Archive for the ‘czech & slovak’ 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 first waves of Greek Catholics – mostly Carpatho-Rusyns or Ruthenes, but some Slovaks and Hungarians – arrived in USA circa 1868 to 1870, mostly from what was then NE Hungary and within a few years also from the Galicia in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy. The most significant early settlements, all well-established before 1890, were in the American towns shown below (with the archeparchy or eparchy from which they obtained their priest given afterwards in brackets):
Freeland PA (Munkács)
Hazleton PA (Munkács)
Jersey City NJ (Lemberg)
Kingston PA (Eperjes)
Minneapolis MN (Eperjes)
Olyphant PA (Eperjes)
Scranton PA (Munkács)
Shamokin PA (Peremysl)
Shenandoah PA (Lemberg)
Wilkes-Barre PA (Munkács)
The Greek Catholic eparchy from which the parish priest was taken may indicate something of the majority origin of the parishioners – i.e. Eperjes (today Prešov in Slovakia), Munkács (now Mukachevo in Ukraine), Lemberg (L’viv, Ukraine) and Peremyshl (Przemyśl, Poland). However, it must be emphasised that these ecclesiastical districts are adjacent to one another and do not heed international borders. For example, an immigrant from Peremyshl eparchy may have been born equally in what is today Poland or in Ukraine.
Greek Catholic communities to develop throughout the 1890s and beyond, especially in Pennsylvania (for example, parishes were formed in Audenried, Braddock, Freeland, Lansford, Johnstown, Leisenring, Mahanoy City, Mayfield, McKeesport, Minersville, Mount Carmel, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Ramey) but also in New York State (Brooklyn, Buffalo and Yonkers), New Jersey (Passaic, Perth Amboy and Trenton) and Ohio (Cleveland).
The Ruthenians or rusyny are a Slavic people occupying the eastern Carpathians and observing none of history’s changing international political borders. Many Ruthenes emigrated to North America during the decades before the First World War, although the use of “Ruthene” or “Ruthenian” in, for example, American and Canadian passenger lists and immigration records of that era also referred to the Greek Catholic Ukrainians of Galicia. Today, the Ruthenian homeland is divided between Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine, with most living in the Ukrainian Zakarpats’ka oblast’.
The rusyny were originally Eastern Orthodox but the majority of communities converted to Greek Catholicism at different dates after 1596. David Buxton’s The Wooden Churches of Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1981) describes in great detail and, with black and white photographs and plans, the beautiful traditional blockwork timber churches built by the Boyko (or Bojko), Lemko and Hutsul ethnic groups throughout this region.
The churches of the Boyko and Lemko are orientated similarly and share the same basic tripartite structure of a western narthex; the central nave or naos, where the congregation stands; and, separated from the naos by the iconostasis, the eastern sanctuary, which only the priest may enter. In Boyko churches, a dome is raised above each of the three sections but distinctively with the central dome, the one above the naos, raised higher than the others. The churches tend to be small and symmetrical, and to have an external gallery (opasannya) on all sides. The bell tower is a separate structure standing to one side. Lemko churches, on the other hand, are usually larger and grander, and are distinguished by the western section – the narthex – being topped by a tall tower (often a bell tower), giving them a very different profile.
Hutsul churches are cruciform, adding an additional cell either side of the central naos. They may have a single central dome, or a dome additional on each of the other four components. As with Boyko churches, there was often a covered gallery around the whole building and the bell tower stood separately.
Wooden buildings, no matter how well constructed, are subject to destruction by fire and, of course, are vulnerable at times of war and conflict. Many striking Carpatho-Rusyn wooden churches have been irretrievably lost and others moved to the open-air ethnological museums or skansens. However, it is still possible to see late 17th, 18th and 19th century wooden churches at their original sites in the Ruthenian lands of SE Poland, NE Slovakia and Western Ukraine.
Hungary became an equal partner with Austria in the Dual Monarchy following the 1867 Ausgleich, or compromise. Ironically, Hungary, which had been struggling for national self-determination and parity of recognition, then pursued policies which, in trying to consolidate its own nation state, failed to recognise properly the rights of the national minorities within its borders.
A policy of magyarisation was pursued vigorously, with view to welding all regions and peoples into a single nation state, as had been achieved in, for example, France. However, unlike France, Hungary contained within its border almost entire nations, such as the Croat and Slovak, and very significant populations of, for example, Romanians and Serbs living in regions very sparsely populated by Hungarians. The magyarisation project was therefore a doomed enterprise and its measures – for instance, to make Hungarian the exclusive official language of state and the language of instruction in schools, with church services to be held and parish registers kept in Hungarian – quickly aroused resentment and opposition.
The pressure upon non-Magyar Hungarian subjects to assimilate included pressure to change patently non-Hungarian or insufficiently Hungarian surnames. The legal process of change of name was simplified to the submitting of a petition. The fee was reduced from 5 forint to 50 krajcár (half a forint), meaning that poverty could not be pleaded as a good reason to retain one’s true name. These cheap “shilling names” were adopted by many among the professional and business classes. Robert Seton-Walsh, writing in his Racial Problems In Hungary of 1908, states that the “demoralising custom” of change of name “has played havoc with the family history of the Hungarian middle classes; and few countries will supply such a puzzle to the genealogist of the twenty-second century”.
Among the examples he gives:
the Oriental scholar Hermann Bamberger taking the name Ármin Vámbéry; the banker Eierstock taking the name Tőkőlyi; the historian Frankl taking the name Vilmos Fraknói; the ethnologist Hundsdorfer taking the name János Hunfalvy; the painter Lieb taking the name Mihály Munkácsy; the banker Löwenmuth taking the name Báthori; the poet Petrović taking the name Sándor Petőfi; the literary critic Franz Schedel taking the name Ferenc Toldy; and the politician Weinberger taking the name Soma Visontai.
The campaign intensified and was particularly directed at those in official positions, such as local authority civil servants, school teachers, railway employees and post office staff, with a clear implication that those not complying could at the very least not expect promotion within the service. Seton-Walsh also cites a document issued by the Royal Inspector of Schools showing exemplary official changes of name among teachers in Bihar county in 1881, designed to encourage colleagues to follow suit:
August Bruckenthal of Haimagi taking the name Bihari John Modora of Olosig (known as Érolaszi in Hungarian) taking the name Tinodi Nicholas Radovich of Cuzap (Középes in Hungarian) taking the name Keti
Urban German and Jewish Hungarians – who of course were not pushing for their own independent nation state as the Croats and Slovaks were – assimilated more readily than the rural populations of Romanians and Slavs and those family historians with German and Jewish roots from Hungary should be alert to the possibility of a change of name in the nineteenth century whenever research results are not achieved under the expected family name. However, anyone with ancestors from Hungary should be mindful of the change of name campaigns and their possible impact upon their family history research.