Župa

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. The word župa or zhupa (Slovakian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian: жупа; adopted into ispán and rendered in Greek as ζουπανία (zoupania, "land ruled by a župan")), is derived from Slavic. Its medieval Latin equivalent was comitatus. 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"). 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.