Archive for the ‘serbia & kosovo’ 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.
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.
Montenegro, Crna Gora, may well be the most beautiful land in Europe. Everywhere you encounter startling and dramatic natural landscapes. Furthermore, with the exception of certain stretches of coastline which have been despoiled by development – by ugly and insensitive recent hotel and villa building – and the sprawl around the capital Podgorica (late Titograd), the built environment is of great attractiveness and interest.
A journey south-eastwards on the southern side of Lake Skadar is a lovely illustration of this. As you leave the lakeside village of Virpazar where the Crnojević river enters the lake, the road starts to ascend and wind its way slowly up the mountainside; these hairpin bends continue as the narrow road pursues its path high above the lake through rocky terrain and ancient chestnut forests towards the Albanian border.
From the start one can see the old Serbian Orthodox monasteries on the islands which dot the lake margin on this side – Manastir Starčevo, Beška, Moračnik. The siting of monasteries on these rocky outcrops would have served two purposes – both a spiritual retreat from the secular world, and a hope of protection from the periodic threat of the Turks. Tiny single-cell Orthodox or Catholic churches are to be found around the Montenegrin villages on this side of the lake, frequently planted on the tops of peaks or in otherwise seemingly barely accessible defensive and visually arresting positions – every one demands a photograph. As you continue south-eastwards, in the distance across the lake on the Albanian side one can see the city of Shkodër, while here in Montenegro churches start to be interspersed with the modest mosques and delicate white minarets of the local Albanians; soon, these start to be preponderant. The villages of the Rumija mountains that overlook the stillness of Skadar Lake are little more than hamlets, yet each one, Christian or Muslim, has its own rightness and sense of belonging to the landscape.
It is with disappointment that the journey ends; a viewpoint is reached near the international border with Albania, after which the road turns sharply back on itself and heads inland towards Vladimir and ultimately the port of Ulcinj.
The modest population of this corner of Europe has survived the centuries in situ, eking out a slight existence and a still essentially unchanged way of life, despite the modern horrors of politics and nationalism. Some villagers will have made their way out, maybe to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, or across the border into Albania, or to find work in Germany, or perhaps even to USA. Bluebird Research can undertake professional family history research across Montenegro but, if we are honest, we do not expect ever to have a case from Rumija and perhaps that is how it should be.
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
The Jews of Belgrade were largely exterminated by the Nazis and their local accomplices between October 1941 and May 1942. The Nazis declared the city Judenfrei by August of 1942. Of course, as elsewhere in Serbia and throughout Europe, this was seldom entirely true – individual Jews managed to go in to hiding, or were concealed and protected by kind neighbours, or left Belgrade for the relative safety of an obscure village in the countryside, or fled while there was still time with view to returning later. Nevertheless, the great majority of the pre-War Jewish population of Belgrade was destroyed.
The Jews of Belgrade were both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, with the latter in the majority (as tended to be the case throughout the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans), forming approximately 80% of the overall community. Before the Shoah there were four functioning Sephardic synagogues and prayer houses in Belgrade. However, families were not necessarily religious – the Jews of Serbia were usually assimilated and often upwardly mobile and, as well as merchants and craftsmen, there were many shop salesmen and clerks, professionals and intellectuals.
Although the community was destroyed in 1942, there are excellent surviving records covering the period from the turn of the century up to the Holocaust. These are not online but in some cases have been digitised and can be interrogated locally. Other and frequently more informative paper files have to be called up in the traditional way in the municipal archives. If an individual or a family was established in the city, especially in the Stari Grad (“old town”) neighbourhoods such as Dorćol, we can usually find a very good paper trail for the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s up to 1941/42, detailing dates of vital events, occupations, residential addresses and so on. Such records often indicate connections elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia or abroad – a sojourn in Croatia perhaps, a wife born in another city with a thriving Sephardic community, or a parent from Sofia in Bulgaria.
If you are interested in Jewish family history research in Belgrade, Bluebird Research would be delighted to assist – please email us for an assessment and estimate of costs.
The very nature of the trade of a professional genealogist is to undertake research into someone else’s family history. As a genealogist, one is accustomed to researching one’s own tree and generally feels reasonably confident when visualising the past and imaginatively reconstructing the lives of one’s ancestors, based upon what one knows of local history and culture, the places where they lived and what they did for a living. At least that is certainly the case when one’s ancestors come from the same country and, as in my own particular case, the same county and often the same town.
It is of course different if you live in diaspora, if you are, for example, a resident of North America or Australia or South Africa with ancestors back in the unfamiliar old world of continental Europe. When, as a professional genealogist, one conducts investigations on behalf of such individuals into their family background in Europe, one brings to bear the wide experience of one’s previous research across multiple cases, the knowledge derived from reading and, in many instances, from travel; but most of all one has to have what Keats called negative capability. This is the ability to suppress one’s own personality and to project oneself into the lives of others, to try to think and feel the world through their eyes. One might argue that this is largely spurious but I do not think it impossible to gain practical insights into avenues of research from this kind of imaginative or lateral thinking. Certainly, one often finds that one becomes preoccupied with particular individuals or lines of a family being researched, as one wonders about their lives, their motivations, what prompted them to emigrate, for example, or how they managed to survive adverse circumstances.
David Albahari published in 1998 a book called, in English translation, Götz and Meyer*. His book is an essay in negative capability, an attempt to come to terms with the experience and unknowable inner life of participants in the terrible drama of the extermination of the Jewish community of Belgrade once Serbia had been forced to capitulate to Nazi occupation. Between April and July 1941 almost 9,500 Belgrade Jews had to register with the authorities. The Jewish men of Belgrade were mostly shot in October 1941, but the women, children and elderly were taken to the Sajmište concentration camp (in the grounds of a former trade fair on the outskirts of the city) in December 1941. The protagonists of the title are Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer, NCOs of the Nazi SS who operated the gaswagen (or dušegupka in Serbian) that liquidated the Sajmište camp Jews between March and May 1942, using the truck’s exhaust fumes, on daily or twice-daily trips (excepting Sundays) out towards Jajinci. What can one know of Götz and Meyer? Albahari presents them not as callous or psychopathic but as normal men carrying out a perhaps unpleasant but necessary duty for the greater good. Gradually over the course of the book they are used as a means of teasing out the last days and demise of the family Albahari doesn’t know, those lost in the Shoah:
“When I first tried to sketch out my family tree, it looked like… a blade of grass, like a bare tree, without leaves.”
He interviews an ailing elderly relative living in care but still able to record the names of multiple uncles, aunts and cousins, whose lives Albahari then researches as best he can using the surviving vital records of the Jewish community of Belgrade:
“My family tree now looked quite different, it had filled out with leaves and branches, and it was sturdier… I ought to have had 67 relatives, some of them close, others more distant… in fact I had only six, including the cousin in the old people’s home.”
The cousin passes away shortly after. The other five kin, “the last kernels on a gnawed ear of corn”, lived in Argentina, Australia, Israel and USA. Their average age was 80 and all were childless.
“I was an ear of corn with nothing but a few loose kernels left on it… when all of us died off, when our kernels fell into the washtub of time, nothing would be left from my parents’ families.”
Although ironically, perhaps, the book is an easy read – you can read it in two sittings – it is a serious and sobering reflection on persecutor and victim, as well as a personal journey in discovering and attempting to come to terms with the past and realising the significance of memory. It also makes one start to think about the ones who got away, and how; what role was played by chance or luck or circumstances, and what part by the initiative, or sheer determination, or instinctive will to survive of those Jews of Belgrade who somehow came through the Holocaust years alive, against all the odds.
*published by Vintage, 2005, in translation by Ellen Elias-Bursać
In the 1881 census for England, a five year old girl named Flora is to be found residing with three sisters, her mother Sophia and her father, the curate, Samuel Dickson Sandes, at The Rectory in Monewden, Suffolk. The living for the rural parish of St Mary’s was valued at £265 in 1868. The National Archives’ handy currency converter tells us that this sum would be worth about £12,110 in today’s money – not much but then it was a small and obscure parish. By the time of the 1891 census, the family has moved a little cross-county to The Rectory in Marlesford.
At the next decennial census in 1901, the family is living in suburbia, at St Paul’s Road, Thornton Heath, Surrey. Rev Sandes, now 78, is recorded as “living on own means”, so one assumes that he has retired from the curacy of Anglican souls. Flora is still at home, a 25 year old spinster, described, like her sister Fanny, as a correspondent. In 1911, the most recent census of England & Wales currently publicly available, the family is still at St Paul’s Road. By this date the Rev Sandes, aged 88, is describing himself as a “retired parson and barrister”. He may have become curmudgeonly with age, or perhaps was registering a minor objection to the exclusion of women from the franchise (in tune with the “No Vote, No Census” protest): either way, the census return, which is neatly completed in most respects, records against the Ages of Females simply “full” against his daughter Flora and the other women in the house (excepting his wife Sophia, who is an acknowledged 78). The census enumerator, one William Warman, has pencilled in the remarks “will not give ages” and “refuses to give ages and any further information”, his irritation almost audible.
And as for Flora herself, the column Personal Occupation says: None. Yet five years later Flora Sandes was a Captain in the Serbian Army.
Flora volunteered for overseas service immediately upon the outbreak of WW1 in August 1914. She was rejected by the Volunteer Aid Detachment but got in to the American Mabel Grujić’s Red Cross Unit on a temporary three-month stint and headed to Serbia. She then returned home to fund-raise before returning in 1915 to join the Serbian Red Cross. She served in Niš, caught typhus in Valjevo, was attached to the Serbian Second Army, and worked as a medical orderly in Salonica and Monastir before making the transition from nurse to soldier. Commissioned as an army officer, she fought at Kajmakčalan before accompanying the retreating Serbs on their long winter march across Albania to safety in Corfu and Bizerte (Tunisia).
After the War, Flora Sandes lived in Yugoslavia and married a White Russian officer named Judenič (later imprisoned and killed by the Nazis), before returning to England in her sixties.
Flora Sandes was one of hundreds of British women who volunteered and served as nurses in Serbia during WW1, at places such as Kragujevac, Mladenovac and Valjevo. Some served under the aegis of the Red Cross, others as part of the independent Scottish Women’s Hospital for Foreign Service. Most came from relatively comfortable and privileged backgrounds and the contrast between their early life experiences and those of the war must have been acute and unimaginable.
For those researching an ancestor or family member who was one of those women, there is a significant collection of records in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London.
Montenegro, or Crna Gora, is named after its “black mountain”. Mountain ranges bearing this name are of course common worldwide and in the former Yugoslavia there is another crna gora, being the Skopska Crna Gora of Macedonia.
Skopska Crna Gora is located north and north-east of the capital, Skopje, stretching up towards the Macedonian border with Kosovo. Its villages tend to be in the valleys of the fast-flowing mountain streams running south to the river Vardar. The villagers were peasant smallholders, growing the usual types of crop, including grape vines, suited to the climate and soil and, in some households, additionally grazing sheep in the mountain pastures.
Traditionally, the villages regarded themselves as being of either Serbian or Macedonian nationality. For example, Banjane, Čučer, Gornjane and Kučevište were Serb villages, while Gluvo, Ljubanci and Ljuboten were Macedonian. The differences – of language rather than culture – were exaggerated by the villagers, while the similarities between them were downplayed: for example, Serbs might jokingly refer to the Macedonians of the neighbouring village as “Bulgarians”.
The villagers were, of course, Orthodox. They celebrated a family slava, being the saint’s day specific to the male line of the family. In all Skopska Crna Gora villages, residence is patrilocal, meaning that upon marriage women move into the household of the man’s family. Generally, village society strongly favoured marriage to a partner from the same village, and certainly of the same nationality, but a bride might well find that she must make allegiance to a new household slava.
Both Serbs and Macedonians also celebrated their village slava. For example, the Serbs of the largest Crna Gora village, Kučevište, observed the village slava on Spasovden, being the feast day of Sveti Spas at Ascension, which is a movable feast taking place 40 days after Easter. Similarly, the Macedonian settlement of Gluvo celebrated the slava of Sveti Nikola annually on 22nd May. The churches in these two villages were dedicated respectively to Sveti Spas and Sveti Nikola, who effectively are their “patron saints”.
Some of the larger villages had a minor chapel as well as the main parish church. These chapels also had their special slava each year: for example, Kučevište has a second slava dedicated to Sveti Atanas each 31st January.
For more on the traditions of the Skopska Crna Gora, please refer to D B Rheubottom’s article “The Saint’s Feast and Skopska Crna Goran Social Structure” in the March 1976 issue of the anthropological journal Man.
For the English-speaking family historian with roots in an Eastern European country, reading English-language travelogues from the past is one way to develop a better understanding of the old country. True, travelogues view a country from a single perspective only, that of the privileged outsider who, on his or her travels, is unlikely to see or experience the country as a native does. Nevertheless, I believe there is much to be gained from historical travel writing and particular from reading a number of books so as to seek a more rounded composite picture of how a place seemed.
Unfortunately, with some exceptions, more recent travel writers rarely seem to be successful in capturing a country. They may be too self-regarding, or unconsciously supercilious, or concerned to avoid seriousness, so that they fall into the category of the ephemeral and lightweight.
There is only a modest literature in English on the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, so I approached Christopher Deliso’s “Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa” (Haus, 2007) with some excitement. Deliso is an American living in Skopje, married to a Macedonian; his travelogue covers his clockwise trip around the lakes of Prespa and Ohrid, through Greece, Albania and of course Macedonia itself.
It is probably accurate to say that I was disappointed by the book but, also, that I understood it and found it interesting despite itself. There are facets of the book which are not pleasing: the casual jibes at poor Albanians and their recent history, seemingly in the hope of raising an easy laugh; the over-intrusive self of the author; the way the book loses momentum midway and starts to peter out in an uncertainty as to its purpose and its audience. The author is described as having read Byzantine Studies at Oxford; it is right that a writer wears his or her learning lightly, but little learning makes it through to this book, which is a shame.
But still, the book catches something of the truth of the place. I can say this with confidence, even without having visited Macedonia. I have travelled in neighbouring Serbia and Bulgaria and I have seen equivalents of some of the things Deliso describes. More than anything else I think I can sense and respect Deliso’s feeling for Macedonia. There is something compelling about the Balkans, something very attractive; and something not at all what you would think if you relied solely on the media’s perennial accounts of the region (a subject superbly dismantled by Maria Todorova in “Imagining the Balkans”), in fact, quite the opposite. It is the humanity of the people and their way of life. To which one should add the roughness and variety of the natural settings of the Balkans, and the beauty of the Orthodox monasteries and churches, and mosques, in that setting. Finally, of course, countries such as Macedonia have yet to be smothered by the blandness of corporate capitalism and the homogenising spirit of the European Union. For the next 10 or 25 years, they will preserve that particularity which makes them fascinating to someone like Deliso or, for example, Alan Grant, whose Balkanology website better illustrates the compelling draw of the region than anything I could write. I am conscious that, if you are from Western Europe, part of this power is the otherness of the Balkans and that this exoticising of the Balkans is something Todorova also addresses in her work; but it also seems to me that the otherness is real and that recognising and valuing it is a valid experience for a person born and raised somewhere in Australia, Britain or North America.
So read Deliso’s book if you can, accept its limitations, and, if you have roots in this particular corner of the Balkans, try to get out there to see it for yourself.
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.
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.
It is still occasionally possible to see, when travelling around rural Serbia, surviving examples of the extended homestead – the main house and around its courtyard (known as an avlija) a cluster of secondary dwellings and structures. The traditional family structure was called the zadruga: it comprised an extended family of, for example, a man and his wife, living with their married sons and their children, or alternatively, two or more brothers and their wives and children. The head of the zadruga was the starešina, who would live in the main building with his wife (the stanarica). The other couples would sleep in simpler outbuildings known as vajati.
An average sized zadruga might be a household of a dozen or so individuals, although up to 25 or more members were not so rare when a starešina was in residence with two or three married sons all of whom had young families. When the starešina died, a new one, usually the eldest able-bodied son or brother, would take over. From time to time, one of the married sons or brothers would break away to set up his own zadruga.
The starešine collectively within its village made up the village council of elders, or kmetovi. The council used to be known as the opština but after WW2 this was changed to odbor.
Complex factors contributed to the slow decline of the zadruga – among them, the fragmenting of land holdings into less viable units, the running out of land which a break-away son or brother could claim to set up a new zadruga, declining birth and death rates, the rise of individualism and interest in more private nuclear family households, and the move to towns and the values associated with modernity which were inimical to the traditional structures. Today most Serbian households are nuclear and the head of a household is simply called a domaćin.
Stara Serbia, Old Serbia, was the unliberated rump of the country left behind inside the Ottoman Empire after the core of continental Serbia – the Principality or free Serbia – gained its independence from the Turks. While the Serbs and other Slavs referred to the region by this name, the Turks referred to it as Arnavutluk, on account of its Albanian (in Turkish, Arnaout or Arnaut) inhabitants.
The heartlands of Stara Serbia were Kosovo and Metohija, respectively regarded as the battlefield and the garden of Serbia. But Serbian settlement in the region has ebbed and flowed with political events, and from time to time during the Ottoman era, such as in 1690, there would be a mass exodus of the population northwards to safer parts of Turkey-in-Europe and beyond the Dunav (Danube) to Banat and elsewhere in the Austrian Empire. The times of Serbian emigration would coincide with times of Albanian immigration, so that the balance of the population in Old Serbia could swing over the course of the centuries, with an Albanian majority at times and a Serbian at others.
There was not a simple Muslim versus Orthodox Christian opposition, however, as a significant number of the Albanians, who in these parts were Ghegs, were Roman Catholic and referred to as Latins (and, indeed, some of them, members of the Klementi tribe, are thought to have fled north with their fellow Christian Serbs when Islamic rule became too oppressive). Of course, many Catholic Albanians converted to Islam over time. Again, as in other places and other contexts within the Ottoman Empire, we read of the Albanian Latins being torn between two faiths and cultures, trying “to bridge over the passage between the two creeds by adopting Mahommedan names, and thus passing for Mussulmans abroad, while they remain Christians at home” (G Muir Mackenzie & A P Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, Daldy Isbister & Co, 1877).
Of course, too, those Serbs locally who converted to Islam out of conviction, or for advantage, or for a quiet life, tended to assimilate with the Albanian population and would be regarded henceforth as Arnaouts (just as they became Muslim Bosniaks in Bosnia).
The Serbs of Old Serbia have always been in a double bind when not in a position of ascendancy. On the one hand, there is a pressure upon them to get out, applied by the majority Albanian population and inevitably internalised by the Serbs as a wish to escape from their invidious minority position and to be able to live in peace elsewhere. On the other hand, Serbs do not want to abandon their historic Stara Serbia: the more Serbs leave it, the fewer claims they will have upon it. This is the reason why Serbian governments have periodically encouraged return migration to and colonisation of Old Serbia.
If during the days of the Ottoman Empire the churches of the subject Christian peoples could not ring bells to call parishioners to prayer (see this blog), then how did the faithful know when to attend? In the days before pocket watches and public clocks, should we imagine a specially employed person rounding them up, or the pious telling the time by the position of the sun or being blessed with an innate homing instinct that would draw them to the church on time?
One traveller, the physician Adam Neale, writing circa 1805 à propos of Iaşi or Jassy, the capital of the principality of Moldavia, comments in passing:
“During the daytime, the clatter of the wooden mallets beating the tablets at the doors of the Greek churches, calling the people to prayers, the use of bells being prohibited in the Turkish provinces, produces a most disagreeable effect.”
(Travels Through Some Parts of Germany, Poland, Moldavia and Turkey, Longman & Co, 1818)
In this context, the “Greek churches” are the Eastern Orthodox churches of the Romanian and Russian inhabitants of Iaşi.
The “tablet” is the semantron, also variously known as talanton, klepalo (in Bulgarian and Serbian) or toacă (in Romanian). It can still be found, especially in monasteries, and is still used, even when bells are available, perhaps out of habit and tradition, perhaps out of continued assertion of Orthodox freedom of worship long after the centuries of Turkish rule.
In Serbian peasant families, surnames were often taken in the very early years of the 19th century. Say there were three brothers, Andrija, Pavle and Stojan, each of whom settled and married in or around the same village. Their families then took a patronymic as their surname, becoming respectively Andrić, Pavlić and Stojanović. The children of the three brothers therefore had different family names, and so on down each male line of descent, which in Serbian is known as a vamilija. Traditionally, kin within a vamilija cannot inter-marry, no matter how far down the lineage.
Each vamilija has its own patron saint and celebrates the saint’s feast day or slava. The slava is of central importance in Serbian tradition and, especially where a surname is common locally, individual families will be known and distinguished by their slava. The family’s patron saint does not appear in any official state or church records but, if it is known or can be found out, it can prove of assistance in identifying related families when undertaking genealogical research to locate surviving family in Serbia. Historically, too, each vamilija tended to reside in its own neighbourhood of a settlement, although in this respect it should be remembered that many Serbian villages are dispersed communities of scattered smallholdings, rather than concentrated and clustered in the manner of villages in many other places in Europe. Often, too, in rural areas (and Serbia was and still is very much a rural land) the vamilija will have its own burial ground (perhaps on a hillside, unconnected to the church), or section of a village cemetery.
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.
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.