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Ana Djordjevié
tion’ and banking.‘ All of these measures were undertaken in towns, primarily in
Belgrade, or along the main travel and trade routes such as the one between Bel¬
grade and Nis, along the Danube, and also between Serbia and Austro-Hungary.
In most cases they did not influence living conditions in the countryside, where
the majority of the population lived.
Compared to the overall rural population, which made up more than 80% of
Serbia's society, Belgrade’s developing bourgeois class was rather inhomogeneous
and small. Existing towns such as Sabac, Uzice, Novi Sad, Nis, Kragujevac, Sme¬
derevo, and PoZarevac had been under foreign domination of either Austria-Hun¬
gary or the Ottoman Empire for a long time, which was visible both in statistics,
architecture, and lifestyle. Only in the 1840s did the Serbs start to move to towns
in greater numbers (see Lampe & Jackson 1982: 117f, Vasié 2006: 193). With Ser¬
bia’s substantial autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in 1830 (as an autonomous
hereditary principality)’ towns started to gradually expand both in size and im¬
portance. In 1850, Belgrade counted roughly 15,500 inhabitants. The population
grew to just under 70,000 around 1900 and ran up to 100,000 until the outbreak
of World War I (Miljkovié-Katié 2002: 108; Stankovié 2003: 71). The rise in
population was caused by immigration both from the countryside as well as from
outside of Serbian borders, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Dalmatia,
Croatia, Hungary, Macedonia, and Kosovo, and resulted in a diverse structure
of society® (Lampe & Jackson 1982: 116; Heppner 1994: 19; Sundahussen 2007:
162-164). Analyzing statistics, Serbian geographer Milovan Radovanovié found
that only one third of Belgrade’s inhabitants had been born there between 1890
and 1900 and one third had immigrated from abroad, especially from Hungary
(Radovanovié 1974; see also Miskovié 2008; Sundhaussen 1989). Those immi¬
grants from Hungary were primarily of Serbian origin. Lampe claims that Serbs
from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy accounted for about a third of the overall
population of Belgrade by 1900 (1975: 68f). This foreign element in Belgrade’s
population did not escape the attention of contemporaries visiting Serbia. The
> Among the most famous is the German Weifert family who, for example, established one of the
first breweries of the Kingdom of Serbia in Belgrade, thereby moving it from the Austro-Hungarian
Panéevo, where it was founded in 1840. Later the family also invested in mining in Eastern Serbia.
Other foreign industrialists were, to name a few, the Czech Ignjat Bajloni and sons, who also estab¬
lished a brewing company and various mills.
6 In 1882 the Austrian Öesterreichische Länderbank established a daughter bank in Belgrade named
Srpska kreditna banka (Serbian Credit Bank); in mid-1910, the Banque Franco-Serbe was opened (see
Lampe, Jackson 1982: 229f).
7 Serbia gained full independence only at the Berlin Congress in 1878. In 1882, it was declared a
kingdom.
§ During Ottoman rule, the Christian population in the Balkans settled in the countryside. Towns
were populated by Muslims and Jews and also Greeks and Tsintsars, who had special trade privileges.
While the Muslim population left voluntarily and involuntarily towns of the autonomous province,
Jews, Greeks, and Tsintsars stayed and were joined by the Christian immigrants (see Lampe, Jackson
1982: 118).