A župa (or zhupa, županija) is a historical type of administrative division in Southeast Europe and Central Europe, that originated in medieval South Slavic culture, commonly translated as "parish", later synonymous "kotar", commonly translated as "county". It was mentioned for the first time in the eighth century. It was initially used by the South and West Slavs, denoting various territorial units of which the leader was the župan. In modern Serbo Croatian and Slovenian, the term župa also means an ecclesiastical parish, while term županija is used in Bosnia and Croatia (in Bosnia also kanton as synonymous) for lower state organizational units.
Etymology
The word župa or (Slovak and Czech: župa; Polish: żupa; Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian: жупа; adopted into and rendered in Greek as ζουπανία (, "land ruled by a župan")), 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 župan. Some scholars consider the word's older meaning was "open area in the valley". This interpretation is confirmed by the Bulgarian župa (tomb), Polish zupa and Ukrainian župa (salt mine), and Old Slavonic župište (tomb). As such, the Proto-Slavic *župa wouldn't derive from (with meaning "bend, distort"), yet from Indo-European meaning "cavity, pit", which derives from Nostratic *gopa meaning "hollow, empty". However, Albert Bruckner suggested the opposite evolution; župa as a back formation from title župan (for the etymology see corresponding article), which is a borrowing from Iranian languages (*fsu-pāna, "shepherd").
Usage
The division had a widespread distribution and did not always had a concrete institutional definition. The term župa 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 župa, and its leader was the župan.
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 županija and župa 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 župan).
Bosnia
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, župa was basic unit of the state organization, with feudal estate at the bottom, followed by village municipality, both below župa, and zemlja above it, with the state monarch at the top. During the 15th century, disappearance of the old organization based on župas is observed. It is obvious that at some point the Bosnian largest landowning barons no longer needed them in its old organizational capacity.
Croatia
The Croatian word župa signifies both a secular unit (county) and a religious unit (parish), ruled over by a "župan" (count) and "župnik" (parish priest).
Croatian medieval state was divided into eleven ζουπανίας (zoupanias; župas), and the ban ruled over additional three župas Krbava, Lika, and Gacka).
Today the term županija is the name for the Croatian regional government, the counties of Croatia. Mayors of counties hold the title of župan (pl. župani), which is usually translated as "county prefect". In the 19th century, the counties of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia were called županija. The Croats preserved the term župa 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 župnik.