Croatian Language Loses Great Defender

The word of Slavic scholars has lost one of its leading lights with the death of Branko Franolic, aged 86, in London. A Croat to his fingertips, Franolic was destined to spend most of his long life far from his homeland, in England, France, Canada and elsewhere.

In his latter years, Franolic was a familiar figure in London’s British Library, poring over manuscripts, looking especially delighted whenever he came across some treatise by a long-forgotten Croatian poet in the Renaissance, or a hitherto little known medieval Glagolitic text.

Franolic’s acute sense of his Croatian nationality was not forged in the Serb-dominated kingdom of Yugoslavia but in Fascist Italy. He was born in Rijeka in 1925, when it was very much Fiume, and his earliest memories were of the forced Italianisation of the city and of the rest of Istria.

This programme stepped up several gears after Mussolini assumed dictatorial power in Rome, and as a child, he remembered the beatings and jail sentences given out to Croats merely for the crime of listening to Yugoslav radio stations and speaking Croatian in public.

To the end of his life he retained his Mussolini-era passport, which rendered his name, as the law then obliged, into Italian form.

After the family moved to Zagreb, Franolic spent the later part of his youth in the turbulent and violent atmosphere of the Croatia of the 1940s. An instinctive non-conformist, with relatives on the political left, he was briefly hauled off to jail by Croatia’s new Fascist Ustashe government, which had taken power in 1941.  

Franolic was not formally charged and was released from Zagreb’s Savka Cesta jail. He never forgot the chilling sound of Partisan prisoners being taken away from their cells in Savka Cesta for execution.

Franolic stayed in Zagreb after the Communist takeover in 1945 but eventually decided the harsh one-party system was not for him.

The then strongly anti-Western outlook of the ruling Communists was also totally at variance with his own abiding commitment to investigating and fostering the cultural links that bound Croatia to the world of the Mediterranean, France and England.

In later years he recalled with distaste the bullying atmosphere that prevailed in Zagreb University at the time, and what he saw as the terrorism of students who came from the “wrong” background. “Get out while you can,” he remembered his father telling him, and he did, in 1952, when he won a scholarship to Britain. He never came back.

The following decades saw him studying and teaching in a variety of universities in Britain, Europe and the Americas. Life abroad, especially in Paris and in Strasbourg, afforded him many opportunities to meet important Yugoslav exiles such the former Ban (viceroy) of Croatia, Ivan Subasic and the sculptor Ivan Mestrovic, not to mention leading contemporary French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But Franolic enjoyed meeting a great many people beyond the world of politics and philosophy, such as the film star Brigitte Bardot, among others.

Politically, he never joined any party but was probably closest to the Peasants Party, which had retained its existence outside Yugoslavia after the war, and he was a long-time friend to the party’s London-based leader, Juraj Krnjevic.

A pronounced non-Communist, he was nevertheless sympathetic to some of the more national, less dogmatic, members of the then ruling League of Communists, such as the post-war mayor of Zagreb, Veceslav Holjevac, Dragutin Haramija and Savka Dabcevic-Kucar.

Although Franolic met a lot of politicians, politics was never an overriding interest. His real love was reserved for the Croatian language and Croatian culture in general.

The history and development of the language, the story of Glagolitic – and the stories of the other languages in Croatia, such as the lost Romance languages of Dalmatia – were his passion. His best-known book on the subject, A Short History of Literary Croatian, remains a small gem.

Unlike so many Croatian émigrés, Franolic was not much drawn to the Catholic Church. He was only really interested in it as historic cultural force.

Indeed, he took a particular interest in the literary output of the small band of Croatian Protestants who fled to Lutheran Tubingen in Germany in the 16th century and whose contribution to Croatian literature he felt had been neglected.

After the collapse of the one-party system in 1989, Franolic returned more frequently to Croatia, renewing acquaintances and making new ones. For post-independence Croatia, Franolic had mixed feelings.

Like many people who spend most of their lives outside their own country, he perhaps had idealistic expectations of a cultural flowering after independence, and was disappointed to encounter a new generation that he felt had little knowledge of, or interest in, the specifics of their own language and culture.

If the rough and tumble of modern Croatian politics left him frankly bored, certain places never lost their attraction. He returned again and again to the island of Hvar and to the surroundings of Dubrovnik, places steeped in the history of which he was so familiar.

In 1996, the Croatian oil company INA awarded him for his work on behalf of the Croatian language. He became a member of the Croatian Academy of Science and Art in 1994. He is survived by his widow, Betty and their two children.