VISUAL ASPECTS OF THE SERBIAN ENTRANCE IN A NEW WORLD
VISUAL ASPECTS OF THE SERBIAN ENTRANCE IN A NEW WORLD

Summary/Abstract: If we wished to select several key words related to the entire history of south-eastern Pannonia, today's province of Vojvodina, one of them would undoubtedly be “migration”. As far back as the prehistoric times, the plain was frequently exposed to waves of immigrants coming from the mountainous areas that surround it – the Carpathians and the western Balkans. During the Migration Period, many tribes from the steppes beyond the Carpathians crossed this area as they advanced towards the West. Similar processes were taking place in other parts of Europe as well, but in this part of Pannonia large-scale migrations continued from the 16th century until today, bringing about, among other things, several profound changes in respect to the population's ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural identity. From the beginning of the 16th and until the end of the 17th century, the Ottoman conquest and rule resulted in a drastic diminution of the Hungarian population. The demographic catastrophe was only partially mitigated by new arrivals from the Balkans, among which the Christians, mostly Serbs, outnumbered the Muslims. After the instatement of Habsburg rule in the 18th century, these lands, devastated by war, were settled by Serbs, Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks, Rusyns, Romanians, and others, both spontaneously and as a result of systematic colonisation by the state. The region thus became remarkably multi-ethnic and it would remain as such for the following 200 years. Minor changes in that respect emerged after the First World War when it was integrated as part of Serbia, i.e. Yugoslavia, and major ones after 1945. At that time, the state colonised the former settlements of exiled and escaped Germans, who constituted about a third of Vojvodina's population, by the dwellers of the mountainous regions of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and, in smaller numbers, of Serbia and Macedonia.

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