A provincial territory or administrative district, especially in Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian history, ruled by a governor called a ban.
From Ottoman Turkish and South Slavic languages, derived from ban (provincial governor or title of nobility). The Banat of Temeswar was a famous historical region in what is now Romania, Hungary, and Serbia.
The Banat was so diverse—Muslims, Christians, Jews, Serbs, Hungarians, and Germans all lived there—that it became a tiny model of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's multicultural chaos!
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