   |
| Total population |
|---|
| 72,690 [1] |
| Regions with significant populations |
| Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta |
| Languages |
| Related ethnic groups |
Several thousand Canadians are of Serbian origin. Serbs have migrated to Canada in various waves during the 20th century.
History
The word Sloboda rings truer than the word Freedom to the ear of the Serb. Indeed, it has been the fairest of our dreams. Sloboda has been the theme of our writers, poets, scholars -- Dositej Obradovic, Petar II Petrovic-Njegos, Mihailo Pupin. But through the centuries that freedom, more often than not, had to be earned at great expense in lives and property. Countless invaders in the past and merciless politicians of late have crushed our hearts and embittered our lives. Today, all we seek and ask is sympathetic understanding from Ottawa and other capital cities in the world!
The first Serbs to arrive in Canada came to British Columbia between 1850 and 1870. Many were employed in mining or forestry near such towns as Phoenix, Golden, Prince Rupert and Kamloops. Serbs could be found in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896. The best known among them was Black Mike Winage (Vinich) who joined in the early days of the gold rush as a young man, and died at Dawson City in 1977 at the age of 107. Like most of the early Serbian settlers Black Mike first emigrated from the Old Country to the United States of America and then settled in Canada. The borders were not as strictly regulated then as they are today, and it was common practice to move around freely from one country to another without let or hinderance.
By 1900, Serbs began to arrive in Alberta. Many of these early settlers had migrated north from the north-west region of the United States. Coal mining attracted them to Lethbridge, while road construction was a source of employment for those in Macleod and Cadomin. Many Serbs worked on the construction of railway lines that now extend from Edmonton to the Pacific coast.
World War I saw many Serbs in Canada join voluntarily in the Canadian Armed Forces, while others, faced with the humiliation of being born in the Austrian Empire, were branded as enemy aliens. In 1914 some 80,000 were ascribed that label and obliged to report regularly to the RCMP. World-renowned violinist, composer, and director Luigi von Kunits (Kunich), of Serbian ancestry, then living and teaching in Toronto, had to report his movements to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on a regular basis. Others, were not so lucky. Stripped of what little they had, forced to do heavy labour in the Canadian wilderness, they were also disenfranchised and subjected to other state sanctioned censures -- not because of anything they had done but only because of where they had come from, who they were. A young deaf and mute Serb from out West cried as he was dragged from his place of residence and shipped north to a labour camp where he endured five, long and severe winters until 1919, an entire year after the Armistance was signed. In some cases it took the intervention of the Consul General of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, prodded by Michael Pupin, to identify Serbs in detention and request their release. There were approximately 300 interned in Ontario, another 300 from Quebec, and the rest from other provinces. Of the 9,000 rounded up in the first national internment operations of 1914-1920, about 10 per cent were Serbian internees, while most were of Ukrainian, Ruthenian and White Russian origins, and the rest were a mixture of people from various ethnic backgrounds born in the Austrian Empire.
The period between the two World Wars witnessed a major increase in Serbian immigration to Canada. As with other periods of immigration, however, the exact number arriving at this time is not known.
Over 30,000 Yugoslavs came to Canada between 1919 and 1939, this included an estimated 10,000 Serbs. After the break-up of the Austrian Empire, Serbs from Banat (now part of Romania), Montenegro, Dalmatia, Croatia-Slavonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lika, Kordun, Banija, Barana, Macedonia, Kosovo-Metohija and Serbia proper sought to seek their fortune in the New World. Many of these immigrants were single, working men who had left families in their home country to seek work in Canada. The vast majority of Serbs arriving between the wars settled in Montreal, Toronto, and other cities throughout Ontario, the Prairies or British Columbia. Very few settled in Quebec City and the Maritime provinces.
Horrific atrocities and genocide occurred in Yugoslavia during World War II, particularly in Croatia when Ante Pavelich declared war against the United States of America and gave the word xenophobia a new meaning altogether. More than 700,000 Serbs, Roma and Jews were slaughtered in camps at Jasenovac and other regions of the newly-created Nazi puppet Satellite State of Croatia with the blessings of the Roman Catholic Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac. The Ustashi, a band of Catholic fanatics, backed by the clergy, decided to eliminate all non-Catholics in Croatia. One morning in August 1941, inside a Serbian Orthodox Church in a Serbian village, seven hundred Serbs were brutally massacred. It became known as the Glina massacre.
At the Teheran Conference the Allies (Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin) arbitrarily decided to partition Europe in two, giving Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Albania, Hungary, Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia (except Greece) to the Soviet Bloc, led by Stalin. There was general agreement both in London (King Peter II) and in Serbia (General Draza Mihailovich, Leader of the Yugoslav Democratic underground forces) that a failure to redeem the Kingdom of Yugoslavia would have a deplorable effect and destroy all hope of establishing a Balkan buffer against communism. By the end of the war, however, the newly established independent communist government was opposed by most Yugoslavs who were not given a chance to elect a new government through a democratic process as previously promised. Instead, they were dragooned by Western betrayal into a dictatorship that would last well over three decades. Many post-war refugees either refused to return to their homeland to live under a communist regime or escaped from the clutches of communism and a civil war that had no end in sight. King Peter II of Yugoslavia was the first to be banned by the communists from returning home, triggering a mass wave of Serbian POWs in Germany, Austria and Italy, and freedom-fighters in the homeland to seek refuge elsewhere. It would be an understatement to say that many were killed in the first decade of communist consolidation of power. The first among the many martyrs, initially succeeded in fighting their way out of Yugoslavia, but Harold MacMillan, then Minister Resident at Allied Headquarters, Mediterranean Command, gave orders to British General Lord Aldington in Austria (see books entitled The Minister and The Massacres and The Victims of Yalta by Nikolai Tolstoy) to deport all Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes back to Yugoslavia, and repatriate the Russians, Ukrainians, White Russians and Cossacks, all of whom were born in the former Russian Empire or in Serbia, and not in the Soviet Union of dictator Stalin. In the summer of 1946 the case of Mihailovich too center stage in the world press. A Committee for a Fair Trial for Mihailovich, with George Creel as Chairman and Dorothy Thompson as Honorary Chairman, demanded that the U.S. State Department make public its secret files on Mihailovich and Tito, together with captured German intelligence. Among the members of the Committee were Ontario-born writer David Martin, Sumner Welles, William Green, John Dewey, the Very Reverend Robert I. Gannon, Gene Tunney, John Dos Passos, Major General Fielding Eliot, Jerry Voorhis, and others. The Committee urged that American, British, and Canadian fliers rescued by Mihailovich be heard at the trial, but Tito's totaliterian court refused. As was predicted before the trial took place, it was Tito's aim to indict the American, British and Canadian governments -- and evidence was excluded that would spoil the indictment. Mihailovich was murdered and the remains of his body have yet to be located.
The Serbs who refused to be repatriated or managed to evade capture by crossing the Italian border, instead of the Austrian, eventually emigrated to Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They came from a wide variety of occupational backgrounds, including military and academic professions and the skilled trades. Some spoke several languages and held several foreign pre-war university degrees.
In the late 1950s a small group of Serbian and Russian war veterans formed their first branch of the Canadian Legion in Montreal. Saint George the Victorious branch had no money for a social hall. They met in the parish hall of the Holy Trinity Serbian Orthodox Church or in the basement of the Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church. Whenever the current president put the question: Is any comrade in need of aid? There were always comrades in need, for whom they strove to get pensions, medical treatment, jobs, shelter, food, and whatever else.
There were many books written in Serbian in the diaspora and later translated into English (at the writer's expense, of course), but the proposed manuscripts were rejected by Canadian, British and American publishers. Post-war adulation for Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman would dominate at the expense of truth. Furthermore, there was very little written in English in the West about the conditions in Yugoslavia in general and in Serbia in particular. The wider publishing market had seemed closed to Serbian writers until New York publisher William Jovanovich and translators Drenka Willen and Professor Michael Boro Petrovich broke through in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the works of dissident writer Milovan Djilas, then known as the most famous prisoner in the world, began to appear. No anti-communist had ever written as devastating and telling an indictment of Communism. Most of the books were conceived during the period of his incarceration under the communist regime that he himself helped found, ironically enough. Not any of his books had appeared in his own language (Serbian), nor were any likely to, not while Tito was still alive. But for the Serbs in the diaspora it was as though the door had finally opened, the door that had been inexorably shut against them. In less than three decades that door would be shut again. In 1993 the book publishing industry underwent drastic changes, and the firm Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ), dropped the name Jovanovich.
In the late 1980s, Yugoslavia's communist government was on the verge of collapse. Shortly after the sudden breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, a large group of Serbs moved to Canada, mostly to Southern Ontario, to such cities as Toronto, Kitchener, St. Cathrines, Hamilton, Niagara Falls and Windsor.
The 2006 census lists 72,690 Canadians of Serbian descent although it is assumed that there are more due to the irregularities in the classification of Serbs. Approximately 3,420 live in Alberta, with Edmonton and Calgary being the major centres of settlement.
The 2009 documentary Serbian Ambassadors follow the lives and tales of several Serbian-Canadians of all generations. A survey in the documentary showed that Serbs are the best educated ethnic groups in Toronto[1].
References
See also
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