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Authors: Mark Mazower
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impoverishing other Balkan farming populations too. 41
Mass emigration, especially overseas, demonstrated how hard the newly independent states were finding it to make peasant farming work. The portraits of Montenegrin, Croatian, Greek and Romanian Jewish country folk stare down at visitors to the Ellis Island Museum in New York, testifying to the great wave of immigrants to America from the Balkans. Migration had begun to gather pace in the last decades of Ottoman rule, but continued thereafter. By 1912, 250,000 Greeks had left for the United States, nearly 10 percent of the population and the largest proportion from any European state after 1900. Entire villages became dependent on remittances from overseas. Some areas started to suffer from labor shortages before the First World War, then U.S. immigration restrictions cut off the outflow. In the 1950s, the same pattern would emerge as Greek and Yugoslav peasants again fled the land for Australia and Germany: the land simply could not support the highest reproduction rates in Europe.
Peasants tried to resist the incursions of modernity. Their generosity and hospitality toward travelers—often codified into custom—existed alongside a deep suspicion of neighbors and the inhabitants of the next village, not to mention landlords. The hatred that existed between hill and valley was well known. “I’d rather marry a Turk than have to go around in black and wear a kerchief,” was how sophisticated Dalmatian lowland girls mocked the highland shepherds who came to market in the early seventeenth century. “The plains were always held by someone alien to the mountaineers, who were hungry for bread and land, and tired of the bare, though beautiful crags that were their home,” wrote the Montenegrin Milovan Djilas. In his memoirs, Djilas vividly conveys the mutual bitterness felt between peasant and town folk. “If the townspeople, erstwhile peasants, had contempt for the peasants,” he writes, “the peasants in turn hated them. . . . The peasants looked down upon the townspeople as a sluggish, wily, and lying breed, who ate little and delicately, fancy soups, tripes and pastries—and wasted away in damp, crowded, little rooms.” 42
For centuries, the village had been the main political, administrative, fiscal and military unit organizing the collective lives of rural inhabitants of the Balkans. It was the village which they referred to as their “fatherland” and its representatives spoke for them before the dignitaries of the state and other intruders. In the nineteenth century, this isolated collectivity began to change in ways its inhabitants found hard to comprehend. Used to a world in which towns were centers of administration and trade, inhabited chiefly by Turks and foreign merchants and shopkeepers, peasants were inclined to identify themselves with the moral essence of national life. “There are no members of the Serbian nation but peasants,” pronounced Vuk KaradŽic early in the nineteenth century. Money meant exploitation, shops and commerce implied degeneration. Some peasants complained that young people were tempted “to steal food from their homes to procure useless, cheap goods at the shop.” 43
But now they found that independence brought no escape from these evils. They had expelled the Turkish landlords and officials, only to find that a new governing class had taken their place, with new means of enrichment and new pretensions. “In analyzing the national character,” a young British diplomat commented on fin de siècle Serbia, “you have two distinct classes to deal with—the governmental and commercial, which wears coats, trousers and boots—but not always socks; and the peasant, which affects jackets, petticoats and sandals.” 44 The arbitrary and corrupt Ottoman tax farmer had been superseded by a salaried and modernizing bureaucracy, eager to replace the old “money anarchy” with a single currency, to send out gendarmes,
Mass emigration, especially overseas, demonstrated how hard the newly independent states were finding it to make peasant farming work. The portraits of Montenegrin, Croatian, Greek and Romanian Jewish country folk stare down at visitors to the Ellis Island Museum in New York, testifying to the great wave of immigrants to America from the Balkans. Migration had begun to gather pace in the last decades of Ottoman rule, but continued thereafter. By 1912, 250,000 Greeks had left for the United States, nearly 10 percent of the population and the largest proportion from any European state after 1900. Entire villages became dependent on remittances from overseas. Some areas started to suffer from labor shortages before the First World War, then U.S. immigration restrictions cut off the outflow. In the 1950s, the same pattern would emerge as Greek and Yugoslav peasants again fled the land for Australia and Germany: the land simply could not support the highest reproduction rates in Europe.
Peasants tried to resist the incursions of modernity. Their generosity and hospitality toward travelers—often codified into custom—existed alongside a deep suspicion of neighbors and the inhabitants of the next village, not to mention landlords. The hatred that existed between hill and valley was well known. “I’d rather marry a Turk than have to go around in black and wear a kerchief,” was how sophisticated Dalmatian lowland girls mocked the highland shepherds who came to market in the early seventeenth century. “The plains were always held by someone alien to the mountaineers, who were hungry for bread and land, and tired of the bare, though beautiful crags that were their home,” wrote the Montenegrin Milovan Djilas. In his memoirs, Djilas vividly conveys the mutual bitterness felt between peasant and town folk. “If the townspeople, erstwhile peasants, had contempt for the peasants,” he writes, “the peasants in turn hated them. . . . The peasants looked down upon the townspeople as a sluggish, wily, and lying breed, who ate little and delicately, fancy soups, tripes and pastries—and wasted away in damp, crowded, little rooms.” 42
For centuries, the village had been the main political, administrative, fiscal and military unit organizing the collective lives of rural inhabitants of the Balkans. It was the village which they referred to as their “fatherland” and its representatives spoke for them before the dignitaries of the state and other intruders. In the nineteenth century, this isolated collectivity began to change in ways its inhabitants found hard to comprehend. Used to a world in which towns were centers of administration and trade, inhabited chiefly by Turks and foreign merchants and shopkeepers, peasants were inclined to identify themselves with the moral essence of national life. “There are no members of the Serbian nation but peasants,” pronounced Vuk KaradŽic early in the nineteenth century. Money meant exploitation, shops and commerce implied degeneration. Some peasants complained that young people were tempted “to steal food from their homes to procure useless, cheap goods at the shop.” 43
But now they found that independence brought no escape from these evils. They had expelled the Turkish landlords and officials, only to find that a new governing class had taken their place, with new means of enrichment and new pretensions. “In analyzing the national character,” a young British diplomat commented on fin de siècle Serbia, “you have two distinct classes to deal with—the governmental and commercial, which wears coats, trousers and boots—but not always socks; and the peasant, which affects jackets, petticoats and sandals.” 44 The arbitrary and corrupt Ottoman tax farmer had been superseded by a salaried and modernizing bureaucracy, eager to replace the old “money anarchy” with a single currency, to send out gendarmes,
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