The Habsburg Garrison Complex in Trebinje

Cathie Carmichael is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

This is the story of the Habsburg Garrison at Trebinje in peace and war. Habsburg power was imposed upon Ottoman Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878. Although the Trebinje citadel surrendered, there was resistance elsewhere. A new garrison was constructed, rapidly transforming Trebinje into a tree-lined city dominated by the army. In 1882, local guerrillas, mostly Orthodox, targeted the regimes's vulnerabilities but were rapidly defeated. Hospitals, cisterns, schools, roads, and railways were then built and educated soldiers produced new work on botany, geology, or archaeology in their spare time. There were peaceful years, but the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand led to more persecution of the Orthodox. Border villages were burnt, people executed in public or deported to camps. Slowly the infrastructure failed, partly because shepherds had been attacked; food shortagesand news of military defeats left the Habsburg population beleaguered and they left rapidly at the end of 1918.