (a list of names of the dead to be commemorated). This custom was found among the Montenegrins and Hercegovinians but, she wrote, not among the Serbs.
She then goes on to write:
“In the Northern tribes of Albania, all the men know their pedigrees – or knew them when I was there. I did not know then that the pedigrees were of any value, or I could have collected plenty. They go back mostly to thirteen or fourteen generations. Owing to early marriage, generations are rather short… In this district – and formerly in Montenegro – knowledge of pedigree is most important to prevent the possibility of committing incest by intermarrying with someone descended from the same ancestor. I expect that that was at first the sole object of preserving these pedigrees, and that praying for the names therein was a later and Christian idea… When I was in Njeguši in Montenegro, I was told of a couple who were just about to be married… The young man was from Bosnia. At the eleventh hour it was discovered he was her second cousin, his grandfather having emigrated. The match was at once broken off, and the girl was married against her will to another man, and the unlucky bridegroom left the country. I expressed sympathy with, and sorrow for, the couple. My informants were astounded: “On the contrary, we should be thankful the family had been saved from incest. We saw how necessary it is to keep pedigrees.””
These pedigrees, which appear to have been written rather than oral, were unlikely to comprise full reliable dates of birth, marriage and death, and were more likely a list showing the male line(s) of descent from an original paterfamilias. Even so, 13 or 14 generations is impressive: assuming 20 years per generation and dating from 1915, it means that the Albanians in questions may have had a record of their ancestors going back to the mid-17th Century.
The Ottomans conceptualised the population of their empire as three basic communities: the Muslims, the non-Muslim inhabitants and the foreigners (or Franks). In turn, the non-Muslims were divided by religion into the millets.
This view of the population informed the arrangements made to measure and monitor the people. Only Muslims could serve in the army. Their Christian and Jewish neighbours instead had to pay a kind of poll tax called the cizye or jizye, later replaced by the bedelât-ı askeriye, literally a tax in lieu of military service. The early 19th century Ottoman censuses were designed primarily to capture the necessary information to enable the state to conscript Muslim men into the army and to levy taxes upon the non-Muslims. Over the course of the century, the Ottomans endeavoured periodically to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their data, so as to boost army and reserve sizes and to maximise tax revenues.
Only males were counted in the census before reforms in 1878, as only males were liable to military service and taxation.
The Ottoman censuses were not defined regular (for instance, decennial) events taking place over a single night or weekend, unlike most of those in places like Britain and America. Rather, they tended to extend over two years and frequently longer. In due course, the census and civil registration functions merged into a single continuous ongoing recording of the population – the basis of this can be said to have been largely achieved by the mid- or late 1880s. This system was also joined up with the military, so that the army had a continuous feed of information for conscripting men into active service, the reserve and the local militia.
From the late 1850s, the census was also used to produce the equivalent of ID cards. The earliest of these was the vergi nüfus tezkeresi or population tax certificate issued to males, which recorded the holder’s obligations to the state, such as their tax liability.
From about 1878, this was replaced by nüfus tezkeresi or population certificate. This served for ID and had to be used in all interactions with the state and for travel purposes. The information on this population certificate was an extract from the sicil-ı nüfus, or nüfus defter, being the actual population registers created and maintained by the state. Muslims and non-Muslims were enumerated in separate registers. The registers included women for the first time. The register included name, age, place of birth, marital condition, religion, occupation, address and military status. Nickname and, in case of adult males, style of beard or moustache were also recorded for purposes of identification. Along side the population registers, a system of notifying and registering births, marriages, divorces, deaths and change of address was also implemented.
Between 1878 and 1885, the new system was gradually rolled out across much of the Empire. Provinces in Turkey-in-Europe which were not immediately covered included the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Shkodër, plus Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Cyprus, Hercegovina and the autonomous Eastern Rumelia. However, the Aegean, Constantinople, Danube, Edirne, Janina and Salonica provinces were covered, plus Ionia and all of western and central Asia Minor.
Finally, new regulations came into force between 1900 and 1902 that mandated the requirement to carry and present one’s population certificate. In due course, this was documenting so much information about the bearer that it became an ID booklet rather than card, known as the nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı or simply nüfus cüzdanı and still used in Turkey today.
Of course, an increasing numbers of Ottoman-born subjects of empire acquired, for protection or advantage, European passports. For instance, the Greek state was happy to assign Greek citizenship to all Greeks living beyond its borders who applied.
For those American family historians with Serbian ancestry, it is important to understand that the immigrant ancestors did not necessarily come from within the borders of modern Serbia. By logical extension, when planning research from America back to Europe, it is crucial to identify correctly the place of origin to be able to successfully investigate your family tree.
Serbs settled in various parts of USA – including some quite unexpected places – during the second half of the 19th century. The first communities developed in cities such as San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Chicago. Many Serbs worked on the railroads and in factories, and in the mining and steel industries, settling in places like McKeesport and Steelton in industrial Pennsylvania. However, there were also sizeable settlements in towns as diverse and dispersed as Douglas (Alaska), Butte (Montana) and Angels Camp (California) which might not be front of mind when one thinks of “typical” immigrant centres of population. Their draw was the gold-rush.
So where did the early Serbian immigrants come from? Some came from Belgrade or across the Danube in Vojvodina but these were very much a minority. The more common sources for Serbian emigrants to USA were:
- Boka Kotorska (the Bay of Kotor) and the Budva district of what is today the coast of Crna Gora (Montenegro) – these Serbs were known collectively as Bokelji
- Dalmatia – prominent in the early settlement in San Francisco
- Herzegovina – particularly during periods when the Austrian occupation intensified
- Krajina, on the Bosnian side of the Croatia-Bosnia border – many settled in Pittsburgh in 1890s and 1900s
If you are interested in research assistance in Europe to help you with your Serbian family tree, please get in touch. We operate successfully throughout Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. We also work in Republika Srpska and elsewhere in Bosnia Hercegovina. Please contact us for an assessment and estimate of costs.
Miroslav Krleža, the Croatian writer, said in his 1952 speech “On the Freedom of Culture” that the greatest native cultural achievements of Yugoslavia (as opposed to those of, say, its Austrian or Turkish heritage) were Croatian church buildings, the frescoes of the Orthodox Church in Serbia and Macedonia, and the stećci of Bosnia.
The stećci or mramorovi are the monolithic carved headstones of the medieval Christian cemeteries of Bosnia and Hercegovina (at that date known as Hum). They span maybe 500 years from the 12th century onwards, pre-dating the Ottoman conquest and surviving it for a while. Most headstones in Europe are flat slabs, but the stećak is a massive solid monumental chunk of stone, inscribed with Cyrillic characters and sculpted in relief, some featuring human figures raising a huge right hand. It is not possible to describe the expressive power they exert, but that power is undeniable.
How exciting would it be to find one of these gravestones for an ancestor! Sadly, that it is unlikely to be. Although Ivan Lovrenović writes in Bosnia: A Cultural History (Saqi, 2001) that an estimated 60,000 stećci survive, and the names of the deceased and even of the stonemasons may be known, the chances of continuity of surname and of researching a family back to the 15th or 16th century in Bosnia are all but negligible. However, the names on the stećci must certainly have their descendants, both Christian and Muslim, and any visitor to their ancestral homeland in Bosnia or Hercegovina should take the time to drop by at one of these graveyards – known as mramorje or groblje – and experience their power. Lovrenović quotes an inscription on one stećak and one hopes that the sentiment will preserve this and all the other stećci for many generations to come:
Be blessed he who passes by And damned he who damages it.The Ottomans in the heyday of their rule permitted no church bells to be rung out to call the faithful to prayer, or to celebrate a marriage service or other festival. Bells were removed from churches already in existence at the time of Ottoman occupation and frequently the most convenient buildings were promptly converted for use as mosques and a minaret raised for the benefit of the occupying imperial power. Churches constructed during the years of Turkey-in-Europe were built with towers empty of bells.
All empires of all political persuasions wax and wane and the Ottomans became famous for being the proverbial “sick man of Europe” during the 19th century. Adjacent powers – the Austrian and the Russian – started to eye Ottoman territory hungrily and of course the subject peoples of the empire began to nibble away at its fabric during the long drive towards self-determination and independence.
The Austrians occupied Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878 and formally annexed it in 1908. However, even before the Austrians marched in, the Christians of Bosnia had begun to wrest concessions and compromises from the enfeebled Ottoman state. Sv Ive Krstitelja (St John the Baptist) at the Franciscan monastery of Kraljeva Sutjeska, between Sarajevo and Zenica, claims the distinction, in 1860, of being the first church in Bosnia to raise a belfry and be able to ring bells to call to prayer its worshippers (in this case, of course, Roman Catholics) while still under Ottoman rule.
Old travel books may possess a condescending tone and often seem ill-informed and romanticised, but they are still worth reading for the occasional and sometimes surprising insights they may give about the lives or at least the lands of our ancestors. Writers on the Balkans invariably viewed them as half-savage and as the gateway to the Orient or the boundary between contrasting civilisations.
Maude M Holbach’s Bosnia & Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings is largely what you might expect from a Western traveller writing a volume of that title in 1910: sometimes patronising, sometimes gushing, but sometimes also keenly observant and genuinely responsive to the beauty of the Bosnian landscape and its people.
Especially striking is a passing comment she makes about the Roman Catholics of Jajce:
“The Bosnians are very religious, with the childish simple superstitious religion of the Middle Ages, and the Catholic people of Jajce still cling to the custom of tattooing a cross on their hands and breast. It is said it was introduced in Turkish times to prevent apostacy, for no Christian thus marked with the sign of his faith could go over to Islam without enduring the painful operation of removing the tattooed portion of the skin.”
Holbach also describes how the Croatians of Jajce do not stand at worship but “kneel or sit cross-legged on the ground in Oriental fashion”, often on the prayer mats or even handkerchiefs which they bring with them to church. Other customs apparently borrowed from Muslim neighbours included touching the forehead to the ground in prayer and raising the palms of the hands upwards to receive the blessing.
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.
Towards the close of the nineteenth century, Bosnia and Hercegovina were theoretically Ottoman territories administered by the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, which effectively annexed and occupied them in 1878.
A contemporary traveller wrote of the region as follows:
“The population consists of Mohammedan Beys, being Servians [Serbians] who adopted Islam to acquire or preserve a privileged position, and a Christian peasantry, almost exclusively Orthodox in Bosnia, but partly Catholic in the Herzegovina. Sometimes a family divided itself between Christianity and Islam so as to have friends on the right side whatever happened. In such case the members of the family recognise each other as relatives but generally use different names for the two branches conveying the same meaning in Slavonic [Serbo-Croat] and Turkish respectively – e.g. Raikovich and Jenetich (Rai and Jennet meaning “paradise”), Sokolich and Shahinagich (Sokol and Shahin both meaning “falcon”).”
(Odysseus, Turkey in Europe, Edward Arnold, 1900)
He then added in a footnote:
“It is often curious to observe the genesis of family names among the Southern Slavs. Most of them are very recent. Thus in one case the grandfather kept a tavern and was known by the Turks simply as Sharabji, “the wine man”. The son thought that the rising fortunes of the house required a family name and by adding a Slavonic affix to the Turkish designation became Sharabjieff or Šarabdžiev. The grandson who lived in days when Turkish words were considered barbaric and unpatriotic substituted for Sharabji the Bulgarian equivalent Vinar and became Vinarov. In many parts of Bulgaria a man and his wife still use different family names.”
Of course, these observations were made by an English-speaking Western traveller trying to understand the alien local societies and cultures with only the most limited language, reading and experience available to him. Nevertheless, it is always good to be reminded that family history research in South-Eastern Europe has such complexities, both so as to manage one’s own expectations and to remain alert to the need to be agile in one’s thinking when approaching research problems.
When undertaking Serbian family history research, it is important to understand two facts: that the current and historical borders of Serbia do not coincide and that Serbs have always lived outside the country. Therefore, you should not assume that your Serbian ancestors always lived on the territory of modern Serbia.
During the period within which most Serbian genealogists can hope to make decent progress in their family history research – approximately 1800 to date – the northern boundary of Serbia was formed by the Dunav (or Danube) and the city of Belgrade was therefore a border town. On the other side of the Dunav was Vojvodina, which was part of Austro-Hungary until WW1. Many Serbs, along with peoples of other nationalities, lived in the Vojvodina; they were known as prečani (“across the river”), sometimes translated as the transriparian Serbs. Vojvodina itself was divided into three segments: the Srem, between the Sava and the Dunav rivers; the Bačka between the Dunav and the Tisa rivers; and the Banat, the largest and most populated region which today extends across Serbia and neighbouring Romania.
Serbs also lived along the military border, the Krajina, established by the Habsburgs as a bulwark against Ottoman expansion. The existence of the Krajina explains the historic arc of Serbian settlement across northern Bosnia, Slavonia and the western Croatian-Bosnian border. Serbs have always lived elsewhere across Bosnia and Hercegovina (where they constituted between a third and a half of the population at different times throughout the 19th century) and, of course, also in Kosovo (“Old Serbia”) and northern Macedonia.
Serbia achieved limited autonomy from the Ottomans in 1815 and effective independence in 1830. The new state immediately attracted Serbs from the surrounding and still Ottoman regions of Bosnia, Hercegovina and Macedonia. New waves of immigrants arrived in Serbia periodically, for example in 1875 following an uprising in Hercegovina and in 1910 following the suppression by the Ottomans of an Albanian revolt in Kosovo. Serbs living in Austro-Hungary, such as those in the Krajina, were also drawn abroad – up to 300,000 Serbs and Croats are thought to have emigrated to USA from Krajina in the decade leading up to WW1. On American passenger lists, immigration papers and census returns, they may be described as Austrians or Hungarians after their citizenship in Europe. Their Orthodox religion, if recorded, will help mark them out as Serbs.
The history of the Serbs, even in modern times, is complicated by the kinds of factors mentioned above. It should be noted that in some areas many records of value to family historians were destroyed, deliberately or inadvertently, during, for example, the Balkan Wars in 1912/13, in WW1 and WW2, or during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As a result, success cannot be guaranteed.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research in Serbia and across Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia; research may also be possible in Kosovo and parts of Macedonia, depending upon the quality and detail of the background information available. We would be delighted to provide advice and guidance, as well as genealogical research services, and welcome all enquiries.
It has been suggested that the best way to understand the history of Bosnia is to read Ivo Andrić’s 1945 novel “The Bridge On The Drina”, to which is worth adding “The Slave Girl & Other Stories About Women” and “The Damned Yard”. His imagining of small town and rural Bosnia brings the region to life in a way that no number of political or social histories can. That is the mark of a great writer. As also is the fact that he is even-handed. He writes equally well and convincingly in the voice of the Turk, the Bosniak (often referred to as “Turks”, as per the Serbian vernacular), the Jew, the Gypsy and of course the Christian rayah, the Serbian Orthodox peasantry which constituted the largest population block (although not a majority) in the Bosnian countryside throughout the 19th century.
The eponymous bridge is that in Višegrad and Andrić’s chronicle spans the centuries from its construction in the 1570s to its destruction by retreating Austro-Hungarian forces in 1914. Andrić is particularly good at expressing the puzzlement of the native population, of all faiths, during the times of the Austrian occupation in 1878 and annexation of the province in 1908, at the Austrian compulsion to quantify and order everything, which is utterly alien to the Bosnian mindset and way of life. The strategic blowing-up of the bridge by the departing Austrians seems a senseless and wanton act to the townsfolk. Although this is the point at which the chronicle culminates, the bridge itself was restored and witnessed much else besides in the course of the 20th century.
Several times in his writings, Andrić touches upon the generational succession of families in Bosnia, in particular the dislocation which tends to follow prosperity or aspiration. This is one of the factors which led to emigration elsewhere within Bosnia (to the city of Sarajevo, for instance), or within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or further afield. The small town or village which had been the historical home of a family for decades or centuries could no longer contain it. In the short story “Zuja”, the narrator explains how the large and prosperous Aleksić extended family was scattered over the course of three generations:
“That little clan, which had become affluent, then rich, started, for that very reason, to disperse. The boys, then the girls, went off into the world and few of them returned… and fewer stayed behind to live, work and earn, as their elders had done… The population dwindled and moved away. And so it is today that there are Aleksićes in parts of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, and even far off around the world, but in town there is not a single one of them left.”
In nearly all jurisdictions in Europe, vital records of value to genealogists are not held centrally in a single repository but are decentralised. Modern civil registers of birth, marriage and death tend to be held at municipality level; older registers and other public records are usually in regional or national state archives. In this context, the first step in any family history research in Europe is to identify the place of origin and ensure you have the correct starting point for your investigations.
Where two or more places of any size in the former Yugoslavia shared the same name, it was usual to distinguish between them by applying a regional adjective by way of prefix. For instance, there are places called Brod in Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia which are known as Bosanski Brod, Slavonski Brod and Makedonski Brod respectively. Similarly, there are Bosanski Petrovac (in Bosnia) and Bački Petrovac (in the Bačka area of Vojvodina, Serbia). There are other ways of differentiating places, for instance there is also a Petrovac na Mlavi (on the river Mlava, in Serbia) and a Petrovac na Moru (on Sea, in Montenegro).
Of course, locally and in every day speech where there is little risk of confusion, Brod and Petrovac are likely to simply be referred to as Brod and Petrovac, and this also how they may be appear in many documents (such as passenger lists and immigration records) and family papers used in family history. Some care needs to be exercised, therefore, to ensure that the correct place of origin is identified.
Mitrovica is another town name which is not unique. There is a Sremska Mitrovica and a Mačvanska Mitrovica (also known as Srpska Mitrovica), which are located in the Srem and Mačva districts of Serbia respectively but are actually facing each other across the Sava river. There is also a Kosovska Mitrovica, a city in northern Kosovo which is effectively divided into an ethnic Albanian south and an ethnic Serbian north, the two sides of the city being separated by the river Ibar. The city has been deeply troubled since the 1999 Kosovo War and tensions still run high. On the southern side of town, the Orthodox church of St Sava was burnt down in March 2004 (one of 35 churches and monasteries in Kosovo to be destroyed and damaged by Kosovar Albanians in a single week of violence). The Serbian Orthodox cemetery has been desecrated and an estimated 70% to 80% of gravestones vandalised; it can only be visited safely under police escort. Whatever your politics and religion, if you feel any attachment to your own home town, or can imagine the destruction of its cemetery, and if you attach any importance to place, as all family historians do, you will understand the anguish of the Serbs of Kosovska Mitrovica.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research services throughout Serbia and the former Yugoslavia. The feasibility of research in Kosovo can only be decided on a case-by-case basis: for an opinion, please e-mail us the details you have.