Thread by @books_jeremiah

A 1910 snapshot of a tragedy in motion, Bosnian Muslim families leaving Bosnia after the Austro-Hungarian annexation. Not mainly for money, but for identity, fear, and pride. The details are brutal. 🧳📜

Cvijić describes Belgrade station packed before the night train to Thessaloniki. Men rushing, women and kids on the floor, all squeezed into 3rd class. Asked why, the answer is simple, “everyone will move out.” 🚆

He calls it a “special type” of migration. Europe sees economic migration, but he argues this one is mostly psychological, a state of the soul after occupation, then annexation, under Christian rule and bureaucracy.

A hard point in the text, many emigrants feel tied to “Turks” through faith, not to neighbors who share their language. He notes hatred toward the new foreign rulers, and a belief that leaving is the only escape.

Where do they go? Not just European Ottoman lands, but Anatolia. He visits Bursa and nearby settlements, “muhajir” neighborhoods, even villages called Bosnaköy. The welcome they expect does not match reality.

The cost is staggering. He reports mass death after arrival, estimating about 1/3 die within five years, especially children. Climate shock, water, heat, disease, and poverty turn “resettlement” into a graveyard.

Survivors face another shock, they are still “foreign.” Older people cannot learn Turkish. Even those who do are marked by accent. Kids born there learn Turkish, sometimes lose the parents’ language. Assimilation arrives through loss.

In Macedonia and Old Serbia he sees Bosnian migrant quarters by their sagging houses and worn clothes. Nostalgia becomes illness. Farmers remember every boundary line, every grafted tree, even the smell of spring brush. 🌿

One scene flips the direction, a man returning toward Bosnia after 20 years. Wealth gone, children dead, reduced to servant work. He finally admits Turks see him as different. He returns “only to die there,” ashamed.

Cvijić warns of long-term effects, language loss, identity reshaping, and emptied land in Bosnia that can be settled by outsiders. His proposed brake is direct outreach, village to village, because pamphlets will not reach the masses.

Reading this today, it is a reminder that migration is not only economics. Pride, fear, belonging, and political engineering can push people into choices that destroy families and communities. Worth the full read. 📚

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