Names
The name Metohija derives from the Greek word μετόχια (metókhia), meaning "monastic estates" – a reference to the large number of villages and estates in the region that were owned by the Serbian Orthodox monasteries and Mount Athos during the Middle Ages.
In Albanian the area is called Rrafshi i Dukagjinit and means the plateau of Dukagjin, as the toponym took the name of the Dukagjini family, the governing family of the region, starting at least from the 13th century.
The term "Kosovo i Metohija" was in official use of the province until 1974, when the constitutional status of Kosovo underwent major changes in a newly established constitution for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The 1974 constitution dropped the term "Metohija" and "Kosovo" became the official term for the province as a whole. The change was not accepted in Serbia, where the old name continued to be in use (for example in the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1986). In 1989, the then Serbian President Slobodan Milošević promulgated a new constitution for Serbia that greatly reduced the province's autonomy and restored the old name, thus symbolically undoing the earlier reforms.
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Famous quotes containing the word names:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)