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Chapter 7: Croatia
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Chapter 7 Croatia Historically, at least, Croatia seems to have spent much of its existence with a chip on its shoulder. The Croatians came into—recorded—existence in the seventh century, about the same time as their linguistic relatives, the Serbs (some linguistic evidence suggests both tribes originated in Persia). But Croats were always smaller in number than the Serbs, by about a half, and their medieval principality lasted just two hundred and fifty years. For their part, Serbian rulers maintained sovereignty from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries until finally eliminated by Ottoman Turks and Hungary. Moreover the Serbs were among the first nations—along with the Greeks—to rise up against imperial domination (in both cases Ottoman) whereas the Croats achieved liberation through the allies’ defeat of the German and austro-Hungarian armies in World War I. Croats tend to make up for their perceived inequalities by claiming they are more “european” than the Serbs by virtue of their use of the roman alphabet instead of the Cyrillic, of their affinity to the roman Catholic Church instead of eastern Orthodoxy and by sheer geographic proximity to the north and west. In fact, the Croats have a lot going for them in the context of modern South Slav (Jugoslav) history—as unifiers rather than as separatists. The very idea of Jugoslavija was born in Croatia in the 1830s as a group of young intellectuals joined to create a movement dedicated to national renewal by way of a standard language and a broader concept of unification of all south Slavs. Inspired, among others, by ljudevit Gaj, 70 FARE WELL, ILLYRIA a journalist who created the Croatian alphabet and in 1834 the first Croatian newspaper, the movement soon adopted the designation “Illyrian.” rooted in the name of the ancient tribe inhabiting a large swath of the western Balkans, Illyria was the name given it as a province by the conquering romans. In 1809, Napoleon revived it after subduing the austrians , and created the short-lived Illyrian Provinces. But after his final defeat in 1816, the revived austro-Hungarian empire restored its northernmost regions as the Kingdom of Illyria. Thus the “Illyria” concept became common currency throughout the region. For the Zagreb intellectuals, the main threat to the Croatian identity came from Hungary and its efforts by newly nationalistic Budapest authorities to Magyarize the Croatians—enforcing the teaching of Hungarian in schools. In 1842, one of their leaders, Janko Drašković, opened an “Illyrian” reading room, called the Matica (Matrix). renamed Matica Hrvatska (Croatian Matrix), it became the nation’s principal publishing house. (Serbs had created the Matica Srpska in the same spirit sixteen years earlier.) also in 1842, Dragutin rakovac, a member of the Illyrian group, borrowed a pan-Slavic anthem (composed eight years earlier by a Slovak, Samuel Tomášik, to a Polish melody) and translated it into Croatian, which began: Hej Iliri! (Hey, Illyrians!). This did not catch on, but when that was changed to Hej Slaveni! (Hey, Slavs!) it became a hit and was adopted by Poland in 1926 and yugoslavia in 1945 as a national anthem. But in 1850, the Zagreb “Illyrians” went a huge step further— meeting with Serbian intellectuals to sign the Vienna literary agreement, proclaiming that the Shtokavian dialect (spoken mainly in eastern Herzegovina and favored by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the great Serbian linguist) should become the basis for a common, Serbo-Croat language. They also agreed that the Croats’ latin alphabet and the Serbs’ Cyrillic would be equally valid. The Croats went still further to institutionalize the concept of “yugoslavia ” by founding a yugoslav academy of arts and Sciences in Zagreb in 1866. Its principal patron was Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, then Croatia ’s leading advocate of higher education—and patron of the arts. The academy was sanctioned by the austrian emperor Franz Josef and went on to produce a great variety of scientific works including historical and ethnological studies. (I visited the academy as a delegate from Harvard to convey the oldest american university’s greetings and congratulations at its centennial celebration in autumn 1966). [52.14.221.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:35 GMT) 71 Croatia In 1991, after declaring independence from the Socialist Federative republic of yugoslavia, the academy was renamed “Croatian”—as it had been by the Fascist Ustaše regime in 1941. Croats experienced a mostly unhappy sojourn (1918–1929) in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was transmuted (1929– 1941) into the...