engleski

Contesting regional identities in the historical context of the borderlands

Along the course of history, the present territory of Croatia has often been a contact zone of various political subjects, cultures and religions. Within the last 500 years, for instance, it was an area where several European and Eurasian political forces – such as the Habsburg monarchy, the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire - as well as various „worlds“, traditions, cultures and religions such as Christianity and Islam - often conflicted and overlapped. In essence, the bordering territory of Croatia has for centuries been a zone of cultural contacts, conflicts and exchanges, that have caused its prominent multiculturality. Deconstructing the symbolical layer of historical maps, it is possible to find out how place names and notions of space in the borderlands reflected the multiculturality of space. The analysis has been applied to historical regions in the borderlands that had formed and had existed due to certain historical circumstances – Morlacchia (Morlakija), Turkish Croatia (Turska Hrvatska) and Minor Wallachia (Mala Vlaška). With the disappearance of their forming circumstances, these regions have undergone two different processes – dissolution and translation (a shift of name/meaning). The research has shown that the mechanism of creating these border regions was based on perception and consciousness of the dissimilarities and „otherness“ of various social groups in relation to the dominant population. The dissimilarity primarily implies a social, cultural and religious difference, as well as a difference in the way of life. Thus, it was due to the consciousness and the appreciation of dissimilarities and uniqueness through the processes of territorialization that the spatial images and regional identities have been formed. Thus, place names and notions of space formed within a multicultural area of the borderlands raise the basic identity issues from individual to collective and territorial levels.

regional identities ; border regions ; historical maps

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