| peterhenger: Re: Minarovits | | , there was a heavy influx of Croatian refugees who settled in southwest Slovakia in the 15th/16th centuries. The area northeast of Bratislava received the bulk of them, around the towns of Pezinok, Svaty Jur, Modra, Senec, up to Trnava. They did mostly assimilate over the centuries, with some of the last holdouts in language and customs in the last century being Senkvice (still speaking Croatian in the mid 1800s) and the Devin/Dubravka area west of Bratislava (where I gather it survived to the late 1800s). The only village I know of that was still speaking Croatian in this century is (appropriately!) Chorvatsky Grob -- the older generation alive today in that village were raised speaking it (and Slovak), although I believe everyone has shifted to Slovak since then. (Please note: no aspersions intended against people's nationality here! These descendants of Croatian refugees all considered themselves to be true and loyal Slovaks, as they were, even though they preserved the language and customs of their forbears.) Anton Vaclavik wrote a book in the 1920s about Chorvatsky Grob, and talked a bit about the surviving traces of the Croatians in the surrounding area, giving some examples of the numerous Croatian names in the villages and towns. I scanned through them and didn't find any Kovanic-es, although there are quite a few Kovacic-es (= Smith). For what it's worth, here's what he gave for Svaty Jur: "Names like this [i.e., Croatian names] are also common in Svaty Jur, for example Belovic, Benovic, Grancic, Gedrovic, Andrasovic, Durdovic, Halenkovic, Jankovic, Lackovic, Luptovic, Minarovic, Mislovic, Ondrejkovic, Necic, Pavlovic, Tomaskovi" [since there's no period at the end of the sentence, I think it and the final -c in Tomaskovic were left out by typo.] He also mentioned that Dubravka west of Bratislava hosted an annual pilgrimmage on the feast of Cosmos and Damian, to which all the Croatian populations in southwest Slovakia as well as the neighboring parts of Austria and Hungary would come. This probably helped preserve the language of Dubravka as long as it did. PS-"white Croatia" doesn't apply here. |
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