The International Congress—which began on 13 June 1878 in Berlin—with the participation of Russia, England, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, Turkey, Iran and the Balkan states, ended with the signing of the Treaty on 13 July 1878. Under this treaty, Austria-Hungary received an occupational mandate over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina was exercised by the joint minister of the treasury, who from 1882 was Beniamin Kallay. In agreement with Count Agenor Gołuchowski, they decided to direct the wave of emigration to Bosnia instead of America, in order in this way to break Serbian unity.
For settlement, areas in the northwestern part of Bosnia within the former Prnjavor district (county) were designated, as well as smaller areas in the neighboring districts—Derwenta, Bosanska Gradiszka, Banja Luka, Donji Micholjac and others. There, Poles established either exclusively Polish villages or farming settlements together with Serbs, Ukrainians and other nationalities. Polish settlement in these counties arose on newly cleared forest land.
Favorable conditions for acquiring land were created for the settlers: forest plots measuring 24 morgs were allotted on condition that 17 morgs of this area be cleared and brought under cultivation. After 10 years, the allotted land became the settlers’ property.
The areas designated for settlement between the Sava, Vrbas and Kozara Massif rivers were largely uninhabited. Among the forests there were only a few scattered settlements of Orthodox Serbs and Muslims, who lived mainly from pastoralism.
These conditions encouraged many agricultural laborers and smallholding peasants from the Austrian partition, as well as families from the Russian partition and Polish families from Bukovina, to settle in Bosnia. From 1890, Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Czechs and Slovaks also began arriving as settlers, with Hungarians and Germans benefiting from privileges in settlement.
Poles settled mainly in Prnjavor County of the Banja Luka District, where a few pioneering Polish families had already settled in earlier periods. They lived here in compact groups, occupying larger areas of forest designated for settlement. Initially, the settlers lived in huts and dugouts under primitive conditions and could rely only on assistance from their neighbors.
The men worked all day felling trees, preparing materials for building homes and livestock quarters, while also preparing the land for growing grain.
Settlement conditions were exceptionally difficult; the settlers had to rely solely on their own strength. They built their homesteads as they had in Poland. These farms differed from the settlements of the local population, which consisted of clusters of small houses belonging to a single family. Polish homesteads and farms were characterized by dispersed buildings on the slopes of hills, and their compounds included barns, which the local population did not build.
The Poles brought a higher agricultural culture to the settlement areas. On manure-fertilized fields, stretches of wheat and rye appeared—crops rarely cultivated by the Serbs. In addition, the settlers fattened pigs in enclosed livestock buildings, an innovation for the local population, which generally raised pigs in open spaces. After the forest was cleared, the land produced larger yields; however, after some time, because of soil exhaustion and especially soil erosion caused by rain and the lack of fertilizer, grain yields were often insufficient to support a family.
The settlers, especially newly married couples, searched for new settlement areas, which were already in short supply in Bosnia. For these reasons, some settlers moved to new areas, particularly in Croatia, for example to Podravina. A difficulty was the higher price of land in those areas. Settlement from Galicia also headed to Croatia. Lacking funds to purchase land there, many settlers took paid work as agricultural laborers on the larger farms of the local population.
In 1901, agents appeared in the settlement areas conducting work among the local immigrant population and promoting favorable settlement conditions in Brazil. This emigration affected a considerable number of Poles and Ruthenians, who took the opportunity to leave for overseas. After 1900, the number of Galician emigrants (Poles and Ruthenians) in Prnjavor County was approximately 15,000, of whom about 4,000 left Bosnia within a short time, emigrating to Brazil.