Not counting the Serbs in Hungary, most of the Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy lived in the area of the Croato-Slavonian Military Frontier and in Civil Croatia. In these regions, around the middle of the 19th century, Serbs made up one third of the entire population (448,319). More of them lived in the Military Frontier than in the lands under civil administration. According to the 1857 census, there were in Krajina (the Military Frontier) a total of 657,817 inhabitants, of whom 45% were Serbs. In the same year, out of the 851,516 inhabitants of Civil Croatia, excluding Srem, which was within the Serbian Vojvodina, 83,026 were Serbs. After Srem was annexed to Croatia in 1860, the area under the Ban's civil administration was inhabited by 129,720 Serbs, who made up 14% of the total population. In terms of numbers, the Serbs in Croatia came immediately after the Croats, but in some areas they were even more numerous than the Croats. The Serbs in the Lika Regimental Area made up a 70% majority, in the 1st Banski Regimental Area - 67%, in the 2nd Banski - 62.2%, in the Petrovaradin Regimental Area - 63.2%, and in the county of Srem, 59.4% of the population.¹ In Pozega county, Serbs accounted for 39.3% of the population, and in Osijek county, 24.8%. In the counties of Zagreb, Varazdin and Rijeka, their numbers ranged from 1,500 to 2,000.

The largest concentration of Serbs in Civil Croatia was in Osijek and its surroundings (20,699), then in the districts of Vukovar (16,642), Nasice (3,628), and Djakovo (3,384). In Pozega county the most Serbs were to be found in Daruvar (8,137), Pakrac (7,973), Vucin (7,761), Slatina (5,847), Pozega and environs (5,350), and in the districts of Kutjevo (3,452), and Virovitica (2,557). In Zagreb county most of the Serbs lived in the district of Moslavina (1,173), in Rijeka county in the district of Vrbovsko (1,909), and in Varazdin county in the district of Ludbreg (1,418). In Zagreb itself there were a total of 332 Serbs, among whom merchants predominated.

If the size of the Serbian population from the time prior to the 1848 revolution is compared with that during Bach's absolutism and several decades later, a steady and fairly rapid decline is evident. Whereas in 1840 there were in both the civil and military parts of Croatia 504,246 Serbs, making up 31.41% of the total population, in 1857, even though all other populations had increased, that of the Serbs had decreased, accounting for only 29.4%. When twelve years later (1869) another population census was conducted, the number of Serbs was shown to have decreased by 1.20% in relation to the previous census, and now they made up just 27.84% of the total population. The true causes of this sudden decrease in the number of Serbs have not yet been sufficiently investigated, but it seems that they were extremely complex and cannot be explained by claiming that the Serbs' mortality rate was higher than that of other population groups with whom they otherwise lived in the same or similar circumstances.

Owing to their numbers, but also because for the most part they lived in the Military Frontier under arms, the Serbs in this as well as in the previous period, and particularly following the collapse of Bach's absolutism in 1860, continued to be an important factor in Croatian politics, especially since they were culturally and politically linked with the Serbs in Hungary and saw themselves as constituent parts of a nation that already had two separate states.

There is no doubt that history and tradition, epic poems and particularly the Serbian Orthodox Church, which at that time in Croatia was almost always equated with the Serbian nation, had played a very significant role in forging Serbian spiritual unity. Until 1873, the Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy, irrespective of the state territory which they inhabited (Austrian, Hungarian, or Croatian), lived within the boundaries of the Karlovci Archdiocese. It subsumed two Serbian Orthodox bishoprics from Croatia. One was the diocese of Pakrac and the other the diocese of Upper Karlovac, with its seat at Plaski, often referred to as the Plaski Eparchy. During absolutism, when Srem was part of the Serbian Vojvodina, the Karlovci Archdiocese was located within the framework of the Vojvodship. When the latter was abolished on December 27, 1860, and Srem was apportioned to Croatia, the Archbishopric found itself in Croatian state territory. In the whole area of Croatia and Slavonia, in the civil part as well as in the Military Frontier, in the two dioceses and the Archdiocese, there were, during absolutism and for decades thereafter, a total of 377 Orthodox parishes and about 446 churches, served by 428 priests, canons, and hieromonks.

Although religious equality was proclaimed in 1848, the status of the Serbian Orthodox Church could not be compared with that of the Catholic Church. The former was tolerated, the latter was privileged. Furthermore, the former, except for the Patriarchate, was poor, and the latter rich. The parishes, as a rule, had small incomes, short of which they were maintained by their parishioners, generally poor peasants, who frequently, especially in the Upper Karlovac diocese, led a hand-to-mouth existence. In contrast, the Catholic parishes, in addition to the property they had, received regular prebends from the state, which the Serbian Orthodox Church did not get. Furthermore, the Catholic priests were celibate, while the Orthodox priests had to support their families. The dissimilar financial status of the two churches was responsible for the different educational levels of the priests. The Catholic clergy, having an incomparably better economic base, had better opportunities for acquiring an education than the Serbian Orthodox priests. In the absence of good and accessible schools, the Orthodox priests were frequently self-taught, without the necessary basics or a sound education. Reverend Prica of Korenica explained this situation in the following way: "A Roman emperor attempted to destroy Christianity by forbidding the Christians to attend school, thus through ignorance arresting their spiritual development. In Austria there are divinity departments for Catholics at all universities, and in Vienna there is a Theological Faculty for protestants, all these being state institutions for the higher education of the clergy. Only for the Orthodox clergy are such state institutions not available in Austria, although we are as numerous as protestants. All we can afford is seminaries, maintained by each bishopric, to train the necessary number of priests. Good teachers are in short supply because there are no schools where they could study. We cannot expect our clergy to have even secondary education, and we are quite happy if they know how to read, write, and reckon, for otherwise we would have no ministers at all. Is it possible, with such a level of knowledge, to prepare good ministers? It breaks our hearts when the Catholics sneer that our clergy are coarse and ignorant, because it is perfectly true. But whose fault is it? The government wants us to be coarse and ignorant, so as not to be equal with the Catholic clergy, although it is fully aware that our Church does not engage in proselytism. What is our financial position? We live on what we get from our communes, which are poor themselves. The Catholics laugh at us, telling one another how Reverend Jovo takes his cow, or Reverend Luka his goat, to pasture, but nobody wants to know whether the right reverends have the means of paying anybody to do it for them...."

The financial position of the Orthodox priests had not been good even prior to the 1848/49 revolution, but after it, as they themselves pointed out, it became even worse. They were hard hit by the abolition of the corvée, as the peasants were no longer under the obligation to supply them with firewood. The introduction of paper money and the increase in prices of most goods resulted in an intolerably high cost of living after the revolution. Yet the clergy's income was not increased but remained at its earlier level. Furthermore, wrote one of them, the priests suffered much hardship on account of "the last war" and would go on feeling it for a long time because "very many people died or were killed abroad, whereas if they had stayed at home, married, had children, and died here" there would have been some benefit from them.

The 1848/49 revolution changed the congregation's attitude to the clergy. The latter's prestige was lowered, and this was unfavourably reflected on their incomes. One reverend father from Lika wrote as follows: "During the time when people willingly and promptly rewarded the priest, giving him not only his due but even over and beyond it, e.g., free firewood, gifts, or remuneration for memorial services, the blessing of holy water, etc.; when the people attended church regularly and sent their children to school, and when they sincerely respected and loved their priest as a father, as a spiritual shepherd and teacher, taking care of his subsistence, each parish could maintain two or three priests, and together they could easily manage to teach the children and attend to their other duties. None of this is possible now; now the priest cannot even get his prescribed stipend and prebend, but has to take recourse to the law to recover from his parishioners what is due to him, and has none of those gratuities that the priest used to get from the people. So it happens that whereas two or three priests used to be able to make a good living, now one ekes out a poor existence with much difficulty."

In order to put an end to the "desperate begging and hand-to-mouth existence," to be able to have a decent living and devote themselves to their calling and in order to free their poor congregations from various impositions, the priests of the Plaski Diocese sent a memorandum to Ban Jelacic requesting him to send it on to the Emperor and obtain for them a salary "similar to that received by the Roman clergy." Jelacic replied to Bishop Jovanovic that during his stay in the Military Frontier, he had had many occasions to witness "the sad and wanting status of the Orthodox clergy." He promised that during his visit to Vienna, he would "take the necessary steps to promote an improvement in their lives." He assured the Bishop that "His Majesty and His government will gladly offer a helping hand for the fulfilment of this wish, waiting only for the proposal of a suitable way of doing so." However, the helping hand was not forthcoming, either then or later, for obviously Vienna was not interested in finding "a suitable way."

In addition to the poor education of the Orthodox priests because of a lack of good theological and other schools, in some parts of Croatia, particularly in Upper Krajina, some churches remained empty during the period of absolutism because it was impossible to find a clerical person capable of saying mass, singers trained for church singing, or readers of ecclesiastical books. All this inevitably had a harmful effect on the moral upbringing and religious and national feelings of the Serbian people. Aware of the problem and having no means of doing anything about it, Bishop Evgenije Jovanovic asked Patriarch Rajacic several times in 1852 to open "schools for church singing" in several places, such as Timisoara, Pancevo, Zemun, and Novi Sad. He urged that in all Serbian Orthodox churches the singing should be uniform, modelled on that of Karlovci, instead of there being "as many different chants are there are churches." This was further evidence of the Serbs' spiritual unity which was fostered by the Serbian Orthodox Church, regardless of geographical remoteness or citizenship.

The low level of education of the Orthodox clergy made the Serbian Orthodox circles afraid of being assimilated into the Croatian and Catholic community. On the other hand, the wretched state of the Orthodox congregations made the Catholic Church hopeful that a portion of the Croatian "Greco-non-Uniate" population would return to "the truth" and Catholic unity, i.e., to Christ's "one and only true" Church. With an eye to achieving this as painlessly as possible, the Archbishop of Zagreb, Juraj Haulik, refrained from infringing anybody's rights or forcing anyone to convert to the Catholic faith, while advocating that the Catholic state must remove all barriers to Catholic proselytism.

Like Haulik, the Zagreb Katolicki list called for tolerance and denounced persecution of other religious communities, in the hope that one day they would join the Catholic Church. According to Mirjana Gross, "tolerance of the Orthodox Church was intended to facilitate its 'return' to the bosom of the Catholic Church." Seeing through the designs of the Croatian Catholic Church, to "return" the "Greco-non-Uniate" schismatics to the "one and only" Christian church, the Orthodox prelates demanded that the official designation of their church as "Greco-non-Uniate," be changed because it implied the need for "unification." The Serbian church hierarchy asked for the Orthodox Church to be officially styled as "the one holy, ecumenical and apostolic" or "Eastern Orthodox ecumenical" church and requested that proselytism by the Catholic Church be prohibited.

In contrast to the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, among the progressive bourgeois circles of Croatia there were men, such as Ljudevit Vukotinovic and Imbro Ignjatijevic Tkalac, who rejected the policies of Vienna and the Catholic Church towards the Serbian population and the Orthodox creed. Vukotinovic called for religious equality, and in Slavenski jug he attacked the Catholic hierarchy, accusing them of intolerance, obscurantism, defence of absolutism and aristocracy, and condemning their stubborn adherence to the feudal order. He believed that the Catholic hierarchy, which endeavoured to split up the "Yugoslavians" was more dangerous than the reactionary ministry in Vienna. Because the Croatian papers Slavenski jug and Südslavische Zeitung denounced the privileges of the Catholic Church and promoted the interests of the Serbs and the Orthodox Church, the Serbian communities in Krajina and their clergy subscribed to them and read them avidly.

The Orthodox Church, tolerated on sufferance, was particularly disadvantaged in the Military Frontier area. Outbreaks of violence took place there, which unambiguously show to what extent the Orthodox Church depended on the good will, or wilfulness, of individual commanding officers. One such incident took place in 1857 at Gospic, when on the day of the Annunciation, which coincided with the Catholic Maundy Thursday, the bells rang out from the Orthodox church. The frontier colonel ordered the bells to be silenced, insulted the priest in coarse language, and threatened to have him publicly whipped. The same thing happened a year later in the same town. An officer with an armed escort entered the church, threw three of the beadles in irons and put them in jail. As they could not handcuff the priest under his vestments, four soldiers with drawn bayonets stood in the church throughout the liturgy. These events provide a good illustration of the position of the Orthodox Church and the Serbian people, who suffered heavy insults in a country which had formally proclaimed religious equality. In this by no means easy position, the Serbs had nothing to do but to hope for better days and comfort themselves that it used to be much worse.

Biblioteka | Serbian Schools, Cyrillic Script Policy,Designation of Language and People

Copyright © 1997 by Vasilije Krestic
Copyright © 1997 by BIGZ , Beograd
Copyright © 1998 by Serbian Unity Congress