The Croatian society is still coping with traumatizing events (World War II and civil war) and memories of them. The politics of memory, articulated by Tudjman´s strategy of generational and memory reconciliation of the society in the early 1990s, led to the relativization and even promotion of the pro-fascist Ustashe regime, and simultaneously to the marginalization and stigmatization of narratives relating to the role of national liberation struggle within multi-ethnic partisan movement. This also included members of local Czech minority. The study shows how - despite this - the narratives concerning the partisan resistance are still alive in family memory, and they form, through generational transmission, a value alternative to the contemporary nationally-oriented state ideology as well as to the cultural presentation of Czech minority. Family memory works as an autonomous ”intimate space/area” of expatriates in Croatia, which is based on searching for a generational value continuities in the period of post-communist social uncertainties.
The text serves as an example of the multi-sited ethnography within the frame of the migration processes from Central Europe to the Balcans throughout the nineteenth century. It focused on the settlement Clopodia (in Czech, Klopotín) in Rumanian Banat, settled in the middle of the nineteenth century by numerous population from the Czech Lands.
The study is based on the thesis that the members of Czech communities abroad who left their country before the period of the „National Awakening“ imbibed the national idea thanks to the „assistance to fellow countrymen“ in the interwar period. This was motivated by the effort to „save“ the communities of fellow countrymen from being assimilated into the majorite society of South-Eastern Europe. The following article aims to apply constructivist approach to nation into the study of the phenomenon of fellow countrymen. Ethnicity only comes to the foreground of the organizing criteria of these collective entities after the arrival of assistants. The first part of the study presents the organizing mechanism of sending the assistants on the example of the Bulgarian community Gorna Mitropolia. The other part represents an effort to conceptualize in a broader way the constructivist approach. The communication network of the state and the foreign out-migration therefore rested on the mission-evangelizing basis. The communities involved accepted, besides the already existing territorial and linguistic identification, also another aspect of the collective identity – the identification with the shared past. Only after the application of the „ethnic diction“ that stressed the common origin we can consider the Protestant groups abroad as ethnic communities of Czech fellow countrymen.