Ante Starcevic, known as the ‘father of the Croatian nation’ had a Croatian Orthodox mother
By: Jean LUNT-MARINOVIC
Since the beginning of the Christian era, the Greek Orthodox religion has spread into Croatia due to the periodic settlement of various ethnic groups. Orthodox Christians gradually assimilated into Croatian society over the millennia and together with Catholic Croats they formed an integral part of the 19th and 20th century Croatian national struggle.
From 1942 until the end of WWII a Croatian Orthodox church existed. These facts have been deliberately censored from history, with fatal consequences. These Orthodox people, or 'Pravoslavci' (as they are colloquially known) should have their own Orthodox church in Croatia, but their human rights are denied by the EU's pro-Serbian tradition.
Following the Cold War, perestroika and glasnost precipitated the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. Some in the EU want to reconstruct a third Yugoslavia to be called the Western Balkan Union. The situation today is not so different to 19th century Austria/Hungary feudal politics.
Visible signs appear everywhere that Serbian nationalism is being presented as multiculturalism. For example, in Bosnia & Hercegovina, a new statue of 'Multicultural Man' stands in stark contrast to the backdrop of a segregated country where Serbia rules over 49 percent of the territory.
In the inland Croatian region of Lika, a new statue of Nikola Tesla and the Tesla Multimedia Museum are being used by Serbia to justify their propaganda and control over all Orthodox people in Croatia. Less than one quarter of the 4.5 percent Orthodox Christians in the 2001 Croatian census are of Serbian ancestry but all of those ethnic groups are included in Serbian propaganda numbers to justify Serbian territorial expansion in Croatia.
The number of Serbian speakers in the Croatian census is inconsistent with other data. In 1991, 12.5 percent of the population in Croatia was Orthodox, while only four percent counted themselves Serbian language speakers. In 2001 there were 4.5 percent Orthodox worshippers and only one percent Serbian speakers.
Anatomy of Identity Theft
The identity of the Orthodox people in Croatia has been stolen by Serbia. The Serbian propaganda claims to ethnicity in Croatia are so ridiculous that doubt overshadows credibility. One Serbian website even claims that Serbs created the Croatian national movement in the 19th century, a movement which incidentally they criticise at the same time as having an anti-Serbian platform.
The 17th century migration of Serbian people led by their church Patriarchs into north-east Croatia (Vojvodina) occurred simultaneously with political changes there, following the Ottoman decline.
FOOTNOTE: Croatia and Slavonia were reunited with Dalmatia during the Illyrian movement, but the Croatian feudal elite believed that the political unification of Croats Serbs and Slovenes would help them to throw off the yoke of Austrian/Hungarian occupation.
So, in 19th century Croatia, the national rights of Croatian people under Starcevic or Kvaternik were undermined by the leadership of the pan-slavist, Roman Catholic Bishop of Dakovo, J. Strossmajer. Political division was so deep that Dr. Ante Starcevic, the head of the Croatian Party of Rights, was accused of poisoning Croatian youth by the liberal Bishop Strossmajer.
The London Times stated in its issue of May 1, 1870, that Strossmayer wanted to fuse the Catholic minority in South-East Europe with the Greek Orthodox Slavs for the sake of obtaining political unity of the South-Slav nations. Strossmayer even introduced liturgical changes in order to merge the differences between eastern and western Christianity.
Hindsight tells that artificial pan-slav politics were too utopian because they were dependant on Serbian support in Hapsburg-occupied Croatia which evolved into Serbian expansion under Garasin's Greater Serbia platform. The Croatian people themselves had not been consulted. (source: Sivric)
This migration gradually led to Serbian political claims over a wide geographical area of Croatia. By 1848 the Serbian Patriarchate of Srijemski Karlovci was established in Habsburg-occupied Croatian lands. Meanwhile, in 1879 the Serbian Orthodox Church in Serbia regained its autocephaly and in 1882 the Kingdom of Serbia was recognized.
Thus, by 1883 in Croatia, the first Serbian Orthodox schools appeared, and the Serbian flag was being used in their orthodox churches there. The Ottoman invasion, occupation, and eventual decline in the region they called the Balkans preceded a gradual ethnic and religious metamorphosis. The head of the original Serbian church in Pec (in Kosovo, autocephaly since 1219) had been dissolved in 1766 and came under the jurisdiction of Constantinople during Ottoman occupation. After Pec was lost the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church moved to occupied Croatia.
The ethnic status quo in 19th century Hapsburg-occupied Croatia therefore began to change when the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate was given the opportunity to take over existing Greek Orthodox churches. By the end of the 19th century most former Greek Orthodox Churches in Croatia were taken over by Serbian priests, and Serbia in this way began to claim all Orthodox people as Serbian constituent people in Croatia.
The Catholic Bishop Strossmayer had already created the Yugoslav Academy in Zagreb in July 28 1867. Both in 1861 and 1867 the National Party unanimously agreed to recognize the Serbs in Croatia.
In the Sabor on May 11, 1867 it was declared that the Triune Kingdom recognizes the Serbian people living in it as a nation identical and equal with the Croatian nation. Both the Academy (1867) and the Sabor proclaimed the Croatian or Serbian language as the official language in Croatia In 1850 the Serbo-Croatian language had been artificially created in Vienna.
As a response to the Hungarian Nagodba, in 1871 the National Party in Croatia had Strossmayer as its political head whose agenda was to merge Croats and Serbs together. The choice that emerged was to be either Serbian Orthodox or Catholic Croatian under Austrian/Italian or Hungarian administration.
Sometimes people with the same Croatian family name inadvertently had their ethnicity changed to Serbian, due to the change in the ethnicity of the church hierarchy. Earlier census records provide evidence that many were not of Serbian ancestry. For example the following, ''It has been said that Manda was Serb Orthodox, but Cavcic shows up in a 1712 census of the Lovinac area, as being a Croatian surname''. (Lovinac is in Lika). (source: Beckie, page 73)
Following the union of Serbia with the state of Serbs Croats and Slovenes, the Serbian Patriarchate of Srijemski Karlovci was shifted to Belgrade in 1920. Following the shooting in 1928 of five Croatian front-bench parliamentarians by a Serb during a session of the Belgrade parliament, the Kingdom of Croats Serbs & Slovenes then became known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a dictatorship led by the Serbian King. (Three of the five died.)
By 1931 and the creation of the Serbian dictatorship, the constitution and re-organisation of the Serbian Orthodox church was finalised. From this time all Orthodox peoples of the whole of Yugoslavia, including Croatia, became classified officially as of Serbian ancestry no matter what their ethnic background.
These Orthodox people had included Greeks, Montengrins, Vlachs, Croats, Bulgarians, Ukranians, Russians, Czechs, Romanians, Albanians, and Macedonians, etc. Sometimes in countries overseas census results or ports-of-entry registries revealed their ethnicity.
For example, Australian census data according to religion about the former Yugoslavia indicated that only a minority of the Orthodox from there were of Serbian origin. Like everywhere in the world, the same place names are used in more than one place. For example there is a Smiljan in Bulgaria.
The later exception was the Macedonian Orthodox Church created by the Yugoslav authorities in 1967. And at the first opportunity after the fall of Yugoslavia (1997) Montenegro re-created its own Orthodox Church which had been usurped by the Serbian Orthodox Church in the early 20th century.
During WWII a Croatian Orthodox church accommodated the orthodox minorities in Croatia. But after WWII the Croatian Orthodox hierarchy (under Metropolitan Germogen) was executed by orders from Belgrade, and their cathedrals became officially Serbian - a fact little mentioned in history books.
''The formation of the Croatian Orthodox Church and its relationship with the Catholic Church in Croatia shows that the Croatian Orthodox Church was not established with 'anti-Catholic tendencies', neither was its intention to 'attract' the Serbs. It was a solution to the problem of professing the Orthodox faith on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia for all the Orthodox Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, Russians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, etc.'' (source: Obrknezevic)
In communist Yugoslavia a nationalist Serbian hegemony was threatened by the existence of the extant Eastern Orthodox Church in Croatia, even though the Greek Orthodox faith there preceded Serbian Orthodoxy. In contrast, the situation with the Catholic church in the former Yugoslavia was more tolerant.
A Vatican protocol restricted the church activities, and thus even Cardinal Stepinac was spared an execution following his trial. (Up to 500 Franciscans and Catholic Priests were murdered however by Serbian-led communists after WWII.)
NEXT WEEK: The first Apostles and the Orthodox Vlachs and Stradioti in Croatia