History

DUSNOK IS MY DEAREST VILLAGE
The words of the title are the opening line of a Dusnok song that was communicated to me back in 1975 by the venerable elder Ivelja Koprivanac (b. 1896), and which continues as follows:
“…for in it there is always joy,
as if every day were a feast day,
whether Pentecost or some baptism —
therefore, come and visit Dusnok,
there Janko and Anoka await you.”
These poetic lines convey the following message: Come, traveler, to our settlement, where men and women, old and young alike await you. And indeed it is so. During my visit to the charming village of Dusnok, at every step I felt the kindness and hospitality of these simple people who share our language and name. In the summer of that year, I had the good fortune to meet many elderly people, even several elderly women who spoke little or no Hungarian. Their local Croatian dialect (still unspoiled by foreign words) was a true delight to me.
While collecting primarily ethnological material, I did not fail to ask my informants what they knew about the origin and time of migration of their ancestors. Most replies indicated that they did not know, or they told me: “They say that our forefathers came from Croatia sometime long, long ago.”
However, I met two eighty-year-old men who, independently of each other, knew more. Jozelja Belja (Jozušev) told me: “Our people came from Jankovci in Slavonia.” He based this claim on an entry written in his great-grandmother’s prayer book. When she died, the prayer book was unfortunately placed in her coffin and buried together with her. Since Jozelja’s grandfather was the leader of the local Nazarene community, he possessed several old Croatian Bibles and prayer books, among which I highlight Daničić’s translation of the Old Testament from 1867, Isusovka by Blaž Modrošić (Timișoara, 1871), and Vienac bogoljubnih pjesama by Marijan Jaić (Budapest, 1909).
Petrelja Šantin expressed a similar view about the ancestral homeland of the Dusnok inhabitants, stating that he had heard about it in his childhood from “old neighbor Ivelja Matica Ilinog.”
Although both said “from Jankovci in Slavonia” (certainly because the Bačka settlement of Jánoshalma and the inhabitants of Dusnok also call their locality Jankovac), we can state with certainty that this refers to the Slavonian Jankovci, namely Stari Jankovci in the Vinkovci region.
Southwest of Vinkovci, since the Middle Ages, there has existed an Ekavian dialect enclave encompassing eleven settlements (Andrijaševci, Cerna, Gradište, Ivankovo, Novi and Stari Mikanovci, Prkovci, Retkovci, Rokovci, Šiškovci, Vođinci), whose speech is very similar to that of Dusnok: accentuation, almost consistent Ekavian pronunciation, the šć sound cluster, noun inflection, vocabulary, etc. (Ikavian forms in Dusnok include divojčica, divojka, divičica, prominjit.)
This dialect enclave was once certainly larger and included Stari Jankovci as well; however, due to the migration of a significant part of its population to Kalocsa, and from there later to Batya and Dusnok, as well as the influx of new settlers, the speech of Stari Jankovci changed considerably, and the remaining old population adopted features of the Neo-Štokavian Ijekavian dialect.
We should not be confused by those features of the Dusnok dialect that today are no longer present in the aforementioned dialect enclave but are encountered in the lower Drava region, for example the comparative ending -eji (stareji) or the suffix -ena in female names (Janjena). These two Ekavian regions once formed a single whole. Being completely separated from the mother population, the inhabitants of Dusnok (like those of Baćin) preserved old linguistic features, while their relatives around Vinkovci were exposed to external influences.
Family names also help us trace the origin of the Croatian population of Dusnok. Northwest of Vinkovci lies the village of Koprivna, from which the surname Koprivanac is derived. Today this is one of the more widespread surnames in Dusnok, and it is also found in Stari Jankovci and two neighboring settlements. The Lexicon of Surnames of the Socialist Republic of Croatia (1976) confirms that persons bearing the surname Jagica reside in Stari Jankovci, and we know that this is also one of the most common surnames in Dusnok.
In both villages, Dusnok and Stari Jankovci, the following surnames also occur:
Berta, Bertić, Balaž, Dudaš, Jakšić, Maroš, Matanov, Matić, Pavo, Perić, Tomša.
Bearers of the common Dusnok surname Hodovan(j) are found in the vicinity of Stari Jankovci (Svinjarevci, Vinkovci, Vukovar). Some present and former Dusnok surnames also occur in nearby Vinkovci: Giljanović, Jagodić, Kopač, Marčeta, Matanić, Mateka, Mateković, Mihin, Perjan, Paviša, Valić; the surname Pavišić appears in nearby Cerna, and Figuričin in Ivankovo.
The inhabitants of all these settlements belong to the Šokac branch of the Croatian people, so there is no doubt that in the past the inhabitants of Dusnok also called themselves Šokci — until state authorities in the mid-19th century imposed the ethnonym “Rac” upon them (although neither language, customs, nor religion link them to Serbs). Thus today the inhabitants of Dusnok are called Raci, and their language Racki.
Church documents, however, almost consistently refer to them as Illyrians, a term that was understood to mean Croats. In Antunović’s work Razprava… we read that the inhabitants of Dusnok in 1762 were Šokci and Hungarians, while by 1882 they were all Šokci; in 1773 the “Illyrian,” that is Croatian language predominated in the village (Lexicon universorum regni Hungariae locorum populosorum); according to church sources, in 1783 Dusnok was inhabited exclusively by Croats (D. Barth: Dusnok es papja, in Dusnoki tanulmanyok, 1999); historian A. Valyi states that Dusnok was a Croatian village (“horvat falu”), further describing it as a “colonia Dalmatica,” that is a Dalmatian settlement (Magyarország leírása, 1796), meaning that the local Hungarians had by then become fully Croatized; S. Katona writes that Illyrians and Hungarians lived in Dusnok (Historia Metropolitanae Colocensis, 1800); E. Fényes in 1851 states that Dalmatian people lived there (a term he used for most Croatian ethnic groups in Hungary).
At the end of the 19th century, Dusnok had 654 houses and 3,443 inhabitants, all Šokci, as recorded by the local parish priest Ilija Kujundžić (born in Subotica in 1857). S. Borovszky (1910) also refers to them as Šokci, as do P. Pekić (1930) and M. V. Knežević (1931). Some modern authors, however, incorrectly classify them among the Bunjevci.
Written records about the settlement of Dusnok inhabitants are very scarce. In the Catholic weekly Glas koncila (1981, issue 17, p. 6), we read that in 1491 King Ladislaus granted the entire region around Vinkovci to the Archbishopric of Kalocsa. Therefore, it is not impossible that the archbishops already at that time relocated farmers from those lands to their estates in Bačka — or vice versa.
P. Pekić states that in 1660 Dusnok was settled by Croatian Šokci (p. 102). Since Dusnok was still an uninhabited wasteland in 1639, it is very likely that the Ottomans settled them there in order to cultivate the land, supply their army with food, and pay taxes. (A Dusnok inhabitant, Išvelja Karasin, told me a legend according to which two newcomers, Gabrelja Matić and Matok Perić, killed a Turkish military leader and liberated the village.)
According to other sources, the village originated in the mid-17th century when people found refuge here among marshes and forests (S. Borovszky). In 1686 Dusnok is mentioned as an “Illyrian,” that is Croatian parish (Antunović), but in 1690 it had only three inhabitants and therefore was not taxed. According to J. Erdeljanović, Dusnok remained partly a “Dalmatian” village during the 17th century.
In 1715 the village had 11 taxpayers, in 1720 there were 23, in 1728 there were 39, in 1744 there were 69, and in 1760 there were 129 taxpayers. Parish registers have been kept since 1736, when Nikola Pastorčić served as parish priest.
In those registers between 1741 and 1752, the following surnames were recorded as “Dalmatian,” that is Croatian:
Balo, Baxy (Bazi), Belya, Bencze, Benczin, Berta, Csikós, Deman, Eleki, Fekete, Hegdics, Hodovan, Ivanacz, Jagicza, Jakso, Jambrus, Kapitány, Kelemen, Kernya (Krnja), Komar, Konyar, Koprivanacz, Kovács, Kyss, Matan, Matich, Matika, Nagy, Pajtás, Pavissa, Pavula, Periar (Perjar), Perich, Perusich, Pintér, Puzder, Racz, Radicsits, Rogacs, Ruppa, Scrapac (Škrapac), Sipos, Sivko (Živko), Szitar, Szudar, Tomasko, Tomsa, Tóth, Varga.
Here we also notice typical Hungarian surnames; their bearers were probably local inhabitants already present there, or former inhabitants of Stari Jankovci, where Hungarians lived both in the past and today, including those bearing surnames such as Astaloš, Balog, Tot, and Varga — surnames also common in Dusnok.
In the same period, the surnames Fekete, Kapitány, Tott, and Varga were also listed among Hungarians (“Hungara”), along with Andreas, Asztalos, Balog, Bognár, Bovári, Csanádi, Csany, Facsko, Mihály, Moramarossi, Novak, Sipos, and Szikora. The same division appears in the 1750 schematism of the Archbishopric of Kalocsa, stating that “Dalmatians” outnumbered Hungarians twenty to one.
From the late 17th century until 1835, Dusnok was a serf settlement belonging to the Archbishopric of Kalocsa, and until 1848 it belonged to the Kalocsa cathedral chapter. Their obligations and burdens are described in a report from 1768 signed by sworn officer Pavo Koprivanac and clerk Matija Mandić:
“We are obliged to provide 60 stacks of hay, cut and transport wood, thresh and sieve grain and transport it to the Danube; provide 250 fence posts and weave 500 bundles of twigs; annually deliver 1,200 bundles of reeds. We have small vineyards, firewood and construction wood, reeds, and we may fish. We live half a mile from the Danube. When the Danube does not flood, we have orchards and gardens and pasture for cattle. We cultivate fields when the Danube does not overflow. We may pasture pigs on acorns. Floods destroy much of our fields, and we live among marshes. We pay tithes from all autumn and spring crops, vegetables, fruit, and bees.”
At that time (1760), 113 serfs lived in Dusnok, owning 172 oxen, 83 horses, and 181 cows.
By 1760 a school was already operating in the village. The teacher was the aforementioned Matija Mandić, who also served as cantor and village clerk. The language of instruction was Croatian until the 1880s, when it was banned.
Due to the curtailment of national rights within the Church, some inhabitants of Dusnok at the end of the 19th century left the Catholic Church and adopted the Nazarene faith. Assimilation reached such an extent that our people were forced (especially in the 1890s) to Magyarize their surnames, for example:
Cerević → Cserháti,
Drobljen → Deli,
Đuraković → Gyulafalvi,
Fačko → Fehérvári, Földesi,
Hodovan → Hatvani, Hortobágyi,
Jagica → Jánoshegyi, Jóházi,
Koprivanac → Kecskeméti,
Mihaljević → Mándoki,
Miho → Mátrai,
Paviša → Péterházi,
Pejo → Palotai,
Perić → Pétervári,
Rogač → Rózsás, Réti,
Tomaško → Tamási, Tatai,
Vidaković → Városi.
(Since this phenomenon affected all our settlements, it would be worthwhile to address this topic separately.)
The former stepmotherly attitude of church and state authorities toward our nationality led to the situation that — despite the teaching of the Croatian language in schools and the exemplary work of Croatian minority self-governments — today among the younger generations in Dusnok only rarely can one find someone who speaks the language of their grandfathers.
(Zivko Mandic)