BETWEEN DEOSMANIZATION AND BALKANIZATION: REFUGEE’S STEPS OF BOSNIAK HISTORY

The past and the present are inseparable, one interprets the other. Many "long-lasting" processes go beyond local frameworks and regional borders. This also applies to the complex "Eastern question", as well as the problem of the deosmanization of the Balkans, whose political geography in the 19th and 20th centuries was exposed to radical overlaps. Wars and persecutions are important factors in the history of Balkan Muslims. In the seventies of the XIX century, they constituted half of the population in the Ottoman part of the Balkans. With war devastation, a considerable part was killed or expelled to Anadolia between 1870 and 1890. The emergent "Turkish islands" in the Balkans after 1878 were increasingly narrowed, or disappeared due to the displacement of Muslims. Multiethnic and religious color of the Balkans disturbed accounts with simple categorizations. The term "balkanization" signified, after the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, "not only the fragmentation of large and powerful political units, but became synonymous with returning tribal, backward, primitive, and barbaric." The Balkanization of "Ottoman Europe" and the violent changes in its ethnic-religious structure led to discontinuity, the erosion of history, as well as fragmentation of the minds of the remaining Muslims and their afflicted communities, the lack of knowledge of the interconnectedness of their fates. The emigration of Bosniaks and other Muslims of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds from the Balkans to various parts of the Ottoman Empire, and then to Turkey, during the XIX and XX centuries, had a number of consequences.