Lusatian Serbs where they live? Lusatian Serbs (tribal union)

Lusatian Serbs are the smallest ethnic group from the present, which includes the Slavic group of nations. And at the same time he is a direct descendant of one of the most ancient peoples of Europe - the Polabian Slavs, along with the Serbs, Croats and other Slavs inhabiting the Balkans today. But the common origin of the Serbs and their Lusatian brethren can only be determined by DNA analysis. Why are these fraternal peoples so different today? And why do Lusatian Serbs, whose photos do not indicate a strong separation from the German environment, are so concerned about their national identity? This will be discussed in this article.

The Polabian Slavs - the oldest Slavic ethnos

The Polabian Slavs had their own state, which founded an alliance of tribes: Lutice, Bodric and Serbs. Union tribes - a typical way of organizing the power of the Slavs, pagans, directly related to the religious cults coveted. For objective reasons, such an organization of power could not stand against more progressive Christian states formed in Europe. The baptized European nobility did not want to have a militant Gentile neighbor. Ancient historian Tacit wrote about the militant morals of the Slavs, who described these peoples precisely on the example of the Polabsky tribal union. The first to encroach on the Slavic lands of Polabia is still Charlemagne. But the local residents managed to repulse the attack of the great commander of the early Middle Ages and last until the 9th century when the state of the tribal union collapsed under the onslaught of the army of one of the leaders of the Holy Roman Empire , Henry I, who for religious reasons did not want to have not only pagans, Ethnos, which was part of the Slavic tribal union, because he rejected Christianity in his person. Beginning with Henry I, all subsequent German rulers aimed at total Germanization of the Polabian Slavs. And we must give them their due, they did it well, because the Lutichi and Bodrichi were Germanized even under Henry I, and only the Serbs retained their authenticity.

Early feudal state of Polabskaya Serbia

In the 7th century, the state search of the Polabian Slavs, one of the tribes belonging to the Union, resulted in the creation of the state of Polabskaya Serbia, which is located in the southern expanses of East Germany. During this period, part of the Serbs moved to the Balkans in order to help the Byzantine ruler Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the war against the Avarian Kaganate, which at the time represented a real threat not only to Byzantium, but also to the whole of Europe. The Serbs, together with the Czechs, raided the Avar fortifications and the Frankish king Charles. Subsequently, the resettled Serbian people founded the state known today as Serbia on the Balkans.

In the 10th century, the militant Saxon king Henry Ptitselov put an end to the existence of the Polabski Serbia, capturing its lands and annexing them to the Saxon state. As a result, this nation, the Serbs, split.

State obradrit-cheerful

In the 11th century, thanks to a successful uprising, the Germans were expelled from the lands of Polabia, and the Serbian state, called the Principality of the Obradrites-Bodricas, was restored. This state was also inhabited by Lusatian Serbs, whose country was an early feudal power with a confident vertical of princely power. Under the reign of Prince Golshtak, the principality managed to unite all the Polabian lands, including modern Mecklenburg, Schleswick-Holstein and the city of Ljubica, in German Lubeck.

Holstein for the Polabski Serbs was like Prince Vladimir for Rusich. He was well aware that the claims of the German states on the Polabian lands have a religious background, and therefore his power is destined to exist until the next crusade, unless Serbs, whose religion is traditional pagan cults, will not accept Christianity. Holstecht appealed to the already baptized at that time the Czechs and agreed on the baptism of the Polabia lands. The prince zealously planted Catholicism among his subjects and very much succeeded in this. It should be noted that the Polabian Serbs did not have a special resistance to Christianization, as, for example, in Norway or Ireland. This is due to the fact that the main religious center of the Polabian paganism - the temple of the supreme god Svetovid, located on the islands in the Baltic Sea - was destroyed long before the formation of the principality of the obedrites-bodriches by the Danes. Therefore, everything that connected the Serbs with their pagan past, there were rituals and traditions, repeated from generation to generation, without realizing their essence and nature.

Formation of the ethnic group of the Lusatian Serbs

Having their own state, the Lusatian Serbs (where most of their compatriots reside) called each other Serbs or Sorbs. The Germans called them Vends. In the 13th century, in spite of Christianization, the state of the Bodrician obedrites was defeated by the Franco-German Crusaders, and the Polabian lands were divided into margra gries, which were inhabited by German peasants by knights and clergy. This behavior of the German crusaders is explained by the fact that the capture of Jerusalem, as the goal of the crusades, was important except for the Pope and his closest associates. The leaders of the Crusaders themselves, not of Italian descent, themselves wished to expand their possessions under the guise of the cross . And the knights themselves wanted to simply rob themselves of their fortune from other, less powerful military states.

After the liquidation of the principality of the obedrit-bodric, the Lusatian Serbs finally settled in Lusatia, which gave the name to this ethnos. To the Lusatian Serbs, from an ethnographic point of view, are the Serbs who remained in central Europe after the Balkan resettlement, living on lands located in present-day northern Bavaria and southern Saxony.

In 1076, under a peace treaty with the Czech Republic, Henry IV granted her territory, which is inhabited by Lusatian Serbs, where the Saxon knights and their peasants also live. Stay luzhichans under Czech rule predetermined the further vector of their development along a different path than the Balkan Serbs. The Czechs, like the Lusitanians, the Slavic people, who, in fact, did not pretend to the Lusatian lands, but received them as a gift for peace with the German states. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Lusikians adopted the accession to the Czech Republic as a blessing, and therefore an active cultural exchange began between the two peoples. The Czechs baptized the luzhichans in Catholicism, the luzhichans adopted from the Czechs many elements of the national costume and traditional cuisine, in particular the meatballs soup with boiled eggs. The influence of the Czechs also affected the language. Therefore, the current Lusatian language belongs to the West Slavic group. At the same time, the original language of the Polabian Serbs, Slavic-Serbian, belongs to the current South Slavic language group.

The influence of the Habsburgs and the new wave of Germanization

Relations between the Czech Republic and Germany have radically changed after the arrival of the Habsburg dynasty, which contributed to the settlement of the Czech territories inhabited by the Lusatian Serbs (where Germans also live), the German nobility. The Germans willingly moved to new lands, because they were given wide preferences. Such a policy of the Czech Republic once again revived the Germanization of the Lusitanians, which became increasingly difficult to maintain their identity. In order to occupy a more advantageous place in society, the Polabian Serbs had to leave their community and completely merge with the main German population.

Lusatia as part of German lands

In the 17th century Lusatia moved to Saxony. The monarchs of this state were ardent adherents of absolutism, comparing themselves with the great monarchs and autocrats of Europe. Even after the fulfillment of the British and French bourgeois revolutions, the German states, and in particular Saxony, remained faithful to the classical traditions of royalism.

The situation did not change after the formation of the German Empire in 1871. The Germanic lands were united under the auspices of a common origin and authenticity of the great German nation in all German lands. In this concept, of course, did not fit the Slavic group of peoples, which by its very existence was reminiscent of the fact that the Germans are not an authentic nation on their eastern lands.

Lusatia in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic

After the unification of Germany, the culture of the Lusatian Serbs was in decline. In Lusatia, instruction was prohibited in the native language, the use of their writing in official documents, on city signs and in public places. Luzhitsky people's holidays were considered working days. The Polabski Serbs were subjected to labor discrimination. To get a job, the average Luzhinin could only if he spoke German in pure German with a Saxon or Bavarian accent. Most of the local Serbs, whose native language was puddle, spoke German with an unusual German average accent. Therefore, Luzhinin could be refused employment only because of the speech that does not satisfy the employer.

The defeat in the First World War and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic based on democratic principles, strangely enough, did not improve the situation in which the Lusatian Serbs were located. Photos of people who inhabited Lusatia in those days, clearly demonstrate the consequences of centuries of Germanization. Public figures of the Lusatian Serbs repeatedly petitioned the League of Nations to grant their people the status of a national minority within the German state, but such petitions were not satisfied. Apparently, the international community did not want to further infringe on the national self-consciousness of the Germans, and was already humiliated by the imposed reparations, the payment of which fell on the shoulders of ordinary citizens. However, to avoid another explosion of chauvinistic sentiment in Germany still failed, and the non-recognition of the Luzhin national minority at that time, perhaps even played this ethnic group on hand.

Luzhichans under the rule of the Nazis

Lusatian Serbs are the only Slavic people who managed to avoid ethnic cleansing during the existence of the Third Reich. Apparently, this contributed to the fascination of the German Nazis on the theory of the great ancient civilizations and the occult role of the German nation in the modern world. The Nazis regarded the German people as a direct descendant of the great Aryans, the people who inhabited the German lands in antiquity. Digging into the depths of German history, Nazi scientists could not hide or bypass the existence of a union of tribes of the Polabian Slavs, so the propaganda machine of Gebels recognized the peoples who lived in the Middle Ages to the east of the Elbe, the Germans. This number includes the territories that from time immemorial inhabit the Lusatian Serbs, where the Czechs also live, which, according to the Nazis, were not subject to Germanization, in contrast to the authentic inhabitants of the Czech lands.

According to Hitler, the Lusik residents were Germans speaking Vendian, that is, a Lusatian language. For this reason the Polabian Slavs, who did not openly oppose the power of the National Socialists, enjoyed equal rights with the Germans. Moreover, the Lusatian Serbs, the photo confirms this, could even wear their national clothes. But these indulgences were still regarded as vestiges. Therefore, by and large, for the time of the Reich, the Luzhinians lost the right to national self-identification under the fear of reckoning to resistance movements, and did not bring up their children in the national spirit.

Lusatian Serbs after the end of World War II

After entering the Red Army Puddle, the Soviet leadership recognized the Lusatian Serbs as a brother Slavic nation and contributed in every way to their national self-determination. At the same time, despite numerous petitions, the Polabian Serbs were not granted autonomy in the GDR, but were defined as a people who are a national minority living in East Germany. In his works, Lev Gumilev called the Lusatian Serbs a relic Slavic people.

Lusatian Serbs today

After the unification of Germany in 1989, the issue of creating a separate Lusatian-Serbian land in the FRG again became urgent. The active position in support of the Central European Slavs was expressed by the President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. But the government of the new Germany did not want to grant the Lusatian Serbs so wide autonomy, apparently fearing its further fall under the Soviet military-political vector. Nevertheless, the Polabian Slavs received the right to teach their children in their native language, to use the Lusatian language as official on the grounds of their residence, publicly celebrate their national holidays and express their national identity in other ways.

But the modern Lusatian Serbs, whose religion is no longer united, self-identify themselves in different ways. Long stay under Czech influence during the Hussite wars left its mark on the history of this ethnos. Today, the territory of the Lusatian Serbs is divided into the Lower and Upper Lusatia. The Serbs in each of these territories have their own peculiarities of language and traditions, and most importantly, Upper Lusatia is predominantly Catholic, and the Lower Luzhitsa is completely Protestant.

At the same time, the population of both territories identifies each other as the Polabian Slavs - an outstanding ethnos, which is part of the Slavic group of nations. And every luzhichanin says that his nationality is Serb.