Perhaps Austria would not have displayed such fervour in creating
Bunjevci, [vS]okci and Kra[vs]ovani if she had known that these Roman
Catholic Slavs would remain, on the whole, very good Slavs. The
Bunjevci, who live for the most part in Ba[vc]ka and Baranja, came
originally from the Buna district of Herzegovina. The total population
of the town of Subotica is 90,000, and 73,000 of these are Bunjevci,
whose peculiarity is that the old father stays in the town house,
while his sons, with their wives and children, drive out on Monday
morning over that rather featureless landscape to the farm, which may
be at a considerable distance, and there they remain till the end of
the week. They are a quiet, industrious people who have lived
withdrawn, as it were, from the world since the twenty-five or thirty
families escaped from the Turks; and as they brought with them only
that number of surnames it is now customary to add a distinguishing
name. Thus the Vojni['c] family has divided into branches, such as
Vojni['c]-Heiduk, Vojni['c]-Kortmi['c], Vojni['c]-Pur[vc]a. The
Bunjevci seem, although Catholics, to incline less to the Croats than
to the Serbs, some of whose customs--those, for instance, of
Christmas--they share. But in merry-making they are a great deal more
subdued, save that, in drinking to some one's health, you are expected
to empty three glasses. In the intervals of a Bunjevci dance at
Subotica men would promenade the room arm-in-arm with men and girls
with girls. The faces of all of them express entire goodness of heart
and absence of guile; many of the girls, who looked like early
portraits of Queen Victoria, were arrayed in the local costume, which
permits great variety of colour so long as the lady wears, I am told,
about fifteen petticoats. These worthy people used to have nothing but
their Church, and are now extremely religious. The man who has most
influence over them is Bla[vs]ko Raji['c], a priest and deputy, who
was not always able to prevent a Hungarian Archbishop from sending a
priest to his church, where he held services in Magyar. During one
night, at all events, this church caused the Magyars much annoyance.
It was at the beginning of the Great War--they had accused Raji['c] of
making signals from the tower, which is very high; and in order to
prove their accusation they sent a large body of soldiers, who
surrounded the church, on a boisterous winter's night. Sure enough,
the signals were seen to be flashing up there. The church was locked
and a blast of the bugles had no effect--save that a few Bunjevci
looked out of their windows--for the flashes did not cease. Then the
captain commanded his men to give a mighty shout: "Put out those
lights! Put out those lights!" But not the least notice was taken.
There was nothing to do but to wait until Raji['c], or whoever it was,
should finish his nefarious business and come down. About an hour
later, though, the wind became so piercing that a non-commissioned
officer suggested that the captain should send for the big drum; the
noise of that, said he, would surely reach that devil in the tower.
But the big drum, when it came, had no success. The noise it made,
reinforced by those of the bugles and the men's shouting, was such
that some Bunjevci dressed themselves and ventured out into the cold,
to see what really all the turmoil was about. To one of them the
freezing captain yelled that he knew perfectly the criminal had heard
them, and that he went on with his accursed flashes since he
recognized that this would be the last base act that he would ever do
on earth. For the remainder of that night the captain and his men, not
with the hope that they would be obeyed but merely to warm themselves
a little, kept on shouting now and then, "Put out those lights!" And
in the dawn the non-commissioned officer discovered that the signals
had been moonlight on some broken glass that was being shaken by the
wind.... One sees in the very well-arranged archives of the town of
Sombor that the Bunjevci were accustomed, like the Germans, to ally
themselves with the Magyars and thus give them a majority. Only in the
last ten years at Subotica (and not at all at Sombor) did they ask for
their rights; they had seemed conscious of the religious difference
between themselves and the Serbs, unconscious that they were of the
same race and language. The Magyars attempted to show in Paris that
the Bunjevci are not Slavs, but the remains of the Kumani (who died
out in those parts about five to six hundred years ago and were not
Magyars). In the census of twenty years ago the Bunjevci were called
Serbo-Croats, in accordance with a monograph, "Sabotca Varosh
Toertenete," in which Professor Ivanji, a Magyar, said they were simply
Catholic Serbs. In the census of 1910 the Bunjevci are put under the
heading "Egyebek," which means "miscellaneous."
This census juggling by the Magyars was one of their milder methods of
administration. The term Serbo-Croat came to be avoided, and, so that
foreigners should be misled, the Yugoslavs in Baranja were classified
as Serbs, Croats, Illyrians, [vS]okci, Bunjevci, Dalmatians and so
forth. The [vS]okci, who were also converted in the eighteenth century
to the Roman Catholic Church, are mostly found to-day in Baranja. The
name by which they are known is derived from the Serbo-Croatian word
_[vs]aka_, the palm of the hand, and refers to the fact that the
Catholics cross themselves with the open hand, whereas the Orthodox
join the tips of the thumb and first two fingers. The [vS]okci are
considered a weaker people than the Bunjevci; the mothers--they say it
is love--are often so weak that they allow their children to do
anything they like at home, and would not think of remonstrating with
them if they wear their caps in church. Among the [vS]okci none is of
a higher than the peasant class, for which reason their priests have
usually been Magyars. He who ministers to the village of Szalanta,
however, is a Croatian poet. The mayor of that village--I believe a
typical specimen of the [vS]okci--was a ragged, humorous-looking
person with a very bushy moustache. He was in remarkable contrast with
the young Magyar schoolmaster, whose remuneration is largely in kind.
This gentleman looked as if he would be well content if the parents of
his children sent him not eggs, butter and chickens, but armfuls of
flowers. A month before the Hungarian revolution in 1918 an order had
come from Buda-Pest to the effect that the lowest class in a school
was to receive instruction solely in its own language, but the
Hungarian Republic ordered that no history was to be taught, since it
praises kings.
As for the Kra[vs]ovani, who inhabit five villages of the mining
district of Resica in Caras-Severin, the eastern county of the Banat,
they also were converted by Maria Theresa, in whose time they fled
from Montenegro, Macedonia and the Bulgarian frontier. Gradually they
have come to reckon themselves as Croats, owing to their priests who
come from Croatia. They are all big men with luxuriant moustaches.
There is a district in southern Russia, near the Black Sea, which is
called New Serbia. It is the fertile country that was chosen by
150,000 Southern Slavs when they preferred, in 1768, to go into exile
rather than change their religion, like the Bunjevci, the [vS]okci and
the Kra[vs]ovani. They preserve some traces of their origin, but can
no longer be considered Yugoslavs.
In speaking of these converts and their descendants we have alluded to
the Buda-Pest policy of enforcing the Magyar language. This movement
may be studied from the close of the eighteenth century in Croatia,
where Latin had hitherto been the official language. In 1790 the
Croats were again delivered by Leopold II. to the Magyars, who were
bent upon executing their designs.