Celebrities with Bosnian Roots

Bosnian, Bosniak, Serb and Croat

Bosnian is the name for anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The constitution of 1995 names its authors as the “Bosniacs, Croats, and Serbs, as constituent peoples (along with Others), and citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina”.^[1]

The three peoples share the same South Slav heritage, and their main cultural difference is religious origin. In the 19th century nationalist movements encouraged Orthodox Bosnians to be labeled Serbs and Catholic Bosnians to be labeled Croats.^[6] In communist Yugoslavia the Central Committee of the Bosnian communists declared in 1968 that the Muslims were a distinct nation. Since the mid-1990s Bosnian Muslims have called themselves Bosniaks.^[7]

The census of 2013 counted 3,531,159 people. No one had to state an ethnicity or a religion. Asked about religion, 50.7% answered Islamic, 30.7% Orthodox and 15.2% Catholic.^[2]

When the results appeared in June 2016, the statistics agency of Republika Srpska refused to publish them in its entity. Its objection was that the count included people who had fled during the war and now live abroad. The state agency said it had included 196,000 people who lived abroad and still owned property in Bosnia.^[8]

The three seats of the presidency are reserved for one Bosniak, one Croat and one Serb.^[1] Citizens who do not declare themselves members of a constituent people cannot stand for the presidency or the upper house of parliament. In 2009 the European Court of Human Rights ruled on the case of two such citizens, of Roma and Jewish origin, and found that this violated their rights.^[9]

Slavic settlers and the medieval kingdom

A 2023 study of ancient DNA, most of it from today’s Croatia and Serbia, traced the Balkan population through the 1st millennium CE. After Roman rule ended, newcomers genetically similar to today’s Slavic speakers of Eastern Europe contributed between 30% and 60% to the ancestry of the region’s people. The authors call this “one of the largest permanent demographic changes anywhere in Europe during the Migration Period”. Present-day Serbs and Croats carry about 50–60% of this ancestry, and the earlier population was never completely replaced.^[10]

In 2005 researchers compared the Y chromosomes of 256 Bosniak, Serb and Croat men from Bosnia. Despite some differences, the three groups “share a large fraction of the same ancient gene pool distinctive for the Balkan area”.^[11] A genome-wide study of 2014, which included all three, described the western Balkan populations as genetically uniform, especially the speakers of western South Slavic languages.^[12]

Slavs began to settle in the region in the 6th century. A Bosnian state of some kind existed for most of the period from 1180 to 1463. Under King Tvrtko I, who ruled from 1353 to 1391, it was briefly the most powerful state in the western Balkans.^[13]

Medieval Bosnia had its own church, which grew apart from Rome during a long isolation. Many 19th-century historians linked it to the dualist Bogomils of Bulgaria. Later scholars pointed out that its members accepted the cross and the Old Testament, which the Bogomils rejected. They see it as a branch of the Catholic Church with some Orthodox practices.^[13]

The stećci, tombstones mostly of limestone, were made from the second half of the 12th century to the 16th. More than 70,000 survive at over 3,300 sites. Orthodox and Catholic Christians and members of the Church of Bosnia all used them. Since 2016, 28 of their graveyards in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia have formed a UNESCO World Heritage Site.^[14]

Ottoman centuries and Habsburg rule

Ottoman forces took Vrhbosna in central Bosnia in 1448 and built it up into the city of Sarajevo. They conquered most of the kingdom in 1463, and the last fortress in Herzegovina fell in 1482. Herzegovina owes its name to herceg, “duke”, the title taken by the nobleman Stefan Vukčić.^[13]

Of all the Balkan lands under Ottoman rule, only Bosnia and later Albania saw a large part of the native population convert to Islam. Reasons included the privileged legal status of Muslims and city life in Sarajevo and Mostar, where a full civic life required conversion. Modern historians have largely disproved the old belief that nobles converted en masse to keep their estates. The Ottomans also brought settlers from Serbia and Herzegovina, most of them Orthodox, into depopulated parts of northern and western Bosnia.^[15]

Sephardic Jews settled in Ottoman Sarajevo and founded a quarter of their own.^[16] At Mostar the Ottomans replaced a wooden bridge over the Neretva in 1566 with a single stone arch 27 meters (90 feet) wide. The town’s name comes from most, “bridge”.^[17]

The bridge was destroyed in November 1993 and reopened in 2004. A year later UNESCO added it and the surrounding old town to the World Heritage List.^[17]

Article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin, signed on July 13, 1878, reads, “The provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina shall be occupied and administered by Austria-Hungary.”^[18] In October 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed them outright. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip of the Young Bosnia movement killed the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. A month later Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and World War I began.^[19]

Yugoslavia, war and the Dayton state

In 1918 Bosnia became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. During World War II an estimated 164,000 Serbs, 75,000 Muslims and 64,000 Croats died in Bosnia. Most of its 14,000 Jews were killed.^[19] From 1946 Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of the constituent republics of communist Yugoslavia.^[7] In the census of 1991, the last before the war, 43.5% of its people were Muslims, 31.2% Serbs and 17.4% Croats.^[8]

Bosnia voted on independence on February 29 and March 1, 1992, and almost no Bosnian Serbs took part. Of the nearly two-thirds of the electorate who voted, almost all voted yes. The United States and the European Community recognized the new state on April 7.^[7] The war that followed lasted until 1995, killed about 100,000 people and displaced 2 million.^[8]

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica, a UN safe area in eastern Bosnia. Between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men from the enclave were killed. In 2004 the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled, “By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide.”^[20] The International Court of Justice also found in 2007 that genocide was committed at Srebrenica. The evidence did not show that the acts could be attributed to Serbia. The court ruled that Serbia had violated its obligation to prevent the genocide.^[21]

The Dayton Agreement of 1995 kept one state with two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 51% of the land and Republika Srpska on 49%.^[7] Annex 4 of the agreement remains the constitution.^[22] Brčko, on which the parties could not agree at Dayton, became a district of its own through an arbitration award in 1999. Its territory belongs to both entities as a condominium.^[3]

One language, three names, two alphabets

Most people speak mutually intelligible languages known as Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian, depending on the speaker’s ethnic and political affiliation. The varieties spoken within Bosnia and Herzegovina are closer to one another than to the speech of Belgrade or Zagreb.^[6] Whether they form one language or several depends on how a language is defined, as the linguist Wayles Browne notes. Under the Dayton Agreement, official documents appear in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian versions. In practice they differ in a few words and in the alphabet, Cyrillic for Bosnian Serbs and Latin for the others.^[23]

In 2013, 52.9% of the population named Bosnian as their mother tongue, 30.8% Serbian and 14.6% Croatian.^[2] Both alphabets have been taught in schools. Since the 1990s Serbs have aligned with Cyrillic, and Croats and Bosniaks with the Latin alphabet.^[6]