How Slovene National Activists from Cisleithania Created the Notion of Hungarian Slovenes

The belief that the western counties of Hungary were inhabited by members of the Slovene nation gradually spread and evolved through the long nineteenth century. The roots of this idea stretched back to the beginning of the century, when it first emerged—clearly in an a-nationalistic form—as a linguistic proposition formulated by the famous linguist Bartholomeus Kopitar (1780–1844). In 1811, Kopitar included the territory of what was one hundred years later known as Prekmurje in his conceptualization of the area where the Slovene language was spoken. According to him, this Slovene-speaking zone spread from the upper Adriatic Sea in the west to the Hungarian counties of Zala and Vas/Železna in the east.Footnote ¹⁰ In the first half of the nineteenth century, Kopitar's idea of Slovene linguistic community gained influential supporters and began to circulate among the members of the educated elite. In 1814, for instance, Janez Nepomuk Primic (1785–1823), who taught the Slovene language at the Graz Lyceum, regarded counties of western Hungary as an integral part of Slovenien, the region inhabited by the Slovene-speaking population.Footnote ¹¹ In 1826, the renowned linguist Pavol Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861) adopted Kopitar's supposition and identified Slovenes—speakers of Slovene language—as one of the seven Slavic nations living in the Austrian Empire. According to Šafárik, approximately 50,000 Winden or Slovenzen lived in the western counties of Hungary.Footnote ¹²

With the establishment of conditions for the dissemination of various social visions in March 1848, Kopitar's notion of a separate Slavic language, denoted as Slovene, became the ideological basis for the emerging Slovene ethnolinguistic nationalism. In spring and summer 1848, the amalgamation of territory where (Kopitar's) Slovene language was supposedly spoken with the territory where Slovenes purportedly lived resulted in two crucial concepts—the Slovene nation and the Slovene national territory—that would frame the politics and rhetoric of Slovene national movement in the late Imperial Austrian setting and beyond. Since then every single Slovene national declaration drew its arguments from Kopitar's notion of Slovene language, regardless of what precisely it demanded, be it political unification and autonomy of Slovene nation or specific language rights and other “national liberties” on various administrative levels. The “Slovenes” that the Slovene Cisleithanian national activists wanted to unify in a single polity or whom they aspired to represent in the decades before 1918 were in fact always understood as speakers of Kopitar's Slovene language. Consequently, Slovene nationalists often regarded the Slavophone population of western Hungary as part of the Slovene nation and the territory they inhabited as part of Slovene national space. Such was the case already in March 1848, when Carinthian priest Matija Majar (1809–92) wrote a text that has since often been propagated as the most illustrative statement of Slovene political nationalism from that period. In his political manifest, “What do we Slovenes demand?,” Majar argued for the unification of Slovenes from Carinthia, Styria, Carniola, Gorizia, Trieste, provincial Croatia, as well as those living in western counties of the Kingdom of Hungary, into a politically and administratively integrated territory that would unify all Slovenes in a single polity with its own assembly under the rule of Habsburgs.Footnote ¹³

Like other activists, Slovene national activists were not particularly successful in their calls for territorial rearrangements in 1848. Indeed, in the following decades even Slovene nationalists often dismissed the idea of a separate Slovene Crownland as improbable. Nonetheless, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the Austrian government and subordinate state officials accepted the notion of a separate Slovene-speaking population, at least regarding the Slavophone inhabitants of Cisleithanian Austria. Kopitar's Slovene language was introduced into the official categorization of languages spoken in the Austrian Empire and thus contributed to the creation of a special Slovene “ethnic category,” one of the many national or quasinational categories increasingly in use by the imperial civil servants and the army in the decades that followed.Footnote ¹⁴

Several years after the suppression of revolution, the imagined Slovene national territory was represented on a map for the very first time. Its author was an early believer in the overlapping of Slovene nation and Kopitar's Slovene language, jurist and entrepreneur Peter Kozler (1824–79). Inspired by the eruption of Slovene ethnolinguistic rhetoric in 1848, Kozler gathered linguistic and ethnographic data and traced the spread of the Slovene language on the territory of the Austrian Empire. The result was his well-known Map of the Slovenian Land and Its Provinces, the first visual representation of imagined Slovene national space. The unprecedented demarcation of Slovene linguistic territory on the political map of the Austrian Empire, which evidently differed from the established administrative borders between Austrian Crownlands, was, unsurprisingly, not received with much approval in the postrevolutionary years. In 1853, Kozler was even called before the military court and accused (but later acquitted) of high treason, and his map could not be published until 1860.Footnote ¹⁵ But the map still fulfilled Kozler's intention to inform the public about, as he stated, “the Slovene nation, its language, and its territory.”Footnote ¹⁶ Because the western territories of the Kingdom of Hungary were also presented as part of the supposed Slovene land, The Map of the Slovenian Land and Its Provinces was regarded as objective visual proof of what was a quite recently invented ethnolinguistic premise. Kozler's map was hence undoubtedly one of the major arguments reinforcing the notion that the inhabitants of what later became known as Prekmurje were indeed Slovenes.

In addition to crafting the first visual representation of Slovene territory, Kozler also contributed to promoting the notion of Slovenes in Hungary to the more literate public. In 1849, he published an article titled “Slovenes in Hungary” in the Ljubljana newspaper Slovenia, which he composed from pieces of information on “Slovenes” in Hungary that he had collected while preparing the map. His intention was to contribute, he explained, “to the better knowledge about the Slovenes in Hungary who are related to Slovenes in Styria and the Kingdom of Illyria.”Footnote ¹⁷ From the 1860s onward, Kozler was followed by other Slovene literati and national activists from the Cisleithanian Crownlands. In 1868 a priest from Styria, Božidar Raič (1827–86), wrote a collection of Stories on Prekmurje's Slovenes and Their Speech to provide Slovene patriots with the “correct” information on the region. In the prose inspired by national passion, Raič narrated his impressions of “holy horror” when his feet “for the first time touched the ground where our grandfathers and great-grandfathers since ever ploughed the greasy soil, dug in the vineyards, sang ancient songs, and sat around the fireplace while tranquilly narrating the stories of their gentle ancestors. Their homeland is certainly not peeled off from our Slovene lands; we are not separated by the Mura River, but united.”Footnote ¹⁸ At the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer and ethnographer Anton Trstenjak (1853–1917) also followed Raič’s steps and published a detailed report on Hungarian Slovenes.Footnote ¹⁹

Such undertakings greatly contributed to the growth of ethnographical knowledge about the imagined members of the Slovene nation living across the Mura/Mur River. But writers with Slovene national inclinations were not the only propagators of the imagined community of Slovenes living on the both sides of border. Several other reputable ethnographers and other individuals with ambitions in the field of ethnography also embraced the idea. The most prominent among them was undoubtedly Karl von Czörnig (1804–89), the director of the office of administrative statistics at the Commerce Ministry. In his seminal Ethnography of the Austrian Monarchy (1855–57), Czörnig presented various peoples of the Austrian Empire and claimed that the “Hungarian Slovenes (so-called Vandals)” (Ungrische Slovenen [sogenannte Vandalen]) formed a subgroup of Slovenes.Footnote ²⁰ Others shared this opinion. In his 1879 book, The Slovenes: Ethnographic Outline, Vilijem Urbas (1831–1900) asserted that the Slovenes were a people, “who today inhabit Carniola, as well as the bordering areas of Carinthia, Styria, Hungary, Austrian Littoral and Venice.”Footnote ²¹ Moreover, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the Slovenes living in Hungary were mentioned as a constitutive part of the Slovene nation in a textbook that was used in state elementary schools with Slovene language of instruction.Footnote ²² And the image of the Slovene national territory, including Prekmurje, even found its way on the stickers put on postcards that were sold by Slovene national associations to collect funds for the struggling “brothers on the border.” In short, in autumn 1918 Slovene national activists had reason to believe in the reality of Slovenes in Hungary, an idea that had been for decades slowly gaining popularity among wider swaths of the population. From the perspective of those Slovene politicians, officials, and national activists, who had been educated in the Cisleithanian lands, their claim to Prekmurje was a legitimate one.

The same nineteenth-century narratives also substantiated the territorial claims made by Yugoslav diplomats at the Paris Peace Conference. Soon after the negotiations began, the Yugoslav delegation issued a memorandum, demanding the inclusion into Yugoslavia of those Slovene areas that were located to the north and east of the territory controlled by the Slovene government in Ljubljana. In addition to parts of Carinthia and Styria under the Republic of German-Austria and inhabited by the predominantly Slovene-speaking population, the Yugoslav delegates in Paris also demanded the annexation of Prekmurje. They based their requests for the readjustment of the postwar state border between the newly formed kingdom of South Slavs and the “Pre-Trianon” Hungary on the claim that the inhabitants of the southwestern Hungary were predominantly of “Slovene race” and language. If nationality as a principle of international arrangement was accepted and applied, they asserted, the area would undoubtedly belong to the newly formed South-Slav state. Apart from that, the very long unbroken presence of Hungarian Slovenes in the region should speak for itself. Slovenes lived there since the Middle Ages. They were, the diplomats claimed, “the last remnants of Pannonian Slovenes, who settled here before the Hungarians and until their invasion held almost the complete area of western and central Hungary where they established their own state.”Footnote ²³ Even though such political and historical arguments fit perfectly with the hegemonic state of mind at the Paris Peace Conference, the Yugoslav delegation could not convince the Big Four during the first months of the brutal diplomatic game and devious bargaining over territories. The tide turned, however, in March 1919, when the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic was established in Budapest. In exchange for military intervention against the Hungarian communist regime, the Big Four were finally prepared for territorial concessions in accordance with the Yugoslav demands.

On 13 August 1919, the Yugoslav army peacefully occupied the territory of the formerly Hungarian counties (Zala and Vas/Železna) up to a previously agreed upon demarcation line. Consequently, Prekmurje found itself under provisional Yugoslav military occupation. For civilian matters, the government named a special head of administration, the Slovene Srečko Lajnšic. Lajnšic had been the district prefect in the neighboring Styrian town Maribor/Marburg until his appointment and became the first Slovene civil commissioner of the region. In his initial proclamation dedicated to Slovenes of Prekmurje, Lajnšic declared that a new era had begun for the region. Prekmurje was from that time “a permanent–eternal Yugoslav land, a part of Slovenia.” He asserted “You are no longer Hungarians, but Yugoslavs, sons of Yugoslavia, Slovenes by descent. Our government has the power to take the given land and the liberated brothers under its wing, our fearless forces will know how to defend what is ours.”Footnote ²⁴ Slovene-language newspapers published in “Slovenian” Carniola and Styria joined the celebration. Imitating the official statement, they embraced the decision to occupy Prekmurje and described the occupation as the event that had no precedence in Slovene history. According to the article “Prekmurje is ours!” (Prekmurje je naše!), published in Fatherland, printed in Ljubljana, the Slovenes were finally united “with brothers in blood from Hungary, who lived over 1,000 years since the arrival of Slovenes in Pannonia, under the foreign, hostile rule.”Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, the local Slovene-language newspaper from Ptuj in “Slovene Styria,” not far away from Prekmurje, also reported on the liberation of Slavic brothers in Prekmurje from the thousand-years-long slavery. “The non-natural borders,” the article claimed, “that hitherto separated us politically and culturally, fell.”Footnote ²⁶

The Annexation of Prekmurje: National Salvation of Hungarian Slovenes?

A few days after occupation, the new administration held a grand public celebration to commemorate “the liberation of Prekmurje.” Slovene Landowner, a Maribor newspaper, reported on 17 August that more than 20,000 locals gathered in the village Beltinci in Prekmurje “to express their indescribable joy and deep gratitude to be saved from a thousand years long national slavery and from the Hungarian Bolshevik tyranny.”Footnote ²⁷ According to the cheerful article, when the army commander and civil commissioner stepped out of the car, they were welcomed with “hurrah!” (živijo!) and accompanied by local young women wearing garlands who formed a guard of honor. Afterward the happy crowd attended the Holy Mass, which was followed by speeches of the representatives of the newly founded state as well as some local dignitaries. The article also reveals that the meeting concluded with an enthusiastic rendition of the national hymn “Our beautiful homeland” (Lepa naša domovina). The celebration gave the impression that Hungarian Slovenes in Prekmurje had finally been redeemed, as if a thousand years of yearning for freedom was at last fulfilled. Everything seemed to be in line with the projections of the Cisleithanian Slovene national activists.

But had the local Slavophones who had their home in Prekmurje really been waiting for their salvation until the glorious days of August 1919? An account written three years later by a headmaster who came to Prekmurje after the annexation illustrates a rather different picture of the local social and ethnic reality. In November 1922, the Ministry of Education dispatched an instruction to all the subordinate offices across the state to report on the advancement of people's education or, in their words, enlightenment carried out by state schools. The offices should gather data on the number and the content of school plays, lectures, parent-teacher meetings, singing, musical classes, and the like. The authorities were not interested in regular classes, but they wanted to get an insight into the extracurricular activities that the schools organized for all members of the community, not only children. The ministry in Belgrade, in fact, wanted to find out to what extent the state schools functioned as agents of socialization, promoting “appropriate values” and positive notions on the existing social order. Consequently, in February 1923, the school administration of the Prekmurje district also asked the local school boards to report on various educational activities. In the following months, the school boards prepared reports and sent them to Murska Sobota, where the seat of the regional state administration had been established. The majority of reports sent to the supervising office were written in a neutral or even apologetic tone. The reports emphasized modest achievements and tried to explain why something had not been done yet. From the rather monotonous accounts, one can easily get the impression that during the first years of the newly established Slovene administration, the accomplishments regarding the people's “enlightenment” were extremely poor. The lack of financial resources seemed to be a good, if not always a justifiable, reason.Footnote ²⁸

Not all Slovene teachers looked for excuses for their feeble successes by pointing at the usual suspects, like insufficient funds and the absence of appropriate infrastructure. There were also those who vividly and at length portrayed the complex social and cultural conditions in local communities of Prekmurje. In their eyes, these conditions were to be understood as the major obstacle hindering the process of people's enlightening. The report written by the headmaster of an elementary school in the small village Stanjevci is a very telling example in this regard. In his description, the headmaster, a Slovene public servant who was sent in Prekmurje after the annexation, asserted that the enlightenment will not be possible if the recently arrived Slovene schoolteachers will be treated by the local Slavophone population in Prekmurje as Slavi, that is as ethnically different or foreign. According to him, the situation in Prekmurje demands slow, quiet, and sensible work. Several centuries of Hungarian oppression, he claimed, left a strong mark on the people's worldview that could not be changed overnight. Though the local Slavophones self-identified as Sloveni or Slovenci, they did not perceive themselves as members of Slovene nation in a sense of Slovene ethnolinguistic nationalism. So, to enlighten them, the locals should first recognize that they are of Slavic origin but also “our Slovene brothers by blood and language.”Footnote ²⁹ Besides explaining their real ethnic and national affiliation to the locals, he continued, school employees should also try to come to terms with the local Slavophone intelligentsia. Despite that most members of the local elite probably sympathized with Hungary and Hungarians, they should be treated kindly because of their influence on the common people, he added. On top of that, to get wider support for the state and the new political circumstances in general, the headmaster proposed to his supervisor that the Slovene state administration in the region of Prekmurje should follow the examples of Schulverein and Lega nazionale, that is of the German and Italian voluntary associations that always “sent their best and most skilled members to the nationally endangered and colonized areas.”Footnote ³⁰

So, what was happening in Prekmurje in the years following the incorporation of the region into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes? Why did a Slovene headmaster of a small provincial elementary school propose that it would be wise to follow the strategies of the two nationalistic voluntary associations with a rather extensive record of acts against Slovenes in the prewar Habsburg era? Why did he think it would be so important to explain to the population that recognized itself as Slovene the “real” meaning of being a member of the Slovene nation? But most of all, how could the group of Slovenes to which the headmaster belonged, be treated as foreign by the local population of Prekmurje, that considered itself Slovene as well?

Even before 1918, Slovene national activists from Cisleithania who encountered the Slavophone population from Zala and Vas/Železna were aware that in this region few people identified with Slovene ethnolinguistic community as it was understood in 1848. While travelling through the villages in western Hungary, three Slovene national activists from Styria—the previously mentioned Raič in 1860 and Trstenjak in 1883 as well as Franc Kovačič (1867–1939) in 1893—independently came to the same “unpleasant” conclusion: Across the Mura/Mur River the Slovene national movement did not exist.Footnote ³¹ In his 1883 travelogue, the journalist Trstenjak reiterated that the locals lacked any kind of “national awareness.” After visiting the village Bodonci/Bodóhegy, he concluded that “by no means can we speak of nationally aware people. National consciousness, as among other Slavs for instance, does not exist here, and for that reason there is no national pride in our sense of the word.”Footnote ³² According to Trstenjak, both the villagers in Bodonci/Bodóhegy as well as the local priest Sinič were very poorly informed about what was taking place on the other side of the border. Although he claimed to be Slovene and to feel like one, he knew nothing about the achievements of the Slovene national activists in Cisleithanian lands. Sinič was thus amazed when he was told that there was a Slovene national theater in Ljubljana. Furthermore, he simply could not believe that in the provincial diet of Carniola the Slovenes held a majority. For that reason, it is not surprising that in his account Trstenjak concluded that the Hungarian Slovenes “are connected to us only through an ancient bond, the unity of our mother tongue.”Footnote ³³

Despite the lack of national awareness in the region, Trstenjak and other Cisleithanian national activists had good reason to believe that the Slavophone community on the other side of Mura/Mur River belonged to the imagined Slovene nation. After all, in the long nineteenth century, the literate inhabitants of this area called themselves (Hungarian) Sloveni (Vogrſzki ſzloven; Szloven i Szlovenka) and, since 1913, (Hungarian) Slovenes ([vogrski] Slovenci). Besides that, a well-established local tradition of literate Slavic language, known as the (Old) Slovene language was present in the region too. From the viewpoint of Slovene national activists, the existence of the Slovene ethnonym and the language known as Slovene could easily be understood as two undeniable proofs that objectively confirmed the locals to be genuine members of the Slovene national community.

Yet, the reality behind the use of both terms, Sloveni and Slovenci, in what became known as Prekmurje differed significantly from the meaning of Slovene and Slovene language devised by the Slovene national activists in Imperial Austria. When used by Slavophone population in the Hungarian counties Zala and Vas/Železna, these two terms almost always denoted only the local community and the local Slavic literary language based on the local vernacular. Moreover, from the beginning of the local Slovene written tradition, these terms were used for a purpose that had nothing in common with the assumptions of the Slovene ethnolinguistic political nationalism. They were meant not to describe a particular national community and its language but to label the vernacular used in liturgy and to define the members of the local Protestant and later also Catholic religious groups. The tradition of the literary Slovene language in the Kingdom of Hungary began with Ferenc Temlin (late 17th–early 18th century), a Protestant pastor who while studying in Halle in 1715 translated Small Catechism (Mali katekizmus) from Hungarian and German into the Slovene language (na szlovenski jezik). He had defined his homeland as Sclavonia, a territory located on the western borderland of lower Hungary with Styria, where a large community of pious Protestants needed books in their own vernacular. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the term “Slovene nation” also began to circulate here. Introduced by another Protestant writer, Mihael Sever (d. 1750), it had a particularly local meaning, denoting people who spoke Slovene language and were members of the evangelical church (Lüblénomi ſzlovenſzkomi Národi, steri Evangelicsánſzko vöro vadlüe). Following the path of Protestants, the first Catholic author of books in local Slavic vernacular, Mikloš Küzmič (1737–1804), also translated several texts to the idiom called old Slovene language (sztári slovenſzki jezik). His motives were similar to those of the Protestants. The translated books were required for the local Catholic Church services and Slovene-speaking pupils in Catholic schools in western Hungarian counties. While communicating in Latin, local translators and authors of Slovene books written in sztári slovenſzki jezik often described their vernacular as the Vandal language (lingua Vandalica; idioma vandalicum). In this manner, they contributed to the belief that gained popularity among Hungarian nationalists in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to the latter, the local Slavophones were in fact descendants of Vandals who thus had nothing in common with Slovene nation in Cisleithanian Crownlands.Footnote ³⁴

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, local Slavophone Catholic priests from Hungary established close relations with Styria's Slovene-speaking clergy. Many also subscribed to Cisleithanian-Slovene publications. They especially fancied the religious books distributed by the Slovene Catholic publishing house, the Hermagora Society (Mohorjeva družba), located in Klagenfurt/Celovec, and almanacs circulated by Slovene cultural and educational association Slovene Society (Slovenska matica, literally “Slovene queen bee”) from Ljubljana. These links frightened provincial Hungarian nationalists and state officials who saw them as a Pan-Slavic threat. But far from being political, the reason for the popularity of Cisleithanian Slovene books was wholly practical. Owing to the lack of appropriate Catholic literature in the local Slovene literary language, these books were welcomed among the Slovene priesthood in Hungary as a useful catechetical tool. Consequently, to reduce the need for Slovene Catholic books from Cisleithania, in the early 1900s the bishop in Szombathely permitted the local Slavophone Catholic clergy to publish almanacs and newspapers in the local sztári slovenſzki jezik.Footnote ³⁵

Despite the panic among the Hungarian nationalists, who interpreted the growing circulation and popularity of Slovene-language books from Cisleithania as an expression of “Slavic solidarity” or Panslavic leanings, the cross-border ties did not indicate the adherence of Hungarian Slavophone priests to Slovene ethnolinguistic nationalism. Their ties remained limited to the level of practical needs, general cultural curiosity, and acquaintances with some individual priests from the parishes near the border. Whereas priests were often bearers of Slovene ethnolinguistic nationalism in Cisleithanian Crownlands, this was not the case on the other side of Mura/Mur River. Local clergy—Catholic and Protestant—predominantly maintained their own understanding of a presumed ethnic separateness from Slovenes in Cisleithania until the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. They continued to use the ethnonyms Sloveni and vogrski Slovenci for self-identification and terms such as Slavi, Carniolans, Styrians, even Illyrians in reference to the Slovene speakers of Cisleithanian Austria.Footnote ³⁶ They considered themselves different from their neighbors, though both used the same ethnic or linguistic labels (Slovenes, Slovene language). Before the annexation in 1919, the literate Slavophones employed several names for region of the Kingdom of Hungary that they inhabited. Besides Sclavonia, documented in 1715, locals also used the term Slovenska okroglina (Slovene district). The latter was introduced by the previously mentioned Catholic priest Küzmič, who used it as the Old Slovene translation of the term “Districtus Tóthságiensis,” which originally meant the southernmost part of Diocese of Györ in the Železna/Vas county between Mura/Mur and Raba/Rába/Raab. After the foundation of Diocese of Szombathely (1777), the term “Slovenska okroglina” gained new content; it defined the area of the subordinate Catholic decanate in Murska Sobota/Muraszombat.Footnote ³⁷ In addition, in the mid-nineteenth century, the term “Slovenska krajina” (Slovene March) came into usage. It was probably used for the first time by the local Catholic priest Jožef Košič (1788–1867) as a geographic description of the area compactly inhabited by Slavophones in the counties of Zala and Vas/Železna.Footnote ³⁸ While educated Slavophones used the denominator Slovene to define their homeland, their understanding of what constituted the Slovene territory had very little in common with how the Slovene national territory was imagined across the Cisleithanian side of the border since the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁹ Such a specific territorial boundedness of Slavophone locals thus further proves the existence of two different perceptions of ethnic borders: one imagined by the educated, predominantly clerical Slavophones in western Hungary and the other imagined by Cisleithania's Slovene national activists.

From the local perspective, we see that until 1919, and, as various sources confirm, surely also much later, most inhabitants of the western Hungary who self-identified as Slovene (vogrski Slovenec or Sloven) did not consider themselves part of the Slovene national community as it was simultaneously imagined in Cisleithania. During autumn and winter 1918, when Slovene national activists from Styria began to distribute leaflets among local Slavophones in Hungary propagating the inclusion of Prekmurje in the new Yugoslavia, only peasants along Mura/Mur with close personal connections to Styria found the idea appealing. In this region, younger members of the Catholic clergy were also receptive to such a territorial and political reorganization. Older loyalist Catholic priests, however, rejected the idea, instead proposing to the Hungarian government the establishment of an autonomous Slovene District in Hungary to be administered in the local tradition of Slovene literary language. Local Protestant communities were even less willing to yield to politics framed by the nationalist worldview. In contrast to Slavophone Catholic priests who demanded either an administrative reform of Hungary or unification with Slovenes in the new Yugoslav state, the Slavophone Protestant clergy opposed from the outset the major redrawing of the borders, openly declaring themselves loyal Hungarian citizens and patriots.Footnote ⁴⁰

By autumn 1918, the inhabitants of the region, as elsewhere in the monarchy during wartime, were facing hardships. The established order changed as many as nine times between the collapse of the Dual Monarchy and the middle of August 1919 when the Yugoslav army finally occupied the territory. After Austria-Hungary's demise, the Hungarian People's Republic under Mihály Károly initially presided over this area. Their rule was jeopardized in late 1918, when the adventurous Yugoslav captain Jure Jurišić led a group of volunteers and established authority over parts of the region, which he intended to annex to Yugoslavia. His plan was poorly prepared and therefore he controlled the area for only one week. Subsequently, authorities from the People's Republic reappeared but were quickly replaced by the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Against the latter, a local political swashbuckler Vilmoš Tkálec rebelled and brought the revolutionary Republic of Mura (Respublika Mörska; Mura Köztársaság) into being at the end of May 1919. The Soviet regime put an end to it after several days, only to pass the power soon thereafter to the units of Admiral Horty's “National Army.” Horty's control of the region was ultimately replaced after the invasion of the Yugoslav army.Footnote ⁴¹ It is thus not unexpected that in August 1919 many inhabitants of Prekmurje indeed welcomed the new Slovene administration with open arms. Yet, did the enthusiasm of locals who greeted representatives of a new Yugoslav regime in summer 1919 originate from millennial-long national yearning or rather more modern political assertion to live in a nation-state with other Slovenes? Considering the pervasive social and political precariousness after years of war and months of postwar disarray and subversions, it appears that the rationale stemmed from a more mundane reason: the longing for a peaceful civil life after years of wartime privation. It was indeed the new Yugoslav authorities that seemed to promise the return of the public order at long last.

Local Slavophones from Slovenska okroglina and Slovenska krajina in a New Social and Political Framework

In August 1919 representatives of the Slovene Provincial Government in Ljubljana crossed the Mura/Mur River, many for very first time, and began establishing a Slovene-speaking administration. The new Slovene authority in Prekmurje immediately fired Hungarian officials, removed Hungarian teachers who were not fluent in Slovene, and declared standard literary Slovene the region's official language. As elsewhere throughout postimperial Central and Eastern Europe, the application of the self-determination principle fostered grave consequences for the social fabric of local communities in what used to be western Hungary. Several thousand inhabitants who either self-described as Hungarians or were classified as such by the new administration, were suddenly treated as members of a new collective category: a national minority. After the Treaty of Trianon, “Hungarians” living in Prekmurje became second-class citizens in many ways. Their numbers fell considerably both because they were subjected to the “statistical assimilation” and because they were excluded from the land reform, which encouraged many to emigrate.Footnote ⁴²

The measures of the new administration against Hungarians, however, proved an easy task. A more difficult problem occurred after the new Slovene officials encountered the local population that called itself Slovene and claimed to speak Slovene. Soon the new officials found out that the local understanding of being Slovene, belonging to Slovene community, and using Slovene language differed significantly from the idea that the Slovene national activists had developed in the nineteenth-century Cisleithania. Moreover, local literate Slovene language was barely comprehensible to newly arrived Slovene officials. On top of that, to the astonishment of the officials, many reputable locals who claimed to be Slovenes often expressed dissatisfaction with the Yugoslav occupation and demanded the return of Hungarian government.

From the perspective of Slovene officials charged with the administrative transition, this opposition was unacceptable. Unsurprisingly, the new Slovene administration soon began to prepare the nationalization process of their new Slovene-speaking compatriots who identified themselves as Slovenes. Because they considered language the most important attribute of the ethnic individuality of local Slovenes, it immediately became the focus of governmental policy. Prekmurje's traditional Slovene literate language, sztári slovenſzki jezik, was declared a mere dialect, and gradually the “imported” official Slovene language, understood to be the national language of Slovenes, replaced it in offices, schools, local newspapers, and churches. Incoming Slovene officials thus acted as agents of the nationalizing Slovene provincial administration within Yugoslav state. In the interwar era, they continued to nationalize Slavophone locals in Prekmurje, that is, to use the words of Rogers Brubaker, “they worked primarily to reshape cultural practices, loyalties, and identities, thereby in effect redefining and enlarging the ‘core nation.’”Footnote ⁴³ But it seems that in the first several years after the annexation the Slovene officials were far from being successful. In May 1921, for instance, the presidency of the provincial government in Ljubljana demanded a radical change of the population's adherence from the regional administration in Prekmurje. They expected the harshest treatment of the so-called Madžaroni, that is “of elements, that are of utterly Slovene origin, but do not recognize themselves as Slavs, yet hypocritically call themselves ‘the only genuine Slovenes’ and address the officials who arrived there as ‘Carniolans,’ ‘Styrians’ etc.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In the process of nationalizing Prekmurje's Slavophones, the Slovene government gave several crucial responsibilities to the network of state-financed Slovene schools. Slovene politicians in Ljubljana considered teachers an essential vehicle for restructuring collective identity in Prekmurje. Consequently, the teachers who had worked in Prekmurje since the “Pre-Trianon” times and were fluent in the local Slovene written language, were told to learn the “standard” written Slovene and pass a language exam to retain their jobs. Those who proved unsuccessful were removed or transferred to Slovene schools in other regions to acquire language competences of the then standard Slovene language of former Cisleithania.Footnote ⁴⁵ The ideology of Slovene ethnolinguistic nationalism, which defined the politics of Slovene administration in the first postwar years, demanded the introduction of one unitary and standardized Slovene language of instruction in the public schools. Yet, following the annexation of Prekmurje, Slovene-speaking teachers—many among them newcomers from former Cisleithanian regions—were expected not only to teach in the standard Slovene but also to make a significant contribution to the process of replacing the local understanding of “Sloveneness” with the idea of being a member of the Slovene nation as it had been imagined by nationalists living in the former Cisleithanian territories.Footnote ⁴⁶

When the Yugoslav Ministry of Education issued the instruction to report on the people's enlightenment in 1923, teachers were still relatively unsuccessful at disseminating the new notion of self-belonging. Yet, the nationalization route Prekmurje was forced to take to become Slovene emerged victorious on the long run. Over the course of the twentieth century, the use of local literary Slovene language (sztári slovenſzki jezik) virtually vanished. Moreover, in a gradual transition that lasted for decades and did not come to an end before World War II, local Slavophones almost completely abandoned their old category of identification, transforming it into a regional one. They have continued to express their unique position in the broader national context, but not by using traditional Slovene ethnonym as a marker of unique collective self-identification. Instead, they have begun to identify themselves as Prekmurci, inhabitants of Prekmurje.

In the period under study, the ethnonym “Slovene” denoted at least two different categories of identification. The Slovene national activists from Cisleithania—who in autumn 1918 successfully gained power over some segments of what they imagined to be the Slovene nation—used the term “Slovenes” to signify a specific ethnolinguistic category of identification. Their Slovenes were members of a nation defined by the ethnolinguistic criteria and supposedly populating a land that spread from the Adriatic Sea to western parts of Hungary. In contrast, when the Slavophones from the counties of Zala and Vas/Železna employed the same ethnonym, it denoted either their local religious community or a group of people speaking a particular Slavic language, the “old Slovene language,” and/or inhabiting the territory commonly referred to as Slovenska okroglina or Slovenska krajina. Unlike the beliefs of the nineteenth-century Slovene national activists, the presence of a certain ethnonym does not necessarily signify the existence of a particular unchanging category of identification. This should not come as a surprise to historians who study processes of collective identification and collective identity formation. After all, while analyzing the use of the same ethnonym in various periods, the medievalist Patrick J. Geary convincingly argued that the social realities behind the ethnonyms could undergo rapid and radical transformations.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet the use of the name Slovenci within the boundaries of imagined Slovene national territory shows that from the perspective of locals, in the age of ethnolinguistic nationalism, one ethnonym can simultaneously subsume diverse understandings of collective self-belonging.