Minorities in SerbiaVanishing Vojvodina
Demographic changes are killing off a once-cosmopolitan province of Serbia
SERBIA'S northern province of Vojvodina has been different for centuries. In the 18th century, following Vojvodina's depopulation during the wars with the Ottoman Turks, the Habsburgs resettled the province. German-speakers lived side by side with Jews and Czechs, Ruthenians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, Romanians and others.
But today, Vojvodina is dying a long, slow death. Like the rest of Serbia, and neighbouring Croatia, Hungary and Romania, its population is shrinking thanks to old age, a low birth rate and emigration. Its character is changing too. The days when the province could boast 28 nationalities are long past.
Census figures indicate that by 1931 only a third of Vojvodina's population of 1.62m was Serb. Almost 350,000 were ethnically German. But after the second world war they were driven out or killed. The Balkan wars of the 1990s saw further demographic upheavals. Many Croats, intimidated and fearful, left Vojvodina—which under the Yugoslav constitution had enjoyed the same autonomous position within Serbia as Kosovo—as did ethnic Hungarians who saw no future in Serbia. But Serbs also left, not just for the bright lights of Belgrade but for other parts of Europe and North America. In their place came 300,000 Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia, of whom 200,000 are thought to have stayed.
By 2002, according to that year's census, Serbs constituted almost two thirds of the province's 2m people. Almost half of the rest were ethnic Hungarian, with no other minority accounting for more than 3%. Next year's count is likely to show that the population has dipped below 2m and that the Serbian share has risen to 70%.
In the little town of Vrsac, in the east of the province, your correspondent visited a museum dedicated to the artist Paja Jovanovic, its most famous son. Inside, his “Vrsac Triptych” (1895) depicts happy and prosperous German peasants bringing in the harvest on a hill overlooking the town (see right). It is unlikely that any of their descendants still live here.
The nearby village of Gudurica was also, until the end of the war, largely German, many of its people descended from settlers from Alsace and Lorraine. After the war the Yugoslav authorities replaced them with a quarter of a million people, many of them poor Serbs from Bosnia. Today rural flight means that the village, by now almost entirely Serb, is probably home to barely half the number of people it was 40 years ago.
Close by is the village of Alibunar, where ethnic Romanians are preparing to celebrate a saint's day. Their church stands next to a Serbian Orthodox one (see right). The walls of their little church hall are decorated with pictures of generation upon generation of their local choir. In 1910 there were 75,000 Romanians in Vojvodina; in 2002 30,000. Next year's census will show a further drop.
Minorities in Vojvodina, says Branislav Djurdjev, a demographer at the province's Novi Sad University, tend to be much older than Serbs, who themselves are ageing fast. Intermarriage is also eating away at the minority share of the population. But demography is not the only explanation for Vojvodina's disappearing minorities. Many young Hungarians, Romanians, Croats and others leave the province to study in the lands of their compatriots; few come back. The expansion of the EU in 2004 and 2007 to take in many eastern European states—but not Serbia—provides a further incentive to leave. On current trends, says Mr Djurdjev, Vojvodina will be 90% Serb by the end of the century. The remaining 10% will consist largely of Hungarians and Roma.
Every summer tens of thousands of young people from across Europe come to Novi Sad, Vojvodina's capital, for the Exit music festival, held in the Petrovaradin fortress above the Danube. Locals like to tell them that Vojvodina's mixed heritage makes it a Europe in miniature. But today, once the bands pack up and leave, they take the cosmopolitanism with them.