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Europe on the Sava: Austrian Encounters with “Turks” in Bosnia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2020

Maureen Healy
Maureen Healy*
Affiliation:
Department of History; Lewis & Clark College; Portland, Oregon
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines Austrian perceptions of the people and landscape of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1878 to 1908. It traces Austrians’ fantasies about and encounters with Bosnian Muslims, whom they often categorized as “Turks.” Following the Congress of Berlin, Austrians claimed to be doing the civilizing work of “Europe” in Bosnia. The article investigates the meanings of border and borderlands between the Habsburg Empire and Ottoman Bosnia, focusing in particular on crossings of the Sava River. Drawing on the writings of soldiers, administrators, journalists and travel writers, the essay considers a number of mental maps, imagined geographies of what Habsburg authors thought they knew about the land and people they occupied. It contributes to a growing scholarship on the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands.

Keywords

Habsburg-OttomanborderlandsBosniaAustriacolonialismSava RiverCongress of Berlin1878TurksMuslimsfrontier Orientalism
Type
Article Commentary
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 51 , May 2020 , pp. 73 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2020

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank heartily Emily Greble and an anonymous reviewer for the AHY for their generous and insightful comments on an earlier version of this article.

References

2 For concision I refer to Bosnia-Herzegovina throughout the chapter as Bosnia, except when quoting directly from other sources.

3 The population in the late 1870s was roughly 42 percent Orthodox, 38 percent Muslim, and 18 percent Catholic. Sugar, Peter F., Industrialization of Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1878–1918 (Seattle, 1963), 6Google Scholar. Another way of counting the population was by village: in 1878 there were 1,412 Orthodox villages, 793 Muslim villages, and 493 Catholic villages, with a “slightly higher number of mixed settlements.” Okey, Robin, Taming Balkan Nationalism (Oxford, 2007), 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 Ibid., 21.

6 Ibid., 22. Here puts “weiße Krain” in quotation marks.

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16 Sugar, The Industrialization of Bosnia-Hercegovina, 29.

17 Amzi-Erdogdular, “Alternative Muslim Modernities,” 916.

18 See Medlicott, W. N., The Congress of Berlin and After: A Diplomatic History of the Near Eastern Settlement, 1878–1880, 2nd ed. (Hamden, 1963)Google Scholar.

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27 Interestingly, there was a concrete diplomatic “entry” into Europe for the Ottoman Empire in the 1856 Treaty of Paris. It “was officially recognized as a permanent part of the European balance of power.” The preamble stated that “the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire was vital to ‘the Peace of Europe,’ and Article 2 gave the Sublime Porte . . . the right ‘a participer aux avantages du droit public et du concert europeen [to take part in the benefits of international law and the Concert of Europe].’” Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: The East in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, 1998), 40Google Scholar. ProQuest Ebook.

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38 Helfert, offering a three-hundred-page book on all things Bosnian, nevertheless admits he had never been there. “Traveler! I was not there, and I bet a hundred to one that the gentle reader [has not been] either,” p. 4.

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40 Contemporary German sources did not adhere to standardized spellings of the river towns; for example, press reports referred to Samac or Schamatz, Brcka or Bereschka, etc. Use of the diacritical marks was also not standardized.

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66 Die Vedette, 14 Aug. 1878, p. 5.

67 Radics, Das befreite Bosnien, 68.

68 Prager Tagblatt, 20 Aug. 1878, pp. 1–2.

69 Okey notes that the resistance had “significant Serb support in the towns but not in the countryside.” Taming Balkan Nationalism, 23.

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83 (Neuigkeits) Welt Blatt, 24 Aug. 1878, p. 5.

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