The Bosnian Exclave

There is are four kinds of extraterritorial jurisdictions that a country can have, or places a country owns and operates in another country:

1. Diplomatic posts such as embassies, consulates, and trade offices/missions.

2. Military bases

3. Exclaves:

4. Enclaves

An exclave is a part of a country embedded within another country. An enclave is the opposite: the portion of a country in the said country. A good example is Lesotho or Swaziland in South Africa.

The Bosnian exclave I'm referring to is a portion of Bosnia in Serbia. The name of the place is Medurečje (MEDJ--ooh-rech yay), which even for a Bosnian speaker like me is quite a mouthful. The story goes that as the Ottoman Empire was being slowly disemboweled throughout the late 19th century, an Ottoman nobleman, seeing the rise of Serbia, refused to give his land to the Serbs. You have to realize that Serbia had gained it's independence in the 1830's, and was officially recognized in 1865. The rebellion was over taxes, which were given to noblemen like the one mentioned. The Serbs were the serfs working the agricultural, pre-Industrial plantation economy of the Balkans. I think he had some definite foresight on what was going to happen to his land upon his death. He instead gifted it to Austria-Hungary, which annexed Bosnia in 1908. The town grew up governed by Bosnia, which in the two Yugoslavias both royalist and Communist worked fine because it was an internal issue. However, upon the violent dissolution of the Communist Yugoslavia, the new post-war international boundaries made this difficult. While still being a part of Bosnia, the Yugoslav utilities infrastructure tied it to the local Serbian power plant. This has made it difficult for Bosnia to retain sovereignty.

If you want, you can trace the development of this land through the maps below. The first one is the excellent military surveys of Austria-Hungary hosted by the website mapire.eu.