Bosnia and Herzegovina was one of the Balkan regions that was part of the Yugoslavian confederation [Page 153]during the Soviet era. As a nation holding a distinct ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity, the population of Bosnia has embraced three main religious traditions through the centuries: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Islam. They are the pre-Slavic indigenous Balkan people, and Paleo-Illyrian, later (in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE) mixed with Slavonic tribes. Bosnia is a region in which religion has historically played a discreet role, restricted largely to the private domain. The fact that the neighboring countries have promoted religion as the key factor of their national identities is perhaps crucial to their earlier respective national awakenings. For several centuries Bosnia was known as refugium hereticorum (“the ...