CROATIA, HISTORY OF

history of the area from ancient times to the present. The territory of Croatia bridges the central European and Mediterranean worlds, and its history has been marked by this position as a borderland. It lay near the division between the two halves of the Roman Empire and between their Byzantine and Frankish successors. The Eastern and Western churches competed for influence there, and, as the frontier of Christendom, it confronted the limits of Muslim expansion into Europe. After World War II, as part of Yugoslavia, it lay between the Soviet and Western blocs. All these competing interests have had an influence on Croatia's development. Additional reading A general survey of Croatian history to 1939 is Stephen Gazi, A History of Croatia (1973). Susan Mosher Stuard, A State of Deference: Ragusa/Dubrovnik in the Medieval Centuries (1992); Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 15221747 (1960); Elinor Murray Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (1975); and Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth: A Life of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (1987), are monographic works on aspects of Croatian history. C.W. Bracewell The economy Following the demise of communism in 1990, the Croatian government began a course of restructuring the economy from self-managed socialism to market-oriented capitalism. This has required such measures as the sale of state-owned enterprises to private owners, the establishment of functioning markets, and the creation of stable prices, interest rates, and currency. The accomplishment of these tasks, difficult under the best of circumstances, has proved to be elusive, largely because of the destabilizing effects of war. Resources Rich deposits of oil and natural gas, sufficient to meet Croatia's needs and provide surplus for export, are found in the Pannonian valleys of eastern Slavonia. There are also bauxite deposits in Istria and Dalmatia, coal in northwestern Croatia, Istria, and Dalmatia, and smaller deposits of zinc, iron, lead, mercury, manganese, and salt throughout the country. Other natural resources are the numerous rivers with hydroelectric potential and the large forests that form the basis of the wood and pulp industry. Croatia's beautiful coastline and its numerous islands supply excellent natural harbours for the shipbuilding and fishing industries; they also form the basis of the country's single most important source of foreign exchangetourism. The land Relief and soil Croatia is composed of three major geographic regions. In the north and northeast, running the full length of the upper arm of the Croatian crescent, are the Pannonian and para-Pannonian plains. Enriched with alluvial soil deposited by the Sava and Drava rivers, these plains are the most fertile agricultural regions of Croatia and form the country's breadbasket. To the north of Zagreb, the Zagorje Hills, fragments of the Julian Alps now covered with vines and orchards, separate the Sava and Drava river valleys. To the west and south of the Pannonian region, linking it with the Adriatic coast, is the central mountain belt, itself part of the Dinaric Alps. The karst plateaus of this region, consisting mostly of limestone, are barren at the highest elevations; lower down, they are heavily forested. The soil here is rather poor, offering some cultivable land in the fields and meadows and some grazing land in the plateaus. The highest mountain in Croatia, Mount Troglav (6,276 feet, or 1,913 metres), is located in the central mountain belt. The Dinaric Alps rising from the Dalmatian coast at Makarska, a resort town south of Split, Croatia. The third geographic region, the Croatian littoral, is composed of the Istrian Peninsula in the north and the Dalmatian coast extending south to the Gulf of Kotor. Wedged between the Dinaric Alps to the east and the Adriatic Sea on the west, its 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometres) of coastline are fringed by more than 1,100 islands and islets. The land is mostly mountainous and barren, with rocky soil and poor agricultural land. Climate Two main climatic zones dominate Croatia. The Pannonian and para-Pannonian plains and the mountain regions are characterized by a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters. In the plains, temperatures average 68 to 75 F (20 to 24 C) in June and 28 to 36 F (-2 to 2 C) in Januaryalthough they range from a low of -4 F (-20 C) in the winter to 104 F (40 C) in the summer. The central mountain regions of Lika and Krbava have warm summers and cold winters, with a milder climate in the valleys. The average temperature range is from 6068 F (1620 C) in June to 2136 F (-62 C) in January. Considerable rainfall, turning to snow in winter, is characteristic of the region. The Dalmatian coast, Istria, and the islands have a mild Mediterranean climate. In southern Dalmatia, where the sirocco winds (known here as the jugo) bring a moderating influence from Africa, summers are sunny, warm, and dry, and winters are rainy. In the north the winters are drier and colder as a result of the cold northeast wind known as the bora (bura). In the summer the mistral wind has a cooling effect on the coast and the islands. The average temperature ranges from 3646 F (28 C) in January to 6475 F (1824 C) in June. Rainfall is moderate and occurs mainly in the winter. The people Ethnic composition Although more than 95 percent of Croatia's population is Slav, there is a great variety of ethnic groups coexisting within the republic. In addition to the Croats (more than three-quarters of the population) and the Serbs (less than one-eighth), there are Slavic Muslims, Hungarians, Slovenes, and Italians as well as a few thousand Albanians, Austrians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Germans, and other nationalities. The primary distinguishing characteristics for ethnic identification among the Slavs in Croatia are religion and cultural tradition, Croats being Roman Catholic and more Western-influenced than the Serbs, who are Orthodox Christians. There is a very close correlation between ethnic identity and religious affiliation. While most of Croatia's Serbs live in urban centres, just over one-quarter are scattered in villages and towns, mostly in lightly populated parts of the central mountain belt, in Lika and Banija, and in northern Dalmatia. There is also a smaller concentration in Slavonia. Many of the Serbs in Croatia are descendants of people who migrated to the border areas of the Austrian empire between the 16th and 18th centuries, following the Ottoman conquest of Serbia and Bosnia. Their original role as frontiersmen against Ottoman incursions, in addition to their poverty and geographic isolation, ensured that Croatia's Serbs would remain among the least-educated and often better-armed and more violence-prone residents of the region. About one-fifth of the Croats of the former Yugoslavia live outside the borders of Croatiamost of them in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Croats have lived since the Slavs first migrated to the western Balkan Peninsula in the 6th and 7th centuries AD. Although there has traditionally been a yearning for unification with Croatia among the Croats of Herzegovina (a region contiguous to Dalmatia), this sentiment is not generally shared by Croats within Croatia or even by Croats in Bosnia. Linguistic composition Like Serbs and Bosniacs, Croats speak Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language of the Indo-European family, but this language is now called Croatian, Serbian, or Bosnian, depending on the speaker's ethnic and political affiliation. The first and major distinguishing characteristic between the Croatian and Serbian variants of the Serbo-Croatian language is the script, with Croatian written in the Latin alphabet and Serbian in the Cyrillic. Minor distinctions of grammar and pronunciation and some difference in vocabulary also occur, mostly as a result of the long history of foreign domination. For Croats, this has resulted in a sprinkling of German, Hungarian, and (in Dalmatia and Istria) Italian vocabulary, while the Serbs' speech shows Turkish and Russian influence. A final linguistic distinction, reflecting the legacies of history as well as the effects of geography, can be heard in the colourful medley of regional dialects and subdialects that survive to this day. The standard Croatian literary language, based on the Shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian, emerged in the second half of the 19th century as a result of an effort to unite all South Slavs. Although all three major branches of Serbo-Croatian (Shtokavian, Chakavian, and Kajkavian) were spoken by Croats (as they still are today), the Shtokavian dialect was the most widely heard in Croatian regions of eastern Slavonia, the Adriatic littoral from Makarska to Dubrovnik, and Herzegovina as well as Montenegro and Serbia; it was therefore adopted by leading Croatian national intellectuals of the 19th century.