Podrinje, a space of encounter and clash

The river Drina, a historical border between the Eastern and the Western Roman Empire, between the Greek and Latin linguistic and cultural areas, and also a borderline between the Orthodoxy and the Catholicism after the Oriental schism, has generally corresponded to the medieval Bosnia’s oriental frontier. Instead, in the first few centuries of the Ottoman domination in the Balkans, Podrinje has maintained its own political unity even when separating Bosnia from Serbia. This unity ceased only in the XIX century, and had as a consequence some anthropical movements from a river’s shore to the another. In that occasion, besides being a political frontier Drina has become also a cultural and religious border, and remained that way also during the Habsburg domination over Bosnia and in the first decade of the monarchical Yugoslavia. With the new administrative partition of the kingdom by the banovine system, while Bosnia has been divided for the first time after more than 400 years, Drina gave its name to one of the new provinces of the state, and has been put not anymore at the frontier, but in the real centre of a territory designed in a way to have a majority of the Serb population. With this operation it seems that the nationalist ideal that sees in Drina the spine of Serbia had been reached. After the second World War and the end of the Federal Yugoslavia made of six republics, such a goal seems – at least partially – reached for the second time. In fact, the Serb Republic of Bosnia, where the left side of Drina’s valley is situated, even while being an entity of the Bosnian state made in Dayton, is also being internationally recognized. Besides, after the ethnic cleansing of the ’90-s has almost exclusively a Serbian population, so it can be presented as a “antique Serb region”, culturally homogeneous despite the political separation between Bosnia and Serbia, and in this way it candidates itself to the “European regional borderland” status.