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| The Neogothic Zagreb Cathedral - with much of the 19th century city core - has born the signature of German-born architect Hermann Bolle since an 1880 earthquake damaged the previous structure |
Croats are Roman Catholics...and Roman Catholics are Croats, at least in these parts. As a matter of fact, though, the truth is not that simple. But almost. What is true, however, is that Croatians and Croatia have a very special and complex relationship with the Roman Catholic church. The reasons are many, and lie buried in history and geography. Some are buried deep and forgotten, some are part of everyday life. So let's best start with just that, every day life. Some 95% of the population of Croatia according to the 2001 census have a faith. For 90 % of those the faith is Roman Catholicism. This is the statistics you will encounter in textbooks, just like the fact that another 4% are Orthodox and 1.5% adhere to the Sunni Muslim faith. Other religions, mostly various reformed Christian churches and Jehova's witnesses are also present with a few thousand members each. Croatia currently counts some 500 Jews.
However, even if 9 out of 10 Croatians are Roman Catholics, this by no means they all attend weekly mass. The figure for weekly mass attendance would be closer to the range of 30 to 40 %. And it would be even smaller in urban areas and the Westernmost regions around Rijeka and in Istria, which are more secular in character. A plurality of Croatian Catholics can be said to attend Mass only on major church holidays, such as Christmas and Easter. A quarter of declared Catholics in Croatia say they never attend Mass. That said, religion plays an important role in Croatia by virtue of its culturally defining function. This brings us back to the first, somewhat crude-sounding statement of this chapter about Croats being equivalent to Roman Catholics and vice versa. Let's digress and go back in history a millennium or so to consider the events that contributed to Croatians becoming Roman Catholic.
At the turn of the 7th century, a an army of Avars and Slavs reached what is nowadays Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina from the North East and destroyed the ancient Roman city of Salona near the site of present-day Solin in the outskirts of Split. This was the first wave of Croats immigrating into their present day homeland. The following 150 years would be a period of instability with Franks, Byzantines and the local nobility all vying for control. Add the odd attack by the Saracens, Normans or Avars and another wave of Slav immigration... and you've got yourself a perfect chaos. It lasted until Charlemagne in the late 700s took Istria from the Byzantines and the northern plains from the Avars and placed them under the tutelage of the Frankish kingdom. In 812 Charlemagne signed the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle with the Byzantine empire, which put all of the area of modern Croatia under Frankish suzerainty except the three cities of Zadar, Trogir and Split and four islands, which remained Byzantine. This would prove to be a decisive turning point in the religious affiliation of early Croats because it allowed for the spread of the Roman rite and Catholicism from Istria into Dalmatia and the interior. Croats thus became the first Slavs to be christianized.
A few decades later pope John VIII would authorize the Croats to serve the Eucharist in the vernacular, a unique exception at the time in Western Christianity. This decision also contributed to keep the Croats' allegiance to what would become the Catholic faith after the Great Schism in 1054. Due to the proximity of Byzantine Orthodox lands to the east and the fact that the Patriarch of Constantinople allowed the peoples converted to the Byzantine rite to serve liturgy in the vernacular, there was a chance that the Croats might be tempted to convert to the Byzantine Rite. The popes over the centuries recognized the situation and continued to treat the Croats with favours and graces. In order to win strong popular support for the Roman church, pope Innocent IV in 1248 granted the Croats of Southern Dalmatia the privilege of using the Glagolitic script and "Slavic" language in the Roman Rite liturgy. The strong support of the Roman Church Croatia enjoyed during its early period has continued to the present day. The Vatican was one of the first administrations in the world to recognize an independent Croatia in 1992. Pope John Paul II, the first Slavic pope, visited a newly independent Croatia in 1994, then in 1998 and 2003.
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| The interior of the UNESCO -protected Euphrasian Basilica at Poreč (W coast of Istria) testifies to the Byzantine presence in Istria in late Antiquity |
Perhaps the most interesting remnant of the Byzantine influence on early Croats is in religious terminology. In the standard language - which is a Southern dialect from Herzegovina - the Croatian word for "Jesus" is "Isus", a reflect of the Greek "Issos" . Other languages spoken by Roman Catholics in Europe prefer the Latin-derived "Jesus" or "Iesus". This is also the case in the northwestern Croatian kaj dialect, spoken where Christianity was introduced only by the Franks and there was no cultural and political competition with Byzantium. The "kaj" dialect name for Jesus is accordingly "Jezuš", which clearly stems from the Latin variant. A similar linguistic legacy of Byzantium is observable in the name of Saint Blaise. In the northwestern parts of the country he is known as "Sveti Blaž", with the Latin-influenced initial "b". In Dubrovnik, in the far southeast of Croatia, his name is "Sveti Vlaho", with a Greek initial "v". The difference comes from different readings of the same letter. "B", used in both the Roman and Greek alphabets, is pronounced /v/ in Greek and /b/ in Latin.
You might have come across a curious fact when browsing through Croatian-made info sheets and pamphlets on the country. It might contain the explicit mention of the Roman alphabet (also referred to as the "Latin script") as the official character code, as it were, of Croatia. Don't you find it strange a country needs an "official script"? Can we write English in any characters other than the 26 letters from A to Z?? Or Spanish? And would anyone ever write Chinese with Arabic letters? Or Russian with the Greek alphabet? Enter the spice in the Croatian alphabet soup: the glagolitic alphabet. The clergy in Croatia was historically split between followers of the Roman alphabet and Glagolitic alphabets. The latinaši ( "the Latin wing" ) prevailed. In more recent times during the Yugoslav federation, it was the (Serbian) Cyrillic that sometimes made the alphabet soup a tall order for kids. At the time Cyrillic enjoyed a semi-official status in Croatian education: students had to learn it and spend an entire school year writing the Cyrillic they wouldn't use much unless they aspired a career in the federal services, all in the name of "brotherhood and unity". The government made away with it when Croatia won its independence in 1991.. but now there seem to be plans underway of reintroducing it in Serb-majority areas from 2011 onwards...Don't worry, the Roman alphabet is set to stay the one and only Croatian character set for all practical intents and purposes. Confused yet? It's OK, if you can still read these lines you can read the official script of Croatia.
