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Slavania in the 1890s8/19/2023 ![]() Some of the refugees eventually found new homes in Austria and Germany, however, most immigrated to the United States and Canada, where they had friends and relatives who had immigrated to those countries prior to World War II. At the end of the war, the Gottscheers were forced to flee into Austria. This was done in December 1941 and January 1942, when almost 12,000 Gottscheers were relocated to Brezice (Rann), Slovenia that had been incorporated into the German Reich during the war.īetween 19, many of the Gottscheer villages were destroyed in battles between the Yugoslavian partisans and the Italian forces. Nine months later, the German government resettled the Gottscheer ethnic Germans from their 650-year homeland. When the German and Italian armies invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, an agreement between Italy and Germany gave control of the Gottschee land area to Italy. The city of Gottschee is known as Kocevje.ĭuring World War II, the Gottscheers lost their homeland. Today, the area of the former county of Gottschee is known as Kocevska, Slovenia. Slovenia gained its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. In 1929, the kingdom became known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Gottscheers were given Yugoslavian citizenship. In 1918, after World War I, with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Duchy of Carniola and with it Gottschee became part of the province of Slovenia in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Many immigrated to various areas in the United States and Canada, with large numbers settling in Cleveland, Ohio, and Brooklyn, New York. The population was about 26,000 and like many Slovenians and other Europeans, Gottscheers began to emigrate from their homeland. In the late 1800s, the Gottschee ethnic and linguistic area of 331 square miles consisted of 176 villages organized into 19 townships and 18 parishes. In that same year, all urban and rural dwelllings were counted and recorded. In 1770, Maria Theresa ordered a count of all males in order to be drafted into the Austrian army. In 1641, Wolf Engelbrecht of Auersperg bought the county ( Grafschaft) of Gottschee. Also in that year, there was an Urbarium (land register) produced with statistics of land, the number of villages, names of the owners, and taxes. About 100 years later, in 1574, Gottschee was owned by the Hapsburg Archduke Carl. In 1471, Gottschee received the municipal charter and city seal. It was mainly a spoken language and those that were born there in the 1920s and 1930s still speak the language today (On the Links page, click Gottscheer Relief Association of New York to view and listen to the Gottscheerisch language.) They also developed a distinct German dialect called Gottscheerisch. The people of Gottschee continued to preserve the customs of their ancestors. In 1350, the emperor made available 300 families from Thuringia in Germany, and this group formed the basis of the population of Gottschee County as a German-speaking language island in a duchy mostly inhabited by Slovenians. As a result, there were a number of important castles and fortifications in and around Gottschee. The area of lower Carniola (the duchy of Carniola was called Krain in German) that was to become Gottschee had been a strategic part of the Holy Roman Empire since the year 800. ![]() The settlers cleared the vacant and heavily forested land and established towns and rural villages. The county of Gottschee was colonized in 1300 by the Carinthian counts of Ortenburg with settlers from Carinthia and Tyrol, and by other settlers who came from Austrian and German Dioceses of Salzburg, Brixen, and Freising. Gottschee was founded at the end of the 13th century, carved out of the uninhabited mountain forests in what is today the south central part of Slovenia.
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