Old Serbia

Historical heartland of the Serbian Empire (1346 71)

Old Serbia is a Serbian historiographical term that is used to describe the territory that according to the dominant school of Serbian historiography in the late 19th century formed the core of the Serbian Empire in 1346–71. The term Old Serbians were used as designations by Serb authors and later governments for Slavic populations from regions such as Vardar Macedonia. In modern historiography, the concept of Old Serbia as it developed in the 19th century has been criticised as a historical myth, based often on invented or tendentiously interpreted historical events. Milovan Radovanović claims that although the term was not attested until the 19th century it emerged in the colloquial speech of the Serb population who lived in territories of the Habsburg monarchy after the Great Migrations. The toponym first appeared in the public sphere during the 1860s, the time of the triumph of Vuk Karadžić's ideas. Until then the Serbs imagined the borders of their country spreading northwest. These ideas are grounded in the late 19th century Serbian nationalism and changed the goal of Serbia's territorial expansion from the west to the south and were important to Serbian nationalism during the Balkan Wars and the First World War.

In the early nineteenth century, Old Serbia as a concept was introduced by Vuk Karadžić in his ethnographic, geographic and historical publications. Karadžić defined Old Serbia as including the Morava Vardar river valley. From 1878 onward, the Serbian state started saying "Old Serbia" also included Kosovo. The critical treatment of facts was damaged by the invocation of the past for the justification of present and future claims, and by the mixture of history and contemporary issues. The core myth of Serbian identity became the idea Kosovo was the cradle of the Serbian nation. Serbian rebels of the First Serbian Uprising and Second Serbian Uprising had no territorial ambitions over Kosovo. Serbian interest in the region of Macedonia was defined in a foreign policy program named Načertanije. This program responded to the need to spread propaganda among Serbs within the Ottoman Empire. Serbian engagement with the region started in 1868 with the establishment of the Educational Council (Prosvetni odbor) that opened schools and sent Serb instructors and textbooks to Macedonia and Old Serbia. In May 1877 a delegation of Serbs of Old Serbia presented their request to 'liberate' and unite Old Serbia with the Principality of Serbia to the government of Serbia. In the same year the Committee for the Liberation of Old Serbia and Macedonia was founded. Serbian nationalists envisioned Serbia as a "Piedmont of the Balkans" that would unify certain territories they interpreted as Serbian in the region into one state, like Old Serbia. In the 1877 peace after the Serbian–Ottoman Wars (1876–1878), the Serbs hoped to gain the Kosovo Vilayet and Sanjak of Novi Pazar to the Lim River. Following the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–1878) and the emergence of the Macedonian Question, Serbs were dissatisfied that Bulgaria became a rival for the region of Macedonia or "Old Serbia". Kosovo formed part of the Kosovo myth that prior to those events was viewed in spiritual and ethical terms, and an important aspect of Serbian cultural and ordinary life. At this time, Old Serbia became integrated into the Serbian state's collective narrative about its own self identity. To bolster Serbian influence in Old Serbia, the St. Sava Society was established (1886) to educate aspiring teachers for the task, and later a department was created in the Serbian Education Ministry with a near identical objective. In 1906–1907, Cvijić wrote the Macedonian Slavs were an "amorphous" and "floating mass", and lacked national identity. By regarding northern Macedonia as "Old Serbia", he sought to legitimize Serbia's territorial claims over the territory. Cvijić continuously changed his maps to include or exclude "Macedonian Slavs", altering the location of the boundary between Bulgarians and Serbs and readjusting the colour scheme to show Macedonia as nearer to Serbia. Due to Greek and Serbian cooperation, northerly areas centred around Skopje were not shown in their maps as being part of Macedonia, as Serbia regarded those areas as Old Serbia. Serb authors viewed the Slavic inhabitants of Macedonia as Old Serbians or Southern Serbs, designations that were used more in the past than in modern times. Old Serbia as a term evoked strong symbolism and message regarding Serb historical rights to the land whose demographics were seen to have been altered in the Ottoman period to favour Albanians at the conclusion of the seventeenth century. Before the events of the Berlin Congress, only a small number of Serbian accounts existed that described Old Serbia and Macedonia in the early nineteenth century. Old Serbia became a topic of focus (mid nineteenth early twentieth centuries) in Serbian travelogues by Serb authors from Serbia and Austria Hungary. In the aftermath of the Serbo Bulgarian War (1885), several travelogues were published on Old Serbia by politicians and intellectuals seeking to counter "Bulgarian propaganda". The travel accounts through use of geography, history, philology and ethnography sought to bolster nationalist claims that those lands were for the Serbs. Focusing on language and cultural aspects, the travellers sought to present and connect the Serbs of Serbia and Austria Hungary to the inhabitants of Old Serbia as synonymous and one nation that lacked differences. These accounts contained portrayals and metaphors about Serb travellers in danger encountering the national cultural extinction of local Serbs or biological threats. The links travelogues drew to Old Serbia with inhabitants under threat had an important impact through discourse in connecting an emerging Serb national identity with Kosovo. Efforts were devoted to interpreting linguistic and cultural information to present Macedonians as nearer to the Serbs than Bulgarians. Due to competition from the Bulgarian national movement, efforts were devoted to delineate a boundary in areas where differences among religions were nonexistent. In areas where the population was mainly Albanian, the appropriation undertaken by travel writers was reinforced through narratives of history, positions based on economic and geographic issues, at times that involved fabricating information and creating the room for discrimination on cultural and racial grounds toward non Slavs. It would entail presenting non Orthodox Slavic inhabitants as either recent religious converts, immigrants or people who underwent a language shift. Peoples like the Turks, Turkifed inhabitants and Albanians (in several texts called "Arnauts") were portrayed as converted inhabitants who were former Serbs. The process allowed the lands of Old Serbia to be denoted as Serbian and implied a future removal of political rights and ability for self determination from non Slavic inhabitants such as Albanians, whom were viewed as the cultural and racial "other", unhygienic, and a danger. As travelogues were presented as firsthand accounts and truth, their contents aimed to get a reader to react and identify as a person with the imagined community of a nation. Kosovo, which was listed as "Old Serbia", was classified as an "unredeemed Serbian" region by the Black Hand, a secret society formed by Serb officers that generated nationalist material and armed activity by bands outside Serbia. In Serbian historiography, the First Balkan War (1912–1913) is also known as War for Liberation of Old Serbia. Later, in 1913 the Sandžak, Kosovo and Metohija and Vardar Macedonia became part of the Kingdom of Serbia. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Serb publications aiming to counter Albanian interests and to justify Serbian historical claims in Kosovo and Macedonia through the recreation of Old Serbia in those territories appeared. The acquisition of new lands was interpreted by individuals such as Vaso Čubrilović, a Serb intellectual, as the realisation of Garašanin's concept. At the end of the First World War, Serbia became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the state placed its efforts toward speeding up the incorporation of newly acquired lands such as Kosovo, Macedonia and Sandžak. To integrate the region after perceived centuries of "separation" between the area and Serbia, national, cultural and economic considerations were seen as a centre of focus in Old Serbia for some high ranking Serb officials. Institutions were founded to accelerate the regional economy such as a prominent bank in Skopje (1923) named "Old Serbia". The government of Nikola Pašić treated the Slavic population of Vardar Macedonia as either Serbs or as Old Serbians (Starosrbijanci). Following the Second World War, Yugoslavia was reorganised as a federal state, with Serbia as one of six republics. The stances and opinions of the early twentieth century Serbian intelligentsia have left a legacy in the political space as those views are used in modern discourses of Serb nationalism to uphold nationalistic claims.