Origins

The Croats in Canada trace their origins to the newly independent country of Croatia, located in south-central Europe along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and its hinterland as far north as the Drava River. Croatia is roughly shaped like a crescent and is divided into three rather distinct regions: (1) the maritime region of Dalmatia, together with several offshore islands, and the peninsula of Istria; (2) the central mountainous area of historic Croatia including the area around the country’s capital of Zagreb; and (3) the plain of Slavonia between the Drava and Sava rivers. Because of its varied terrain, communications have until quite recently been quite difficult within Croatia. Consequently, the maritime, mountainous, and plains regions each have developed distinct linguistic and ethnographic characteristics as well as different historic traditions.

For many centuries, Croatia had been a borderland between the Catholic Habsburg and Muslim Ottoman empires, and the frequent wars between those two powers brought about numerous migrations and population exchanges. As a result, Croatia came to include within its borders a Serb minority, especially in Slavonia and the Lika/Krajina area in the northern hinterland of Dalmatia. On the other hand, Croats are also to be found outside Croatia, in many parts of western Bosnia and, in particular, Herzegovina.

Croat tribes migrated to the Adriatic coast and the northern Balkan hinterland in the sixth and seventh centuries from lands north of the Carpathian Mountains. Although they were invited to the region by the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire, it was from the Roman Catholic west that in 680 the Croats were to receive Christianity. Located along the borderland of the two Christian worlds, the Croats were jurisdictionally under Rome, but they also welcomed the disciples of the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius from whom they initially received a distinct Croatian liturgical language written in the Glagolitic alphabet. It was not until the eleventh century that Glagolitic Croatian was largely replaced by Latin and that Croatian was written in the Roman alphabet.

The relationship with Rome also enhanced Croatia’s political status when in 925 the pope recognized Tomislav as the first king of Croatia. Throughout its history, medieval Croatia was frequently challenged by Venetia for control of the eastern Adriatic ports and by Hungary for the region of Slavonia. When in the eleventh century, the Croatian dynastic bloodline died out, the country was joined in a union with Hungary. Croatia’s dynastic union with Hungary was to last for over eight centuries. During that entire period, Croatia had its own parliament, its own legal system, and its own administrator (ban) appointed by the Hungarian king.

When, in 1526, the Ottoman Empire defeated the Hungarian army and the king was killed, Hungary’s hereditary throne passed to the Habsburgs. This meant that Croatia, while still united with Hungary, became part of the larger Austrian Empire. Until the eighteenth century, much of Croatia was overrun by Ottoman troops during its wars with Austria, while the coastal cities on the Adriatic were for long periods of time ruled by Venetia, so that port cities like Rijeka (Fiume), Zadar (Zara), Split (Spalato), and Dubrovnik (Ragusa) took on a distinct Italianate flavour.

It was not until the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815 that all of Croatia found itself within the borders of the Austrian Empire. The internal administrative system was complex, however. Historic Croatia and Slavonia together formed an autonomous entity within the Hungarian Kingdom, while Dalmatia and Istria were separate provinces within the Austrian “half” of the empire. The nineteenth century also witnessed the growth of a Croatian national movement which was aimed at raising the national consciousness of Croats wherever they lived and with uniting the various regions of Croatia into a single triune kingdom. Whereas political unification was never achieved, the Croatian nationalist intelligentsia did succeed in laying the groundwork for the idea of cultural unity with other South Slavs, in particular the Serbs. One result was the creation of a common Serbo-Croat literary language, for which the Croats used the Roman alphabet while the Serbs used the Cyrillic.

Following the collapse of Austria-Hungary in late 1918, the Croats joined with the Serbs and Slovenes to create a joint kingdom, which in 1928 was renamed Yugoslavia. From the outset, the Croats felt the agreements that led to the creation of a common state were being violated by the Serb king and Serbian-dominated central Yugoslav government. Croat demands for political autonomy were finally granted in 1939, but in the spring of 1941 Yugoslavia fell victim to Nazi-German, Italian, and Bulgarian military aggression.

Whereas Yugoslavia ceased to exist during World War II, Croatia was reconstituted as an independent state (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) closely allied to Germany and Italy. Its territory expanded in 1943 to include Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although technically a kingdom, Croatia was effectively ruled by Ante Pavelić, head of the patriotic Croatian Ustaša movement. Croatia’s expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina was challenged by Serbs living there, so that most of the war years were marked by a three-way struggle between the Croatian Ustaša, Serbian Chetniks who wished to restore the prewar Yugoslav monarchy, and the Partisans under Josip Broz Tito who hoped to establish a Communist republic.

With the end of the war and the defeat of Nazi Germany and its Croatian ally, thousands of Croats (both Ustaša and non-Ustaša supporters) fled abroad. Tito’s version of a restored Yugoslavia was to prevail and the country was divided into six federal republics. One of these was Croatia, with borders similar to those that the independent country has today. Although Croatia had its own republic, real power was in the hands of the Communist-led central government in Belgrade under Marshal Tito. Nevertheless, for over three decades until his death in 1980, Tito’s Yugoslavia provided political stability and an improvement in the economy, especially the tourist industry along Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. Since Yugoslavia was not within the Soviet bloc, Tito’s government allowed both temporary and permanent emigration, and many Croats seeking to improve their economic situation went abroad.

By the second half of the 1980s, political tensions between the various Yugoslav republics increased. When no solution seemed in sight, Croatia declared its independence in May 1991. Although independent Croatia was recognized immediately by most European states, the federal Yugoslav government (eventually dominated by Serbs and Montenegrins) and the Serb minority within Croatia (in both eastern Slavonia and Lika/Krajina) challenged Croatia. The result was a brutal war that eventually spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina where it was to last until late 1995. Nearly two million people were uprooted by the conflict, including tens of thousands of Croats within Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, many of whom fled for safety as refugees to several European countries, as well as to Australia, the United States, and Canada.