Burgenland Croats

Burgenland Croats (Croatian: Gradišćanski Hrvati, German: Burgenlandkroaten, Hungarian: Burgenlandi horvátok, Slovak: Gradiščanskí Chorváti) is the name for ethnic Croats in the Austrian state of Burgenland and neighboring regions of Hungary and Slovakia.

There are around 120,000 Croats that live in Austria. 27,000 to 30,000 of them are Burgenland Croats. Another 56,785 out of them had Croatian citizenship.

Since 1993 Croatian organizations are appointing their representatives to the Council for National Minorities of the Austrian government.

Burgenland Croats began to emigrate from Lika, Krbava, Kordun, Banovina, Moslavina, Western Bosnia and Gorski Kotar, areas that were occupied by the Turks, in the 16th century during the Turkish wars (1533-1584). Refugee Croats were given land and independent ecclesiastic rights by the Austrian King Ferdinand I because many of their villages had been pillaged by the Turks. This gave the Croats a safe place to live while providing Austria with a buffer zone between Vienna and the Ottoman Empire to the south and east.

The first wave of emigration came in the 1530s after the Turks destroyed almost all the settlements between the river Una and the mountain Velebit, and the river Kupa and the mountain range Kapela. In the second wave of emigration in the 1540s many Croats left Slavonia. The third and last wave of emigration, came in the 1750s and 1760s.

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