ABSTRACT
The new South Slav kingdom attempted to bring together a population with a shared experience of death, disease, and privation, but had come to loathe and fear each other during the war. What looked like a victory in 1918 for the Serb Orthodox peoples also looked like a defeat for those Catholics and Muslims in Hercegovina who had so wholeheartedly supported the Habsburg war effort. Natives who had emigrated years earlier began to establish contact with Trebinje again. The monastery at Tvrdoš was a picturesque ruin before the First World War, but its restoration was financed by American Nikola Runjevac in 1928, who had left his home village of Poljice years earlier. Others also made the journey home. Jovo Krstovich had left for Gary, Indiana in 1903. In 1907, he had founded a grocery shop with Mato Chuck, John Wuletich, and Theodore Komenich, and was active in the Sokol Lodge and Sloboda Society, but went back to Trebinje in 1921 to get married. 1 The Serb Orthodox population asserted its presence and newfound hegemony. New research, with distinct paradigm shifts, was undertaken, while the Landesmuseum/Zemaljski muzej in Sarajevo was newly led by Serb Orthodox directors. Milenko Filipović began his fieldwork in the 1920s around Popovo polje, extending some of the research interests of Vejsil Ćurčić. Jovan Dučić, born in Trebinje but for so long absent, served as a Yugoslavian diplomat before moving to the United States. A statue of the Montenegrin poet and ruler Petar II Petrović Njegoš by the Split-born sculptor Toma Rosandić was erected in 1934 in the center of Trebinje, under the auspices of Dučić and at his expense. The Petrović dynasty had had an enormous role in shaping both local and national consciousness before 1914, but by this time Trebinje was part of the banovina of Zeta, which included Nevesinje, Dubrovnik, Novi Pazar, and Kotor, with its capital in Cetinje. 2 Four years later in 1938, Dučić returned to his hometown to celebrate the opening of a new gymnasium and the unveiling of a striking memorial to commemorate the victims of the First World War, which he called “a symbol of the past and of the martyrdom of this land.” 3 It depicted an angel of peace and now stands among the plane trees in the market square.
