Talk:Croatia

I am looking at things that I know intimately to try and gauge the worth of this enciklopedia. Gathering from this page about Croatia I must say that if the rest of it is like this, then it's on the verge of useless crap written by people who's only purpose is to further their POV... full of crap...

Then why don't you step forward and list the points which who think are POV, so we can discuss them? Or change them directly if you are sure it will be more neutral afterwards. This site lives by constructive criticism, not from complaining. -- andy 11:32, 14 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It was said that are 300 000 Serbs had gone in 1995. That is not correct number. Much less- 100 000. Jasenovac wasn't 3rd camp in WW2. The number of victoms was glorified by Serbs. You should check better that numbers.

It was said a comunist state which is not true, It was a socialistic state!

Dubravko, currently the language is called Serbo-Croatian in Wikipedia. Notice that the official language was listed as Croatian - please see the pages on Serbo-Croatian, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. If you have problems with this, please discuss it on Talk:Serbo-Croatian language before changing all references to local names in Croatia from Serbo-Croatian to Croatian. Zocky 12:47 27 May 2003 (UTC)

I fixed the link which now points to correct page Croatian_language.

As said, this is not about the link, it's rather about consistency within this encyclopaedia - the language in the sense of a set of grammatical rules and words is called Serbo-Croatian (in wikipedia and throughout universities and literature in the world), whereas written standards and official languages are called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian etc.

It's an issue that has nothing to do with Croatia per se, so if you have problems with this defacto policy, please discuss it on Talk:Serbo-Croatian language before changing it again. Zocky 13:01 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Speaking of consistency, please check out what is stated under Croatian language about Serbo-Croatian language.

Thanks for pointing that out. Please people, let's not stoop to the low levels of Greek geeks vandalizing every article on anything Macedonian. This is an encyclopaedia, not a third-rate political tabloid. Zocky 13:14 27 May 2003 (UTC)

An Zocky:

Was soll dieser Schwachsinn über Griechenland sein ?

Macedon,Thessaloniki 27.05.2003

Someone anonymous seems to insist that Croatia is not located on the Balkan. Can anyone dig out any proof for this claim, or other way round proof to convice the anonymous? -- andy 13:31, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

To be fair, the country does have three distinct geographical, historical and cultural influences, so I've updated the opening paragraph to include all three of them, not just one (and one that is the most negative at that). --Shallot 12:20, 27 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Following reference moved from article: olivier 11:56, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Much of the material in these articles comes from the CIA World Factbook 2000 and the 2003 U.S. Department of State website.

Rubbish about "Ustaša state" (1941-1945 period) deleted. It would be as stupid as to call Nazi Germany "SS" state or Fascist Italy "camice nere" state. Btw- the entire page on Ustaša movement is little more than an example of Serbian morbid Weltanschauung & will be significantly altered in near future.

Mir Harven (mharven@softhome.net)

Listing Bošković and Tesla is not misappropriation, dammit. Bošković was from the Dubrovnik Republic, which is part of Croatian heritage in just about every way imaginable,

You are kidding me right? The Ragusan Republic was an Italic state, just like the Venetian Republic, it has absolutely nothing to do with Croatia except for the fact that Croatia's present-day borders encompass the former state. On that basis, the Vinca copper-age culture is Serbian because it is located within Serbia's present-day borders? --Igor 0:48 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This attempt at trolling is so feeble it's hardly worth a response. Anyone with even a remote handle on facts will see that this "simple logic" is just pretext for the rest of your demagoguery. --Shallot 13:52, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

and Tesla was the man who himself said "I am proud of my Croatian homeland" ("and Serbian descent, long live Yugoslavia!"). --Shallot 13:39, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Could not have mentionned any Croatian homeland as he died before 1991. --Igor 0:48 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Uh-huh. Whatever. --Shallot

Uh to Shallot, he wasn't born in Croatia (the Croatian crownland however you wanna say it) as he was born in the Lika crownland.

Lika wasn't a crownland (ever, AFAIR), when Tesla's was a child it was part of the Military Frontier. This part of the Frontier was created by carving out the eastern border of the Croatian crownland, and after the said military entity was abolished, it was returned to the Croatian crownland. Attempting to completely disassociate Tesla's birthplace from Croatia is pretty much pointless. I don't know how many more times will basic historic facts have to be repeated... --Shallot 11:25, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Shallot is right. Not listing Boskovic and Tesla under Croatia is like listing Danilo Kis and Branislav Nusic under Israel instead under Serbia. Ridiculous.

Danilo Kis is half Hungarian (Jewish or gentile I have no idea?), half Serbian, born in 1935 in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Nusic was born in Belgrade but spent most of his childhood in Smederevo. What are their respective connections to Israel? --Igor 0:48 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Tesla was born in what was then and is now Croatia, and whatever you think of Dubrovnik, it has passed through history from the independent republic through austria to Croatia. Just the way it is. Zocky 14:55, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Tesla was born in what was then Austria-Hungary, what it is now is relevant as Tesla died in 1943. He certainly has no connections with the modern state of Croatia, furthermore to associate him with it would be perverted in the outmost of ways as that very state has partaken in the collective ethnic cleansing and genocide against his Serb conationals, particularly in his native area of Gospic (massacre of Serbs in 1991, Medak pocket massacre in 1993 and additional pillaging and murders in 1995). Boskovic was not born in Croatia nor had anything to do with it. Italy has mor claim to him than Croatia yet Croats take great efforts not only to hide his Serb but Italian heritage as well. --Igor 0:48 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You're lying, insinuating and misinterpreting, all in the same paragraph. Frankly I'm uncertain how you still expect to get taken seriously. --Shallot 13:52, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

User:Igor's commit log Tesla born in Austria-HUngary, Boskovic in Ragusan Republic,

Just for the record, I don't think that's particularly relevant, or that it somehow overrules the explanation above. --Shallot 02:37, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Del'ed stuff about "Catholic" Croats, "Orthodox" Serbs and "Muslims". Dated and inaccurate.

Mir Harven

Actually, the mappings are almost exact, how is it inaccurate? I assume the dated comment refers to Bosniaks vs. Muslims, which is okay. --Shallot 19:41, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There are many Croats who are not Catholics: atheists, Baptists, Jehovah witnesses, Muslims,....For instance, Dimitrija Demetar was Orthodox, as well as Stjepan Miletić or Svetozar Borojević. Wont even bother to mention Muslims (Bašagić, Ćazim Ćatić, Kikić, Dizdar, Omer Mujadžić, ...) Or atheists like Krleža or Jews like Schwartz. No- the equation Croats=Catholics doesnt hold water. In fact- it never did.

M H

That's all fine and well, but it doesn't make it unreasonable to note that Croats are generally Catholic etc. I guess we can let the main page contain only ethnicities and not religions, but there's not much point in removing them based on not being phrased precisely enough; instead, it should just be rephrased. --Shallot 01:44, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

In the article on Croatia, one should only mention Croats etc. when referring to nations/peoples. Religion is a separate entry. However, on the page on Croats (not Croatia)- it's OK to describe influence of Catholicism etc.

M H

Jiang, the numbers are like that because that's the official numbering. E.g. my home county is Vukovarsko-srijemska, but it's also the sixteenth county; if we sorted the list some other way, it'd still be the sixteenth county. BTW, thanks for fixing those extra \ns in the history section, I was wondering myself why that didn't work but I forgot that I copied and pasted that from my text editor and that that brought in the linebreaks. --Shallot 18:51, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Maybe it's worth adding a line in the article indicating that these numbers are "official". --Jia ng

User from 67.39.198.184 wrote: National, endemic flower is kockavica, (Fritillaria meleagris), whose checkered surface is part of the national symbol.

Where is the proof of such a connection? At least I never heard of the flower being the reason for the šahovnica. --Shallot 02:50, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Also, who is Ivan Schwarz and what exactly do they have with the invention of the airplane? Google can't find me any answer on this whatsoever... --Shallot 15:58, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I've removed the adjective "small" from the first sentence because it is too relative to be of any value. You'll notice that Slovenia, Slovakia or Bosnia don't have the adjective. Even Luxembourg doesn't have it! That said, I think this is a good page and I'm going to use it for the Croatian version. -- Zmaj 13:50, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

IMHO that's only a reason to fix the .si, .sk, .ba and .lu pages, but hey, if no one else complains... --Shallot 14:01, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Note that I've listed Italy not just because it's accross the sea but because the territorial waters touch off the Istrian coast. (This is regardless of how the border is drawn in the bay of Piran, too.) --Shallot 23:16, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"Croats are a Slavic people probably with origins in ancient Persia, who migrated from areas of what is today's Galicia and settled in present-day Croatia during the 7th century".

Do you have any source? And does this refers only to the Croatian people or also to whole South-Slavic people in the former Yugoslavia?

Meursault2004 11:32, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

De Administrando Imperio, Dioclean priest's chronicle, some Frankish records... Google, you'll find this everywhere. It refers to Croats, and I believe very similarly for Serbs (who settled in a somewhat different territory). It doesn't include Slovenes or proto-Bulgarians I don't think, though they probably migrated similarly. --Shallot 15:36, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Glede Schwartza-nije Ivan nego David. http://www.hr/darko/etf/popis.html#sci Mir Harven 20:25, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

(Ivo Banac)...A bit of nonteleological history One of the great problems is that our understanding of the common and individual histories of the South Slavs and the other peoples of southeastern Europe has not significantly benefited from critical historiography. This is because nationalist historiographies regularly have explained modern developments as an aspect of unilinear design. We have been taught to see connections that may be of our own making. For example, if we look at a current political map of the area and compare it to that from the era of settlements we will see that the present political divisions do not correspond to those from the early medieval period. Croatia is mainly a coastal area from the Rasa River in Istria to the Cetina River, a little bit to the east of the city of Split. Down the coast from the original Croatia, we have a row of unfamiliar Slavic territories that Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the tenth-century Byzantine emperor-historian, called Pagania (literally, land of the pagans), Zachlumia (most of present-day eastern Herzegovina, with the Croatian peninsula of Peljesac), Terbounia (the Trebinje area of eastern Herzegovina, with Dubrovnik and its eastern coastal environs), and Dioclea (the southern portions of contemporary Montenegro with the Bay of Kotor and the northwesternmost portions of present-day Albania around Lake Skadar/Shkoder). Serbia is located in the hinterland of Zachlumia, Terbounia, and Dioclea, its center around Ras, near today's Novi Pazar, in the Sandzak. Bosnia was apparently within this territory, but represented a negligible area around the source of the Bosna River, where we now find Sarajevo and its environs. And Dalmatia? In the tenth-century this was a necklace of Byzantine-ruled Roman coastal cities and island territories, from Krk in the north to Ulcinj in the south.

Moreover, modern territoriality required a tradition that was itself a product of modernity. Thus, unrelated traditions were merged to produce an idea of ethnic-as opposed to cultural-continuity. The Croat historical tradition goes back to the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea (a twelfth-century text from Bar in contemporary Montenegro) and its various translations (for example, Marko Marulic, 1510), which were in turn incorporated into the Early Modern "Slavic" and "Dalmatian" histories of Mavro Orbin (1601) and Ivan Lucic (Ioannes Lucius, 1666). These works then became material for the Croatianizing work of Pavao Ritter Vitezovic (Croatia rediviva, 1700), who was the most important influence on the revivalist generation of Ljudevit Gaj (1809-1872) and that of postrevival integral nationalists like Ante Starcevic (1823-1896). Curiously, the same histories (Orbin's) were Serbianized through the translations of Sava Vladislavic (1722), which then influenced the pioneering Serbian histories of Jovan Rajic (1794), and were Bulgarianized in the history of Paisij Hilandarski (1762). The Bosnian historical tradition was somewhat more self-contained. It combined the Franciscan memory of medieval Bosnian statehood with the experiences of Muslim ayan (notable) selfrule to argue for a uninational Bosnia (for example, Antun Knezevic, whose book was published between 1884 and 1887).

Clearly, something has happened in the span of ten centuries. Pagania, Zachlumia, and Terbounia have disappeared. The center of Croatia has migrated from the Adriatic to the north, into medieval Slavonia (literally, Slavic land), with Zagreb at its head. This happened in stages. During the High Middle Ages, the heart of Croatia was on the Una River, now in northwestern Bosnia. This territory (Turkish Croatia) was lost to the Ottomans in the sixteenth century and became a part of Bosnia. During the Habsburg reconquest and the concomitant Venetian operations in the seventeenth century, the framework of modern Croatia emerged in two extended shanks-one, to the north, to modern Slavonia; the other, in the south, in modern Dalmatia. At the same time, the Zagreb area, which was only dubiously Croatian in the early Middle Ages, became the heart of modern Croatia.

The story of Serbia is not much different. Serbia first migrated to the coast and assimilated Dioclea. Then it moved to the Ibar-Morava valleys; then toward the valleys of Struma and Vardar in Macedonia. It reached the Danube only as an Ottoman vassal in the fifteenth century. And its modern capital, Belgrade, became truly Serbian only in the course of Karadjordje's uprising in 1806. Bosnia, too, expanded under Ban (or prorex) Kulin (r. 1180-1204) into the Donji Kraji (literally, Lower Lands) around the Vrbas River and the Soli (literally, Salt Lands; for centuries, Ottoman, then modern Tuzla) and Usora, in its present northeastern corner. Later on, at the height of its power in fourteenth century, Bosnia expanded into Hum (Herzegovina) and the Drina River valley. The westernmost regions were incorporated into Bosnia during the Ottoman period. In fact, the only South Slavic land that demonstrated a modicum of territorial continuity, albeit under various overlords, was Dioclea, or medieval Zeta, that is, modern Montenegro. This history of the South Slavic domains is not a story of the movement of peoples. The dominant element, until the Ottoman conquest, is instead the movement of states. Modern nationalism has worked doubly hard to confound this history by equating peoples with states and territories.

All of this points to the differences between premodern societies and modernity. Premodern West European society was hierarchical, estate ordered, religiously intolerant (cujus regio ejus religio), and localistic. Although institutionalized inequality and localism obtained in the Ottoman Balkans, this society was open to complicated pluralistic arrangements that had disappeared in the West. The Ottoman millet system did not imply religious equality, but it effectively prohibited the type of religious homogenization that became the norm in Western Europe, going back to the unification of Spain that was accompanied by the expulsion of Moors and Jews. Christians and Jews were never expelled from the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The reverse expulsions, that of the Muslims from Europe, occurred as a direct consequence of the transition to modernity, that is, to democracy, secularism, and nationalism.

How and when did this occur? Southeastern Europe was lacking the Western "bourgeois" revolutions, which Marxism-one of the more influential interpretations of the transition to modernity- discovered in the Reformation, the English civil wars, and the French Revolution. The Balkan "revolution," that is, the forging of the independent nation-states of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria, is a story of peasant uprisings in which the key component is ethnic cleansing. It involves the expulsion and, frequently, the extermination of Muslims. This did not occur in the western portions of the Balkan Peninsula because this area came under the Habsburg monarchy, itself a premodern and conservative empire, which prevented the course of "revolutionary" ethnic homogenization. For various reasons, the interwar Yugoslav state, too, failed to pursue the uninational project...