Magyarország,¹ Hrvatska,² Slovenija,³ and Bosna and Hercegovina⁴

How is the land laid out?

West and south are mountains; north and east are plains associated with the Danube⁵ river system. The northwest corner has extensions of the Alps:⁶ the Julians and the Karawanken. Another extension of the Alps separates the Kisalföld⁷ from the lowlands southeast of Lake Balaton. Finally the Dinarkso Mountains⁸ form a wall along the Adriatic. In the south are the river-cut highlands of Bosna. The Croatian coast--beyond the Dinaric ranges--includes the Dalmatian Archipelago. The Danube, Europe's second longest river, forms part of Magyarország's north border, then cuts south through the middle of that country. It continues as part of Hrvatska's eastern bound, receiving the Drava⁹ from the west before exiting the area eastward. Two other tributaries, which join their mother stream beyond the area, are the Tisza, which dominates the Alföld,¹⁰ and the Sava which originates in Slovenija, cuts through Hrvatska and forms part of the Hrvatska-Bosna border.

UNESCO honors as natural World Heritage Sites Plitvice Lakes National Park--also a tourist attraction¹¹ and Škocjan Caves. Additionally two sites are partly in this area and partly beyond: The Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst, and the Ancient and Pimeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe. Locally these are:

Map

Who lives there?

The Magyars of Magyarország are a very slight majority, followed by speakers of the language known variously as Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian depending on the speaker's religion. There is as well a substantial Slovene minority. Together these constitute more than 90 percent of the inhabitants.

On the other hand there is a clear, though not overwhelming, majority in religious belief: More than eight in ten are Christians, and less than one in ten Sunni Moslims. Of the Christians, three in four are Roman Catholics, with Calvinist Protestants and Serbian Orthodox Christians accounting for most of the others. The Catholics are mostly in the north and along the coast; the Calvinists entirely within Magyarország, while the Orthodox and most of the Moslims are in Bosna.

The area's principle city is Budapest, capital of Magyarország, with Zagreb, the capital of Hrvatska, the only other metropolitan area that exceeds one million residents.

List of Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian and Bosnian Cities

UNESCO honors current or recent culture through several World Heritage Sites:

Tourists also enjoy--for modern and pre-modern culture--Hvar Island¹¹ and Jahorina.¹²

Who was there before?

When Europeans elsewhere started writing the region contained three groups, all leftovers from earlier migrations of the Proto-Indo-Europeans from eastern Europe. At the head of the Adriatic were the Venetii,¹³ along the Croatian coast were the Illyrians¹⁴ and farther inland were Thracians.¹⁵ After 500 BCE Scythians--the first Iranian group to enter Europe--invaded the area, leaving no lasting influence beyond place names. These temporary invaders worshipped a pantheon of a Great Goddess, a God of Heavens, an Earth Goddess, a Sun God and a Moon Goddess under the ministry of shamans. About 400 BCE the Thracians were displaced or absorbed by continental Celts. Roma's conquests transformed the coasts but Celtic culture and the Druid-led religion survived for centuries. Next to arrive were Germanic language speakers, following the Danube, then the Drava, and settling for a while in today's Hrvatska, before moving on to the northwest. Sarmatians, an Iranian group, passed through Hrvatska next--leaving little influence, while soon after more Germanic peoples moved through today's Magyarország and Hrvatska and on west, partly driven by the 'Scourge of Europe', Attila the Hun. He and his Huns created an empire, probably centered in the country English speakers name after them: Hungary. Their language is unknown but was most probably Turkic. Other than destruction they left little to remember them by and probably became absorbed into the people they conquered. By this time these peoples had converted to Christianity under Roman imperial leadership. Older religions were persecuted but not nearly as vengefully as the internescine quarrels among the new religionists. Eventually that produced the division currently sustained by the Serbians and Croatians, speaking one language but worshipping Jesus in separate rites. These and the Slovenes were South Slavs who reached the eastern Alps by the sixth century and overran Hrvatska and Bosna in the seventh. They were originally united with the West Slavs as one people, but then were separated by the Avars, who took over for 200 years what is today Magyarország. (These speakers of a Northeast Caucasian language now only exist in Dagestan, Rossiya.¹⁶) Meanwhile the South Slavs split into distinct groups and abandoned the worship of a heaven and thunder god, of household fertility gods and of tree cults, adopting instead Christianity, which intially spread from the south along with Church Slavonic--close to Macedonian--and writing. But this spread of Orthodox Christianity was countered by Roman Catholicism, which converted first the Slovenes and by the 11th century the Croats. In the following century the Serbian Orthodox Church established religious indepedence from the Byzantine leadership. Bosna, as today, was divided; it even briefly flirted with state-sponsored Manicheanism in the 14th century.¹⁷ One of the two final elements in medieval peninsular demographic change was the arrival of Turks as conquerers from the south. While Turkish speakers are gone from the area, their religion of Islam remains in Bosna and nearby. The other element was the migration of Germans, settling in planned communities, which remained the chief urban settlements in Slovenija until after World War II. Further north in Magyarország the Avars were replaced by new invaders: the Magyars. These arrived starting in the late ninth century--driven west by the Patzinaks. The elite converted to Roman Catholicism by the end of the first millenium and violently imposed their religion on the remainder of their new empire. This empire was vanquished by the Mongol invasions, but their destructions left the empire's core--today's Magyarország--a Magyar speaking area.

UNESCO honors pre-modern culture through several World Heritage Sites:

Additionally there are four sites partly within the area:

Locally the former includes the stećci at:

Venetian defence works include those at Zadar and Šibinek (Saint Nicholas Fortress).

Around the Area

northwest
northeast
southeast of Hungary
south of central Hungary and southeast of Bosnia
southwest
west of Slovenia

Footnotes

1. Hungary in English.
2. Croatia in English..
3. Slovenia in English.
4. Bosna i Hercegovina in Bosnian and Croatian, which is written as Босна и Хереговина in Serbian. Bosnia and Herzegovina in English.
5. Locally called the Duna (Hungarian), the Donava (Slovenian) or the Dunav (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian).
6. Called the Alpe in Slovene.
7. Little Hungarian Plain in English.
8. Dinaric Alps in English.
9. Drava is the name in Croatian and English. It is the Dráva in Hungarian.
10. Great Hungarian Plain in English.
11. https://www.touropia.com/tourist-attractions-in-croatia/, accessed September 10, 2018.
12. https://www.thecrazytourist.com/15-best-places-visit-bosnia-herzegovina/, accessed September 10, 2018.
13. Perhaps the Venetii language was in the Italic group.
14. Perhaps the ancestral language of the Illyrians was related to Albanian.
15. A language group in itself.
16. Also transliterated as Rossija. Russia in English.
17. Only Bosna proper, the north of Bosna and Hercegovina.