Kljajićevo

Kljajićevo
Кљајићево
Village

The Visitation of Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church.
Kljajićevo
Coordinates: 45°46′N 19°17′E / 45.767°N 19.283°E
Country  Serbia
Province  Vojvodina
Population (2002)
 • Total 6,012
Time zone CET (UTC+1)
 • Summer (DST) CEST (UTC+2)

Kljajićevo (Serbian Cyrillic: Кљајићево) is a village in Serbia. It is situated in the Sombor municipality, in the West Bačka District, Vojvodina province. The village has a Serb ethnic majority and its population numbered 6,012 people (2002 census).

Name

In Serbian the village is known as Kljajićevo (Кљајићево), in Croatian as Kljajićevo, in Hungarian as Kerény, and in German as Kernei or Gernei.

History

Ancient settlement

Human settlement in the territory of present-day Kljajićevo has been traced as far back as the Stone Age. In 1391, during the administration of the Kingdom of Hungary, settlement named Szent Király (Sveti Kralj) was mentioned at this location.

Ottoman administration

During the Ottoman administration (16th–17th centuries), Bačka was part of the Sanjak of Segedin (Szeged). The former Hungarian population escaped and the area was populated mostly by ethnic Serbs from the south. The village first was mentioned in 1590 in the Ottoman tax-lists (Defters) as Kernja, a settlement near Sombor. Settlement was also mentioned under name Krnjaja in 1601 and was populated by ethnic Serbs. In the early 1700s Serbs managed cattle ranches in this area as part of the Austro-Hungarian border defences against the Ottoman Empire, and the area remained sparsely settled until the 1760s when the first Danube Swabians who called themselves Shwoveh after the Serbian "Svabos" were settled in 100 new houses.

Habsburg administration

In 1699 the Bačka came into the possession of the Habsburg Monarchy of Austria. After Maria Theresa of Austria assumed the throne as Queen of Hungary in 1740, she encouraged vigorous colonization on crown lands, first on the Military Frontier and than on the whole area, which had low population density after the last Ottoman Wars, as much of the Serbian population had been decimated through warfare.

The new settlers in the village were primarily Austrians, Hungarians, and Bohemians from the greater empire; however, they were commonly referred to as Danube Swabian and came to call themselves Schwowe (Shwoveh). In 1763, the Imperial Advisor Anton von Cothmann, proposed to his Empress Theresia that Kernyája and the surrounding territory should be settled. According to the "Conscriptio" from December 21 in 1765 a new village was resettled and newly founded with 17 families, 57% ethnic Germans. Among those there were farmers, 2 smiths, 1 carpenter 1 weaver and one innkeeper. The village now was called “Kernjaja” or "Kernyaja". For the next decades, the number of settlers increased yearly, to 291 families coming to live in Kernaja between 1794/1796, among them 83% Germans, 11% Hungarians and 6% Bohemians.

Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor from Austria extended the village with 78 new houses. The Catholic Church was built in 1791. Although the town had many official names it was always called "Gernei" and written Kernei by its Shwovish inhabitants until 1945, when they were expelled. At the beginning of 1767 pupils were taught in the cantor's house. The new school was built in 1911. The church has since been turned into an Orthodox Christian church.

In the year 1805, Kernei had 2,000 inhabitants. When the number of people reached 3,500 in 1850, the proportion of the population from other nationalities was less than 5 percent. At that time there were roughly 50 Jews in the village, with their own graveyard and street, but the last Jews left sometime around 1910. The first migration away from Kernei into newly established settlements began around 1866. Around the turn of the century and thereafter, the great wave of emigration to North America began. There was a steady rise and fall in the numbers of the population so that it did not reach the 5,000 mark until 1910.

Yugoslav administration

In 1918, as part of Banat, Bačka and Baranja, Krnjaja became part of the Kingdom of Serbia, which later together with the Kingdom of Montenegro and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs formed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed to Yugoslavia in 1929). Between 1929 and 1941, the village was part of the Danube Banovina, one of the provinces of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

World War II

In 1941/42, the population of the village totaled about 6,000. When Axis Powers invaded and partitioned Yugoslavia in 1941, Krnjaja was placed under Hungarian administration. During the Battle of Batina, the front was stretched all the way to Apatin and Bogojevo, and these places became military bases overnight. Many Kerneiers were forced to work on the front lines digging trenches and clearing roads. After October 1944, and the arrival of Yugoslav partisans, Krnjaja came under Yugoslav military administration. In December 1944, 340 young men and women were forcibly enslaved as war reparations to the Soviet Union to work in labor camps. The antifascist council for the liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) declared its mainly Danube Swabian population German public enemies and voided their citizenship and all civil rights. More than half of the village left in long wagon trains in 1944, expecting the worst from the Russian Army and the Yugoslav Partisans. The other half who innocently and naively remained were expelled in April 1945, starved and tortured in cordoned resettlement villages used as prisons, mainly Gakowa (Serbian Gakovo) and Krushiwlje ( Serbian Kruševlje), (see the List of concentration and internment camps - Yugoslavia) and their lands were expropriated and resistors murdered in an act of ethnic cleansing. Of the roughly 2,325 internees about 706 died of hunger and disease before many escaped or were finally released in 1978. [1]

Modern Kljajićevo

After World War II, Krnjaja became part of the new Socialist Yugoslavia, within the People's Republic of Serbia and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. In this time, after the legally forced expulsion of ancestral Shwovish farms and dwellings, Serbs from Croatia (Lika, Gorski Kotar, Žumberak, and Kordun) began living in the abandoned, expropriated buildings. The current name of the village, Kljajićevo, was introduced in 1949 and derives from Miloš Kljajić, a popular hero who was born in Kordun and was killed on Žumberak in 1944. The streets are still lined with the acacia trees planted by the Shwovish settlers, and they bloom in magnificent profusion in the spring.

Historical population

Gallery

See also

References

  1. ↑ Eichorn, Michael (1979) Kernei und die Kerneiers. Regensburg: Gstoettner

    External links

    Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kljajićevo.


    Coordinates: 45°46′N 19°17′E / 45.767°N 19.283°E