A à ¾upa, or zhupa, is a historical type of administrative division in Southeast Europe and Central Europe, that originated in medieval South Slavic culture, commonly translated as "county" or "parish". It was mentioned for the first time in the eighth century and was initially used by the South and West Slavs, denoting various territorial units of which the leader was the à ¾upan.
In modern Serbo-Croatian, the term also refers to an ecclesiastical parish, in Slovene likewise for à ¾upnija, while the related à ¾upanija is used in Croatia for lower administrative subdivisions, and likewise by Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina (as a synonym for kanton).
The word à ¾upa or ' (Slovak and Czech: ; Polish: ; Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian: ; adopted into and rendered in Greek as (, "land ruled by a à ¾upan")), is derived from Slavic. Its medieval Latin equivalent was . It is mostly translated into "county" or "district". According to Kmietowicz, it seems that the territorial organization had been created in Polish territories before the Slav Migrations. Some Slavic nations changed its name into "opole", "okolina", "kraj" and "vierw", but it has survived in à ¾upan. Some scholars consider the word's older meaning was "open area in the valley". This interpretation is confirmed by the Bulgarian ("tomb"), Polish and Ukrainian ("salt mine"), and Old Slavonic ("tomb"). As such, the Proto-Slavic wouldn't derive from (with meaning "bend, distort"), yet from Indo-European / meaning "cavity, pit", which derives from Nostratic *gopa meaning "hollow, empty". However, Aleksander Brückner suggested the opposite evolution; à ¾upa as a back formation from title à ¾upan (for the etymology see corresponding article), which is a borrowing from Iranian languages (*fsu-pÃÂna, "shepherd").
The division had a widespread distribution and did not always had a concrete institutional definition. The term à ¾upa was at first the territorial and administrative unit of a tribe but was later only an administrative unit without tribal features. The South Slavs that settled in Roman lands to a certain degree adopted Roman state organization, but retained their own tribal organization. Slavic tribes were divided into fraternities, each including a certain number of families. The territory inhabited by a tribe was a à ¾upa, and its leader was the à ¾upan.
The zhupa (plural zhupi) was an administrative unit in the First Bulgarian Empire, a subdivision of a larger unit called comitatus. In these countries, the equivalent of "county" is "judet" (from Latin judicium). The Croats and the Slovaks used the terms à ¾upanija and à ¾upa for the counties in the Kingdom of Croatia and Kingdom of Hungary. German language translation of the word for those counties was komitat (from Latin comitatus, "countship") during the Middle Ages, but later it was gespanschaft (picking up the span root that previously came from à ¾upan).
Territorial-political organization in medieval Bosnia was intricate, and composed on several levels. In this scheme in the territorial-political organizational order of the medieval Bosnian state, à ¾upa was basic unit of the state organization, with feudal estate at the bottom, followed by village municipality, both below à ¾upa, and zemlja above it, with the state monarch at the top. During the 15th century, disappearance of the old organization based on à ¾upas is observed. It is obvious that at some point the Bosnian largest landowning barons no longer needed them in its old organizational capacity.
The Croatian word à ¾upa signifies both a secular unit (county) and a religious unit (parish), ruled over by a "à ¾upan" (count) and "à ¾upnik" (parish priest).
Croatian medieval state was divided into eleven öÿàÃÂñýïñà(zoupanias; à ¾upas), and the ban ruled over additional three à ¾upas Krbava, Lika, and Gacka).
Today the term à ¾upanija is the name for the Croatian regional government, the counties of Croatia. Mayors of counties hold the title of à ¾upan (pl. à ¾upani), which is usually translated as "county prefect". In the 19th century, the counties of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia were called à ¾upanija. The Croats preserved the term à ¾upa until the modern times as the name for local clerical units, parishes of the Catholic Church and of the Protestant churches. The parish priest is called à ¾upnik.
In c. 1074, the à ¾upa is mentioned in Hungary as -spán, also as határispánságok (march, frontier county). The derivative titles were ispán, nominated by the king for not defined time, and gradually replaced by fà Âispán in the 18-19th century; megyésispán, also nominated by the king but could be expelled anytime; alispán was the leader of the jurisdiction in the county if the 'megyésispán' was not available; várispán was more linked to the "vár" (fortress) in Hungary in the times of ÃÂrpád.
The Serbs in the Early Middle Ages were organized into à ¾upe, a collection of neighboring village communities within a geographically distinctive region (roughly the equivalent of a county), headed by a local à ¾upan (a magistrate or governor). Thus the title of grand à ¾upan (veliki à ¾upan), meant "supreme à ¾upan" of à ¾upans who ruled over à ¾upas, particularly in the Grand Principality of Serbia, from the end of the 11th up to the beginning of the 13th century.
Duà ¡an's Code (1349) named the administrative hierarchy as following: "land(s), city(ies), à ¾upa(s) and krajià ¡te(s)", the à ¾upa(s) and krajià ¡te(s) were one and the same, with the à ¾upa on the border were called krajià ¡te (frontier). The à ¾upa consisted of villages, and their status, rights and obligations were regulated in the constitution. The ruling nobility possessed hereditary allodial estates, which were worked by dependent sebri, the equivalent of Greek paroikoi; peasants owing labour services, formally bound by decree.
Though the territorial unit today is unused, there are a number of traditional à ¾upe in Kosovo, around Prizren: SredaÃÂka à ½upa, SiriniÃÂka à ½upa, Gora, Opolje and Prizrenski Podgor. The Serbian language maintains the word in toponyms, the best known being that of the à ½upa AleksandrovaÃÂka.
The term à ¾upa was popularized in Slovak professional literature in the 19th century as a synonym to contemporary Slovak term stolica (county). After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, it was used as the official name of administrative units of Slovakia within Czechoslovakia in 1919 â 1928 and then again in the Slovak Republic during WWII in 1940âÂÂ1945. Nowadays, the term is used semi-officially as a short alternative name for the self-governing regions of Slovakia. The president of the self-governing region is semi-officially called à ¾upan.
In Slovenia, the mayor of a municipality has the title à ¾upan. The name also survived in the clerical context, as parishes are called à ¾upnija (dual: à ¾upniji, plural: à ¾upnije). Colloquial parishes are also called "fara" (dual: fari, plural: fare). A parish priest is called à ¾upnik (dual: à ¾upnika, plural: à ¾upniki).