Last October marked eighty years since the beginning of the organization and implementation of the most extensive resettlement of the population of the Slovenian south in its recent history. This was the second Yugoslav post-war colonization of Vojvodina, which largely affected the population of the so-called passive regions, i.e. the population of the Dinarides mountain range, but also with a significant number of migrants from southern Serbia (and a small number from Macedonia and Slovenia).
The then Yugoslav communist authorities had two tasks that should be solved by colonization. The first task was to fill the territory devastated by the exodus of the Danubian Swabians in numbers, and the second task related to the agrarian reform that was to distribute the land fund of Vojvodina so that, first of all, small farmers and landless people would be settled, and large landowners would be prevented from enlarging their holdings. The bearers of these changes in the new world for them were people from a significantly different geographical, biological, economic, social, cultural and every other milieu compared to Vojvodina, but people who, through their participation in the National Liberation War, gained merit for participating in this “experiment”. Mountain families of fighters from Dalmatia, Lika, Kordun, Banija, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro were sent to the southern lowlands of the former Hungary, who, in a certain sense, performed the role of informal border guards of the newly established state and socialist order. Since I myself am a descendant of colonists from the aforementioned latter country, for subjective reasons I will reflect on the experience of Montenegrin colonial heritage and the question of where we are eighty years later.
The Dinaric man replaced the Swabian
First of all, one should understand the spirit of the place in which the colonists found themselves, or rather, understand Vojvodina as a territory that is managed in a planned manner, which implies a certain system of knowledge, technology, and even a certain worldview in order to live in symbiosis with the environment. If we were to imagine the state apparatus in a figurative way, Vojvodina in that picture represents a tool, or rather the technology of a society, since it itself emerged from the nothingness of the turbulent Danube and Tisa, groundwater, swamps, marshes, leeches, mosquitoes, and malaria. The plain as we know it today was largely built by those who had to leave Yugoslavia (but also from all Eastern European socialist countries) after World War II, and this community of Danubian Swabians can rightly be called the only “educated” manager of the plain. This is primarily because they were people who were settled in Vojvodina (but also in Slavonia, Baranja, parts of Romania and Ukraine) in the 18th century in several waves from the former Swabia, today the German provinces of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. These German colonists came as missionary devotees and farmers whose task was to make the southern parts of the empire habitable after the long wars with the Turks, which left behind a wasteland and inarticulate nature. Therefore, the Swabian colonists did not come as warriors, although the goal was certainly to fill them with a loyal population, but as farmers and representatives of a system that built entire settlements, diverted river flows, dug canals, built locks and factories, and cultivated the plain.
The disappearance of the Swabian colonists, about 350 thousand of them, meant the arrival of the Dinar colonists who were nowhere near as skilled and taught how to govern and manage themselves in the newly created situation - they were (and still are) faced with the great challenge of maintaining what was found, which they, as tragic heroes of socialist destiny, could not fulfill. Today, this is most visible in the colonial places whose grandiose urban and aesthetic form is irrevocably deteriorating and disappearing like a museum antique in some depot with which no one knows what to do. All that remains are "shrouded streets", abandoned churches, the occasional castle or count's summer house and "houses on the elbow" without essence and a planned way of life for them, they stand as monuments to a lost time, seemingly faceless and uniform, somewhat absent and dilapidatedly threatening, but at their core luxurious and deeply unhappy. Just like the colonial destinies that were scattered and scattered, moving away from their vital source and losing their original characteristics, while gaining new ones with great difficulty in a world that was existentially alien to them. It could be said that the “Swabian houses” and the colonists found and surprised each other unprepared, but it could also be said that the management and planning of colonization was a misunderstanding of the “Prečan” way of life. This is best seen in the basic motives of colonization, which are the change in the structure and type of land ownership, as well as the change in management. For the then Minister of Colonization in the government of the DFJ (Democratic Federal Yugoslavia) Sreten Vukosavljević The colonization of Dinaric highlander families from, in Cvijić's words, the patriarchal-highlander cultural circle into the Central European-urban cultural circle represented an act of patronizing loyal landless peasants devoted to the proletarian idea of a classless society. If such a thing made sense from the perspective of communist ideology, then from the perspective of the long-term design and revival of the Vojvodina countryside it was outside the meaningful centuries-old way of managing this space. This can best be seen in the continuous decline of the presence of colonists, or rather colonist descendants, in the "promised land", which was conditioned precisely by the lack of understanding of the living conditions of the environment and the needs of the settlers. The agrarian reform broke up large estates, and the distribution of land and its repurposing enabled the original self-sufficiency that would soon grow into autarchy, which is a characteristic of social development in extraordinary circumstances or circumstances of a temporary solution. Therefore, the colonization had as its dominant goal the establishment of a new administration of a socialist system based on the principle of native identity, not professional identity. That is why this colonization is said to have been a “colonization with turf” because it transplanted entire tribal, kinship, native communities into a new context with the aim of avoiding potential conflicts between different nations, confessions and classes, but also to facilitate a new beginning for the newly arrived colonists with people, customs and rules of conduct familiar to them. In this way, small enclaves of Dinaric communities were created, and it is still possible to hear the Serbian language of a typical Montenegrin from Cetinje, a Lika from Gračac or a Dalmatian from Obrovac in some places of Bačka today.
More than 62 thousand houses and 500.000 acres of land
At the time of the beginning of colonization, the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and Colonization had at its disposal about 500.000 cadastral acres of land on which settlers would be colonized, in the territories of Bačka, Baranja, Banat and Srem. The total fund of confiscated houses that were to be distributed to colonists amounted to 62.281 houses and, by district, it included the territories of the cities of Subotica, Sremska Mitrovica, Petrovgrad (Zrenjanin), Pančevo, Novi Sad and Sombor. Of the districts listed, the Sombor district had the most confiscated houses in the fund for colonists, a total of 19.997, while, for example, the first and next on the list in terms of the number of houses were the Pančevo and Zrenjanin districts with slightly more than 10.000 houses. 45.000 colonist families were to move into these available properties, mostly from Bosnia and Herzegovina (12.000), then from Croatia (9.000), then from Montenegro (7.000), followed by Serbia (6.000), Vojvodina (6.000), Slovenia (3.000) and Macedonia (2.000).
Montenegrin colonists came from different districts (Andrijevica, Berane, Bar-Ulcinj, Bijelo Polje, Danilovgrad, Kolašin, Kotor-Herceg Novi, Nikšić, Pljevlja, Titograd (Podgorica), Cetinje, Šavnik), but the most numerous were colonists from the Nikšić (1.200 families), Cetinje (1.000), Šavnik (1.000) and Pljevlja (600) districts. The Montenegrin colonial region included settlements in central and western Bačka and, in accordance with the aforementioned logic of "colonization with turf", did not mix members of significantly different Montenegrin districts in the new Vojvodina environment, so colonists from districts close to their homeland - Pljevlja and Bijelo Polje - settled in Sivac (which was then divided into Old Sivac and New Sivac). The villages of Sekić (Lovćenac), Feketić and Mali Iđoš were settled by Cetinje, Barani, Kotorani and Novljani, in Crvenka colonists from the Danilovgrad district settled, in Veprovac (Kruščić) by Kolašinci, in Torž (Savino Selo) and Kucur from the Berane and Andrijevica districts settled, in Bačko Dobro Polje colonists from Šavnik, in Vrbas Nikšićani, in Pašićevo (Zmajevo) and Nove Šove (Ravno Selo) from the Podgorica district settled, while in Kula colonists from all Montenegrin districts moved in. Of the total number of 7.000 colonist families from Montenegro planned at the end of August 1946, a total of 4.899 families with 23.199 members were settled in Vojvodina. Of that number, the largest number was settled in the towns of Lovćenac 4.812, Vrbas 3.960, Bačko Dobro Polje 3.665, Sivac 3.232. An interesting and somewhat bizarre criterion by which Montenegrin settlers were colonized is precisely in these towns that stretch along the Great Bačka Canal, and it refers to an attempt to facilitate adaptation to the newly created environment, primarily to the climate.
Difficult adjustment
Since the Montenegrin colonists came from the area with the highest average altitude, the organizers of the colonization “tried” to provide them with living conditions that were as close as possible by settling them at the highest points in Bačka, that is, in settlements located on the slopes of the Telečka loess plateau, whose average altitude is 100 m (in Sivac 103 m above sea level). Compared to the altitudes of the colonists from Pljevlja who came to Sivac in large numbers from the Bobovska plateau, whose average altitude of inhabited hamlets is 1300 m above sea level, the newly found geography really seems apocalyptically different.
There is a part in Gorski vijenac that tragically laments the fate of the Serbian people due to the Turkish occupation, where former warriors suddenly find themselves in the role of peaceful peasants - the kolo sings 'the lafi remained to the farmers', and there is also a more recent visual representation that symbolically expresses the shift in the experience of shaping the world and is located in New York in the United Nations Art Gallery. It is a sculpture by the Russian and Soviet sculptor Yevgeniy Vučetić (also Montenegrin by origin) who, in addition to the famous sculpture of Motherland in Volgograd, also sculpted the statue 'Beating Swords into Plowshares', hinting at the post-war policy of peace and coexistence among people. In a symbolic way, the colonization of the highlander warriors represented the bending of iron into the earth and for the earth
And it was certainly apocalyptic in the beginning, since the colonists were uneducated people, with very little contact with the outside world, since they lived in areas that were difficult to access and where few people went “out into the world”. For them, the new environment was a chance for a new beginning, which was not easy at all, since they had a hard time adapting to the climate, diseases, new diet, new way of doing business and generally a new way of life. Many left the colonization disappointed with the living conditions, primarily unaccustomed to the plains water, air, food that was scarce at first, and unprepared to deal with the diseases that took their children, they returned to their native lands. During 1946, a total of 3.105 families left the colonization, of which 538 were Montenegrin (the average family had six members). The state authorities tried to facilitate the integration and life of the colonists in the new world through various educational courses, so lectures on agriculture, household management, medicine and hygiene, literacy courses, etc. were organized. As part of these efforts to better prepare and equip the colonist population for life, the provincial authorities also published the Kolonist sub-list within the Slobodna Vojvodina magazine, which was concerned with marking and preserving the cultural level and identity of the colonists.
Assimilation
For many colonists, the new environment was a chance for a new emancipatory, individual beginning, which coincided with the then mass industrialization, urbanization and open free education system that enabled many to achieve vertical mobility and personal aspirations regardless of social background. This trend was general throughout socialist Yugoslavia, but in colonial environments it was especially pronounced, bearing in mind that the colonists' families initially suffered the "stress" of breaking with their traditional ones, and therefore it was quite possible that it was easier for them to decide to step into the new industrial and bureaucratic society. With all the changes that have occurred in the last 80 years, including the aforementioned industrial revolution that brought numerous families out of the rural family circle into the world of urban lifestyle, then education and women's emancipation, then the later dismantling of the socialist order and the unclear definition of the anti-fascist struggle that was one of the pillars of the colonial identity, as well as recent changes in national identity and the experience of contemporary Serbian and Montenegrin cultural policies, the Montenegrin colonist community in Vojvodina is suffering a long-term decline. Compared to the 1948 census when 40.176 Montenegrins lived in Vojvodina (which was about 17 percent of the total colonist population), today, according to the 2022 census, there are 20.238 of them, mostly in the West, North and South Backa regions (coinciding with the aforementioned settlements where the largest number of them settled in 1945 - Sivac, Lovćenac, Vrbas, Bačko Dobro Polje).
The author is a sociologist
Bonus video:
