The 'Abandoned Land': Muslim Refugees’ Property in the Post-Ottoman Balkans

• In Event: Legal History at the Margins of the Ottoman and Russian Empires

Abstract

This paper examines what happened to the land of Muslim refugees who had fled Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78. It focuses on the fields, pastures, and houses of North Caucasian and Crimean Tatar refugees, whom the Ottoman government had settled in the Balkans in prior decades. The lands vacated by Muslim refugees became a prized commodity in the three newly independent or autonomous countries. All three national governments passed legislation in 1880 to appropriate the land as state property.

This paper argues that the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian governments used the “abandoned land” for internal colonization by co-ethnic immigrants, in the process homogenizing their border regions. It further asserts that Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania largely upheld the Ottoman land regime, building their land legislation upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, and used key tenets of the Ottoman Immigration Law of 1857 for their immigration legislation. National governments settled the newly arriving Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Wallachian, and Moldavian immigrants, many of whom were refugees themselves, on the vacated land. By focusing on Muslim refugees’ “abandoned land,” this paper explores intersections of law, migration, and political economy in the post-Ottoman Balkans.

Author

• Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, UC Santa Barbara