Croats

“ Taken as a whole, the face is wanting in the power and massiveness of the Teutonic. Contrasted with the Serbs, the Croats are neither so tall nor so finely proportioned; their countenance is less open, beauty rarer. ”

“ At the fall of the Empire came the Goths, then the Avars, who, for two centuries, burned and massacred, and turned the whole country into a desert. ... In 630 the Croats began to occupy the present Croatia, Slavonia, and the north of Bosnia, and in 640 the Servians, of the same race and language, exterminated the Avars and peopled Servia, Southern Bosnia, Montenegro and Dalmatia. The ethnic situation which exists to-day dates from this epoch. ”

“ The Croats on the Save and its tributaries naturally expanded westward and aspired to closer connection with the sea where their struggle with the remnants of Roman civilization and a superior culture absorbed their energies. They developed out of their tribal state more quickly, while the Serbs, further inland and amid more difficult surroundings, developed more slowly. ”

“ Already there have been manifestations of friction between the Serbs and the Croats and between the Serbs and the Slovenes, to say nothing of the open hostility which exists between the Serbs and certain Montenegrin factions, to which I have alluded in a preceding chapter. It should be remembered that the Croats and Slovenes, though members of the great family of Southern Slavs, have by no means as much in common with their Serb kinsmen as is generally believed. Croatia and Slovenia have both educated and wealthy classes. ”

“ Roughly speaking, the eastern half of the peninsula is held by the Bulgarians, some 5,000,000 in number, the western half by the Serbo-Croats, of whom there must be about 8,000,000. This is the most divided of the Slavonic races; its members profess three forms of religion and use three alphabets—the Serbs and Bosnians being mostly Orthodox and using the Cyrillic alphabet, but including many Mussulmans; the Croats being Roman Catholics, writing with Latin letters; and the Dalmatians also Roman Catholics, but using, some of them, the ancient Glagolitic script for their Slavonic liturgy. ”

“ It is only within the last few years that a movement has taken place, the object of which is to reunite Serbs and Croats into one nation and eventually into one state. The movement originated in Serbia, the Serbs maintaining that they and the Croats are one people because they speak the same language, and that racial and linguistic unity outweighs religious divergence. ”

“ Croats insist on the title Jugo-Slavia; Serbs are inclined to drop it and revert to the name Serbia. The Germans during the war are said to have promised the Croats to form the German counterpart of the Allies' idea of Jugo-Slavia, and had Germany and Austria won, a new constituent of Central Europe was to have been inaugurated with its capital of Zagreb. The name Jugo-Slavia was familiar to the Croats and popular with them before the Serbs adopted it. The Croats think that because they are more educated than the Serbs they should be the dominant party in the government of the new State. ”

“ The later Byzantine historians, full of classical lore, sometimes call the Serbs Τριβαλλοί after the Thracian tribe, which occupied in antiquity part of modern Serbia, and the king of which is brought on the stage and made to talk broken Greek in the Birds of Aristophanes. Yet, despite this false etymology of their name, Constantine Porphyrogenitus himself admits what was doubtless the fact, that the Croats and Serbs were “subject to none.” ”

“ Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars—they have good and evil qualities so different that one must take them separately, and perhaps it will be more instructive to compare them with each other. The Slovenes need not detain us; they are a small people occupying a surprisingly large area ”

“ Gradually they have come to reckon themselves as Croats, owing to their priests who come from Croatia. They are all big men with luxuriant moustaches.
There is a district in southern Russia, near the Black Sea, which is called New Serbia. It is the fertile country that was chosen by 150,000 Southern Slavs when they preferred, in 1768, to go into exile rather than change their religion, like the Bunjevci, the Šokci and the Krašovani. They preserve some traces of their origin, but can no longer be considered Yugoslavs. ”

“ In the 7th the Serbo-Croats invaded the north-western regions (Croatia, Servia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro and northern Albania) ; they expelled or assimilated the Illyrian population, now represented in Dalmatia by the slavonized Morlachs or Mavro-Vlachs, and appropriated the old Roman colonies on the Adriatic coast. At the end of the 7th century the Bulgars, a Turanian race, crossed the Danube and subjected the Slavonic inhabitants of Moesia and Thrace, but were soon assimilated by the conquered population, which had already become partly civilized. ”

“ The lands that today comprise Croatia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the close of World War I. In 1918, the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes formed a kingdom known after 1929 as Yugoslavia. Following World War II, Yugoslavia became a federal independent Communist state under the strong hand of Marshal TITO. Although Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it took four years of sporadic, but often bitter, fighting before occupying Serb armies were mostly cleared from Croatian lands. ”

“ It is happening that many Croats are entered up as Bunjevacs and Šokacs in columns where nationality is marked, and not as Croats for example: in identity documents, various records and lists, and that often happens by their explicit request or by will and discretion of respective clerk. ”

“ The Croats preserved their local autonomy, the use of their language for official purposes, their elected diet and other ancient institutions, but Hungarian control was represented by the ban.
The National Revival.—The Croats acquiesced in their position of inferiority until 1840, when the Magyars endeavoured to introduce Hungarian as the official language. A nationalist or “Illyrist” party was formed under Count Drašković and Bishop J. Strossmayer (q.v.) to combat Hungarian influence and promote the union of the “Illyrian” Slavs, i.e. the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. ”

“ They have come to the Sclaves of the South from a common source—the Eastern Roman Empire. Like the coinage, like the [17] rich architecture of the old Serbian Empire, they betray Byzantine influences. The most conspicuous instance of this is the Stutza or Stutchka, as the Croats call it. This I have seen myself nationalized and adopted by Wallacks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosniacs, and Turks, over an area extending from the mouths of the Danube to the Adriatic, and from the mountains of Bosnia to the Carpathians, varying slightly at times in hue or form, but essentially the same. ”

“ In this double capacity he presided over many Croatian diets, always strenuously defending the political rights of the Croats and steadfastly maintaining that as regarded Hungary they were to be looked upon not as partes annexae but as a regnum. ”

“ Serbs and Montenegrins are Orthodox; Bosnians, Herzegovinians, and a portion of the inhabitants of what is known as New Serbia are Orthodox, Catholic, and Mohammedan; while most of the Croats, Dalmatians, and Slovenes are Catholic. The Jugoslavs of the Hapsburg Empire are Occidentals, and have always been under the influence of Rome. ”

“ The people are Slavonic, and kin to the Croats of ancient history. They are described as having come from Poland and Galicia, moving down the Danube, into what is the present kingdom. In the fourteenth century the Servian empire comprised the whole Balkan peninsula, from Greece to Poland, and from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. But Servia warred with Turkey, and her troops were defeated in the great battle at Kossovo, and the Ottoman power became supreme. The country has an area of about 34,000 square miles and a population of 4,600,000. ”

“ When Cardinal Bourne came to Zagreb in the spring of 1919 and the town-hall was decorated with the British, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene and the town flag, some one asked the mayor why the State flag had been omitted. He was horrified. "The State flag!" he cried. Then it dawned upon him.... Numbers of Croats have belonged to the governing class and—impelled by the Catholic religion—have displayed more devotion to the arts than to the freedom of their country. On the other hand the Serbs, a race of practical peasants, have a highly developed national consciousness. ”

“ The Bohemians, Poles, Serbs, Croats, and Bulgars, have been politically independent and have effected noteworthy performances in the fields of statecraft and civilisation. It is owing to the small-scale character of Slovene development that the intelligentsia of this people tends in cultural matters to lean upon the Croats and the Czechs. ”

“ In 1776 the Croatian seaboard, which had previously been under the same administration as the rest of the Austrian coast, was annexed to Croatia, but three years later Fiume was declared an integral part of Hungary. These administrative changes, and especially the brief existence of united “Illyria,” stimulated the dormant nationalism of the Croats and their jealousy of the Magyars. In 1809 Austria was forced to surrender to Napoleon a large part of Croatia, with Dalmatia, Istria, Carinthia, Carniola, Görz and Gradisca. ”

“ Croatia, where the movement in favour of what was called Illyrian nationality originated fifteen or sixteen years ago, and where it was fostered, curiously enough, by the patronage of two imperial governments—Croatia does not appear to have any reason to complain of Hungarian oppression. The Croats had their own provincial assembly or diet, which regulated the internal affairs of the province, their own county assemblies, their own Ban or governor, they elected their own county and municipal officers ”

“ The southern Slavic group includes the Slovenes, numbering 1,192,780, in Carniola, Görz, Gradisca, Istria, and Styria, and the Servians and Croats, numbering 711,380, in Istria and Dalmatia. The peoples of Latin stock are the Italians and Ladini (727,102) , in Tyrol, Görz, Gradisca, Dalmatia, and Trieste, and the Roumanians (230,963) in Bukovina. ”

“ As a rule our Croatian friends were never tired of assuring us that it was beyond the frontier that these gentry flourished; and the hilly country that rose to the south-west—the Kraina, as the promontory of Turkish territory is known, which acts as a thorn in the side of Austria—was pointed out as a regular asylum for wild characters, and in fact was long the only part of the frontier where the watch-service was still needed. At the present moment, however, even the Croats were fain to admit that Bosnia was free from robbers, while their own country was insecure ”

“ The Austrian kingdom of CROATIA in our time, between Styria, Hungary, Slavonia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, and the Adriatic, is not the ancient Croatia of Constantine Porphyrogenitus. Together with the Croatian colonists in Hungary, and the inhabitants of the Turkish Sandshak Banialouka, it contains about 800,000 souls. Of these less than 200,000 belong to the Greek Church; the great majority are Catholics. ”

“ As in ornament so in general character, the Croatian dress resembles that of all the Southern Sclaves, including the Roumans of Transylvania and Wallachia, who, for ethnological purposes, may be looked on as a Latinized branch of the family. In parts, indeed, it has been Orientalized by the Turks; and it is noteworthy that just as the men’s costume in Croatia shows the Oriental influence in ornament, so in Serbia, Dalmatia, and the lands beyond the Save and Danube, it is the men’s costume that makes the chief advances towards the Turkish. ”

“ Croatia and Slavonia, preponderatingly Roman Catholic, were lands of the Hungarian crown, and though they had a provincial pseudo-autonomous diet at Agram, the capital of Croatia, they sent deputies to the Hungarian parliament at Budapest. Thus what had in the Middle Ages been known as the triune kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, with a total Serbo-Croat population of three millions, was divided between Austria and Hungary. ”

“ In modern times we must not forget the activity of the new Queen of the Adriatic, ‘la bella Trieste,’ the [25] Austrian successor of the great republic, nor the Italian seaport of Hungary, Fiume, connected now with the interior by rail as well as by the magnificent Louisa-way; so that, with the old Venetian influences, we have plenty to account for the presence of a considerable Italian ingredient in the population of Agram and Croatia generally. For anyone here unacquainted with Croatian, Italian, not German, is the best means of communication. ”

“ Farther to the westward lies the historic kingdom of Croatia, which has for eight hundred years been bound to Hungary by ties which no one could ever quite satisfactorily define, but which have often been compared to the connection between England and Ireland. In the last half century at least, Magyar-Croat relations have been even less serene and amicable than Anglo-Irish ones. It goes almost without saying that Croatia has now, of her own choice, united with Serbia and the Slovene lands of Austria to form the new state popularly called Yugo-Slavia. ”

“ Rumanian troops held Transylvania, most of the Bukovina, and a slice of Hungary. Croatia and Carniola, like Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the previously independent Montenegro had already combined with Serbia to form a great Jugo-Slav kingdom stretching from north of Laibach to the south of Monastir, and from the Adriatic to the Danube. The Trentino, Trieste, and Pola had been occupied by Italy, but the future of Dalmatia, Fiume, and the islands in the Adriatic was the greatest bone of contention at the Conference, and their disposal was almost indefinitely postponed. ”