While the numbers are not as high as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Jasenovac was notorious for its cruelty and the high number of young children who were victims […]
Read More →Remembering Jasenovac: The lesser Recognized Concentration Camp
The Croatian National Revival Movement (1830–1847) and the Serbs (III)
In the Yugoslav historiography (1918–1941; 1945–1991) Lj. Gaj’s decision to choose a Illyrian name and the štokavian dialect for the Croatian national revival movement was politically explained by his wish to culturally and even politically unite all the South Slavs, believing that this was an ancient common name for all the (Balkan) Slavs, because he like the other leaders of the Illyrian Movement considered the ancient Balkan Illyrians (or Illyrs) as the South Slavic and even Slavic ancestors. However, this decision had much deeper roots and totally different purposes than it was officially presented by the Yugoslav historians. An undisputable fact is that Lj. Gaj chose the Serbian literal language (based on the people’s spoken language) for the literal language of all Croats. Gaj by himself recognized that the Croatian leaders of the national revival movement accepted exactly the Serbian literal language, which was reformed by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, for the literal language of the Croats […]
Read More →The Croatian National Revival Movement (1830–1847) and the Serbs (II)
Lj. Gaj and his followers required that the Croatian national language has to be accepted as an official-bureaucratic medium of correspondence in the Triune Kingdom (Dalmatia-Croatia-Slavonia) within the Habsburg Monarchy instead of the Hungarian, Latin or German […]
Read More →NATO Doesn’t Care that Montenegro is a Haven for Crime and Corruption
Although Montenegro became independent in 2006, it took only until December 2009 for the country to reach the final process of becoming a NATO member, the Membership Action Plan, before officially becoming a full-fledged member on June 5, 2017 […]
Read More →How Yugoslavia was Created: The 1917 Corfu Declaration
The end of WWI in November 1918 as a consequence of the military collapse of the Central Powers and the following series of peace treaties of Versailles on June 28th, 1919 between the Allies and Germany, of St Germain on September 10th, 1919 with Austria, of Neuilly on November 27th, 1919 with Bulgaria, and finally of Trianon on June 4th, 1920 with Hungary, produced major border changes in Central, South-East, and East Europe as the continent saw the emergence of several of new states and the enlargement of others fortunate enough to be on the side of the victorious powers. After 1919, new states included the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (under such formal name from 1929) […]
Read More →The Idea of Pan-Slavic Ethnolinguistic Kinship and Reciprocity in Dalmatia and Croatia, 1477–1706
This paper sets out to examine and clarify the historical development of the ideological concept of Pan-Slavism, which was created by the writers of Dalmatia and Croatia at the time of the late Renaissance and early Baroque (from the end of the 15th century to the very beginning of the 18th century). The literary works of that time by many of Dalmatia’s and Croatia’s writers deal with the ethnolinguistic aspect of Pan-Slavic unity, solidarity, kinship and reciprocity […]
Read More →The Idea of a Greater Croatia by Pavao Ritter Vitezović (III)
As a result of the Polonization of the vast territories of East-Central Europe from 1569 to 1795 many Poles considered these lands as the Polish linguistic and cultural space. It became a common attitude of modern Western historians of non-Polish origin to describe the Republic of Two Nations as an exclusively the Polish one, due to the great scope of the Polonization of the Lithuanian society and culture […]
Read More →The Idea of a Greater Croatia by Pavao Ritter Vitezović (II)
P. R. Vitezović’s writings were especially directed against pro-Venetian texts of the famous historian and doctor of law from Dalmatian city of Trogir – Ivan Lučić (Lucius Joannes 1604–1679) – who is traditionally considered as a founder of the Croatian scientific historiography. Lučić’s most important work – De Regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae libri six (“The Kingdom of Dalmatia and Croatia in Six Volumes”), Amsterdam, 1668 – that includes many narrative sources, genealogical tables and historical-geographical maps, tells the historical truth that Dalmatia in former time was a separate territory from the state of Croatia and, in fact, the Venetian possession […]
Read More →Resolving the “Serbian Question” – One 19th-Century Project (II)
The main conclusions are that V. S. Karadžić’s understanding of language in the conception of the Serbian linguistic nationalism was primarily of an ethnic nature and that I. Garašanin drafted a project of a united Serbian national state by implementing a linguistic model of Serbian national identification exactly as developed by V. S. Karadžić […]
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