“We have our Bosnian name, and everyone knows who’s who.” On the importance of knowing one’s Bosnian family name: the case of the Bosniak muhajirs in Turkey
Prof. dr. Tone Bringa
Sažetak: For the descendants of the Bosniaks who emigrated to Anatolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Hercegovina raised their interest in learning about
their village or town of origin and finding long lost kin who had stayed behind in their ancestral land. Their hereditary Bosnian surname was a key connector to place and kin. However, as part of the Turkification policies of the young Turkish Republic, a family name law was introduced in 1934 that required all citizens to adopt Turkish hereditary family names. This meant that Bosniaks who had settled in Turkey had to change their surnames. In this context, knowing one’s Bosnian family name became valuable knowledge beyond the community of
Bosniak settled villages. In this chapter, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork among Bosnian speakers in rural, Western Turkey and discuss the introduction of the surname law and how it affected Bosniak muhajirs. It is argued that for the Bosniak Turks to know their original, Bosnian, family name was important both to maintaining Bosnian cultural practices and a shared Bosniak identity, and from the 1990s to (re)establish relationships with Bosniaks in the Bosnian homeland.