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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*
Affiliation:
Department of History; Lewis & Clark College; Portland, Oregon

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.

Type
Article Commentary
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.

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5 Ibid., 21.

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

7 Andre Gingrich writes that the “frontier oriental” was (and is) useful in Austria for self-definition. Frontier Myths of Orientalism: The Muslim World in Public and Popular Cultures of Central Europe,” in MESS. Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School, vol. 2, eds. Baskar, Bojan and Brumen, Borut (Ljubljana, 1996), 99127, here 111Google Scholar. See also Robert J. Donia, “The Proximate Colony: Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian Rule,” Kakanien Revisited (11 Sept. 2007), accessed 30 June 2019, www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/fallstudie/RDonia1.pdf.

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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.

19 Article XXV of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin stated, “The provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina shall be occupied and administered by Austria-Hungary.” Internet Modern History Sourcebook, accessed 8 Dec. 2018, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1878berlin.html.

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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.

39 The spelling “Brood” also appears in German primary sources.

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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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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82 Die Occupation Bosniens und der Hercegovina durch k.k. Truppen im Jahre 1878, 53–55. In this official report, the Habsburg General Staff estimated that roughly forty thousand Ottoman troops had been present during the military occupation.

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

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