Ethnic and religious structure of Tutin municipality

Abstract

Tutin municipality is settled in southwest Serbia. It is one of Serbian municipality with one dominancy one ethnic group over another - Muslim group in this case. Muslims were dominated over Serbian in Tutin even before The Second World War, but these differences became more distinctly by the end of XX century. The reasons for such situation are numerous: population increase which is bigger among Muslim than among Serbian population, high migration saldo (for the period 1961-1981), emigration processes from villages to only town centre in municipality - Tutin. Ethnic structure on the settlement level is, more or less, the same as on the level of municipality. There are only five out of 93 settlement in the municipality with dominant Serbian population. The other 88 settlement are with absolute dominancy of Muslims. Religious structure follows the course of ethnic structure in Tutin municipality. Muslims are absolutely dominant religious group with 95% of Tutin population, and only 4,31% of population are orthodox Christians. If all these processes continue in the future, there will be absolute dominancy of only one ethnic group by the end of the next decade. On the other side, the area of Raška region is one of the most important geostrategic area in Serbia, and for that reason it would be good to pay more attention to building spirit of tolerance between different ethnic and religious groups.