The list was originally posted in February 2012, but was most recently edited in March 2016.
The main problem with the list is that it cites several people who are not Croatian. In fact, out of the first 16 names on the list, only half of them are Croatian. Furthermore, the inclusion of some of these names are patently absurd and even offensive.
Take for example the inclusion of Mario Andretti, an Italian born in what was then the Kingdom of Italy, whose family was forced into exile from their homeland of Istria following an ethnic cleansing against ethnic Italians by the Yugoslavs at the end of World War II. How could such a man possibly be defined as “Croatian”, let alone “make Croatia proud”?
If anything, Croatia should be ashamed at the way in which Croats treated the indigenous Italian population of Istria and Dalmatia, including Mario Andretti and his family. Genocide and expulsion of ethnic Italians from their historical homeland is nothing to be proud of.
It is completely absurd and dishonest, not to mention highly insulting and offensive, for the Croats to persecute an ethnic group, expel that ethnic group from their own land, occupy their territory, and then, a few decades later, claim the members of that same ethnic group as part of the Croatian nation, merely to bolster Croatia's list of supposed “accomplishments”!
Instead of “making Croatia proud”, this list should make Croatia blush with shame, because it is yet another example of how Croatia is a country which has fostered and continues to foster a gross historical revisionism among the masses of its citizens, and continues to perpetuate a mentality which has frequently led to wars and genocide in the Balkans.
Among the first 16 men cited on this list, we find names such as Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, Marco Polo, St. Marinus and Nikola Tesla, whose names are all written, unsurprisingly, in their falsified Croatian forms.
Non-Croats That Make Croatia Proud: Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich
The first non-Croat to appear on the list is Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, an Italian Jesuit scientist who was born in Ragusa to an Italian mother and a Bosnian immigrant father. His name is falsely written on the list as Rudjer Boskovic, a neologism frequently used by Croats. In reality his birth name was Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich; he was named after his Italian uncle and godfather Ruggiero Bettera. Boscovich was born and raised in an Italian cultural environment in Ragusa; his mother tongue was Italian and he used Italian in his private correspondence; he spent almost his entire life in Italy, self-identified as Dalmatian and Italian, and signed his own name as Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich. He was not Croatian.
Marco Polo: Venetian, Not Croatian
The next non-Croat to appear on the list is the famous Venetian explorer Marco Polo. The list claims that Polo was born on the island of Curzola in 1251. This claim is rejected by all reputable historians, who unanimously maintain that Polo was born in Venice. However, even if he was born in Curzola, this still would not make him a “Croat”. At the time of Marco Polo, Curzola was a Venetian island populated by Italians and Dalmatian-speakers. Until 1900, Italians still comprised more than half of the population of Curzola's main city. The island had no connection to Croatia or Slavdom until it was annexed by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia) in 1921. Marco Polo had nothing to do with Croats or Croatia.
Giorgio Orsini, Not “Juraj Dalmatinac”
Next on the list is Giorgio Orsini da Sebenico, a 15th century Italian sculptor from Dalmatia who has been ridiculously renamed Juraj Dalmatinac by the Croats – a name which did not exist until it was coined by Croatian nationalist writers several decades ago. Giorgio was born into the Orsini family, a noble Italian family of Roman origin. He spent his entire life in Italy and the Venetian cities of Dalmatia. He was not Croatian.
St. Marinus: Roman, Not Croatian
Next is St. Marinus, the famous monk and saint who founded the Republic of San Marino. Born on the island of Arbe to a Roman family in the 3rd century AD, St. Marinus lived and died several centuries before the Croats arrived in this territory. In fact, the first Croats did not begin to settle in Arbe until the 10th century AD, some 600 years after Marinus' death. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the urban center of Arbe remained exclusively Italian-speaking until the early 20th century, and during World War I the population voted unanimously in favour of being united to Italy. It was not until 1921 that Italy was forced to cede the island to Yugoslavia, which led to a persecution and exodus of the ancient Italian population. Only in a fantastically illusory world in which all facts of history are ignored could St. Marinus be called “Croatian”.
Nikola Tesla: Not Croatian
Not at all surprising, the next man on the list is the famous inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla is frequently claimed by the Croats for the mere reason that he was born in a village which is today part of Croatia. While the author of this list admits that Tesla was of Serbian descent, he nonetheless argues that being born in Croatia also makes him a Croat. However, the village in which Tesla was born – Smiljan, in the Austro-Hungarian military district of Krajina – was at the time inhabited by ethnic Vlachs and Serbs. Tesla's father and maternal grandfather were both Serbian Orthodox priests and Tesla himself was raised as a Serb, although there is evidence that his family originally descended from Morlachs or Vlachs, an indigenous Latin population of the Balkans which over the centuries became culturally and linguistically slavicized. One thing however is certain: he was not Croatian.
Fausto Veranzio, Not “Faust Vrancic”
Next we arrive at Fausto Veranzio, a 16th century Italian bishop and polymath from Dalmatia credited with inventing the parachute. The Croats have renamed him Faust Vrancic and cite him as a “Croatian inventor”, despite the fact that he was born to an Italian noble family, with an Italian name, in an Italian city, whose only connection to Croatia is having his birthplace annexed to Croatia three centuries after his death.
Giovanni Biagio Luppis, Not “Ivan Lupis”
Next on this list we find Giovanni Biagio Luppis, an Italian inventor from Fiume, listed under the fake name Ivan Lupis. Giovanni – which was his real birth name – invented the self-propelled torpedo, originally called the Salvacoste (Italian for ‘coast-saver’), which was the first modern torpedo. He was a member of the noble De Lupis family, which originated in Puglia, Italy and settled in Dalmatia in the 13th century, before finally settling in Fiume in the 18th century. His father Ferdineo Carlo Ermenegildo de Luppis was born in Parenzo, Istria. His mother Donna Giovanna Margherita Parich was an Italian noble from Ragusa. He was not Croatian.
David Schwarz: Jewish Inventor, Not Croatian
Next on the list is David Schwarz, a Jewish man from Hungary whose name is clearly not Croatian. The author of the list credits Schwarz with inventing the airship and asserts that the German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin copied the idea from Schwarz. This narrative is highly disputed by historians, who generally recognize that Zeppelin's airship was radically different from the one invented by Schwarz. However, even if it could be proven that Zeppelin indeed copied Schwarz, it would make no difference in regards to Croatia, because Schwarz's parents were Hungarian Jews, not Croats.
Republic of Ragusa: Italian Maritime Republic, Not Slavic
After this, the author discusses national health insurance and credits its establishment to “Dubrovnik”, which is a reference to the Republic of Ragusa, an Italian maritime republic founded by Romans who had escaped the medieval invasions of the Slavs and Avars. Ragusa was an ancient Roman city which inherited its language and culture from Rome, and modeled its institutions on Venice. The official language was Italian; the nobility and representatives were Italian; the names were Italian; and the culture itself was Italian. Slavic was initially spoken only by immigrants and refugees who began to pour into Ragusa's territory following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the 15th century; the Ragusan Senate banned their language in 1472 in a desperate attempt to preserve the Italian character of the country. For a millennium Ragusa belonged to the Latin and Italian cultural sphere and had nothing to do with Croatia or the Slavic world.
Dalmatian Italians Secretly Croats?
Next the author says that many Croatian architects, sculptors and painters had great careers in Venice, and that they “took Italian names and are therefore only known under these names”. The author thus subtly reiterates the Croatian nationalist revisionist claim that all the notable Italian Dalmatian historical figures were secretly “renegade Croats”, despite having Italian names, despite coming from Italian cities, despite being born to Italian parents, and despite speaking the Italian language.
Unfortunately for Croatian revisionists, there will always remain this pesky and inconvenient fact: the fact that, aside from a handful of minor authors who wrote in Slavic dialect, all the illustrious men from Dalmatia – whom the Croats seek to steal for themselves – were born into known Italian families and their names were always recorded in Italian and Latin. The Croatian variants of their names did not exist until the 19th and 20th centuries, when Croatian and Yugoslav authors began to translate and slavicize the Italian names of all historical figures of Istria and Dalmatia, slavicizing not only the names of those few insignificant figures who were known to be ethnic Slavs, but even men who were purely Italian and born into Italian families, who formed the majority of the population in all the Dalmatian coastal cities until the 19th century.
If these men were all truly Croats or Slavs, then such gross historical distortions and intellectual dishonesty would not be necessary.
The 'Adriatic' is a Slavic Sea?
The author then goes on to say that the Adriatic Sea derives its name from Adria, a city located in the region of Veneto, in Italy. That the Adriatic derives its name from the city of Adria is undoubtedly true, and is attested to by the Roman author Pliny the Elder. However, since this list is purported to be about Croatian achievement, the author seems to be implying that Adria has some sort of connection to the Croats or Slavs, which is completely false. The first settlements in the area of Adria were created by the Veneti, an Italic tribe closely related to the Latins. The city itself was founded by the Etruscans, and later it became a Roman colony. The city has no historical link whatsoever to the Croats or Slavs.
Mario Andretti: An Italian Targeted For Genocide
Further down on the list we find Mario Gabriele Andretti, the famous Italian-born racing driver already discussed earlier. As already mentioned, Andretti was born to an Italian family in Montona, Istria, which was then part of the Kingdom of Italy. At the end of World War II, his homeland was occupied and annexed to Communist Yugoslavia (and today it is part of Croatia). Ever since the latter stages of the war ethnic Italians in the region were targeted for ethnic cleansing by the Yugoslavs; many thousands of Italian civilians were slaughtered in the Foibe Massacres, while some 350,000 Italians were forced into exile. The Andretti family was among them: they left Istria in 1948 and ended up in a refugee camp in Lucca, Italy for the next seven years.
In a 2016 interview, Mario Andretti said:
“We were basically refugees in our own country. We were stripped of everything because we sacrificed to maintain Italian citizenship. But nobody understood us because nobody talked about it. The press didn't talk about it, and the government was basically ashamed of it in a sense because of the Geneva pact.”It is truly disgusting, perverse, atrocious and really something to marvel at, that a man who lived in a refugee camp and whose family was targeted by the Yugoslavs due to their Italian national origin, would today be claimed as belonging to the same Slavic people that persecuted him and his family! At this rate, Bobby Sands will be remembered as a “proud Englishman”, alongside that great “Turkish” hero Aeneas and the “Russian” philosopher Immanuel Kant!
Diego Maradona: Italo-Dalmatian Ancestors, Not Croatian
Diego Maradona, an Argentine footballer, was born in Lanús, Argentina. Anyone who has ever seen Maradona would immediately realize that he has a significant amount of Native American ancestry, although he also has Italian ancestry. It is also presumed that he may have Spanish ancestry as well; the surname Maradona is most often a Spanish surname, although some speculate that in this case, Maradona's family surname may derive from Madonna, a surname which is diffused throughout southern Italy. In any case, it is certain that he has both Italian and Native American ancestry. It is the Italian ancestry that interests us here, because this is where the Croats are engaging in monumental fraud, dishonesty and manipulation.
Some of Maradona's Italian ancestors came from Dalmatia. Maradona's maternal great-grandfather, Matteo Carioli (also spelled Cariolichi), was born in Curzola, an island off the Dalmatian coast which was formerly inhabited by Italians, but which today is part of Croatia. In 1994 the journal Studia Croatica, a Croatian-Argentine journal founded by Croatian immigrants, published an article in which they referred to Maradona's great-grandfather Matteo Carioli by the fake name Matej Kariolić, a purely invented name not found in any historical records or birth registers.
The Croatian revisionists also referred to Matteo Carioli's father (Diego Maradona's maternal great-great grandfather, born in Curzola in 1820) as Gašpar Polić, another name which is not found in any birth records. In fact, at that time Croatian diacritics were not invented yet! The letters š and ć did not enter the Croatian alphabet until 1830, ten years after the birth of “Gašpar Polić”. Obviously this could not have been his real birth name, since those letters did not yet exist; but these pesky facts are evidently irrelevant for the revisionists. They further asserted that this non-existent “Gašpar Polić” was a descendant of Marco Polo, the Italian explorer whom they also claim was a “Croat”. A fantastic story with no basis whatsoever in reality.
In this way, the Croatian community in Argentina began to spread the claim that Diego Maradona's Italian Dalmatian ancestors were Croatian. This false claim has now been spread by Croatian revisionists on various Internet sites, such as Wikipedia, EthniCelebs and Geni.
Joseph Haydn: The Austro-German Becomes An Austro-Slav
Another interesting man on the list is Franz Joseph Haydn, the famous Austrian composer. Haydn was born in the village of in Rohrau, in Austria, to Mathias Haydn and Maria Koller. Both were ethnic Germans, as their German surnames and historical records both demonstrate.
Ever since the late 19th century, however, Croatian revisionists have claimed that Haydn was a Croat. The theory originated with Franjo Kuhač, an ethnic German from Slavonia whose birth name was Franz Xaver Koch. He became interested in Croatian folk music and in 1871 he changed his name to Franjo Ksaver Kuhač. After studying Croatian folk music and comparing it to the music of Joseph Haydn, Kuhač arbitrarily concluded without any tangible evidence that Haydn must have been Croatian. Kuhač further claimed, again without any evidence, that the name “Haydn” was of Croatian origin. From that point forward, Haydn has been usurped by Croatian revisionists who, disregarding records and history, still today pretend that the Austrian composer was a Croat.
Nor is this claim limited merely to a nationalist fringe; mainstream Croatian historiography also maintains that Haydn was Croatian. This can be seen in Haydn's biography on the Croatian-language Wikipedia website and in numerous Croatian-language encyclopedias, which assert in no uncertain terms that Haydn was “of Croatian origin”.
The Mythical “Croatian Popes”
The list also claims there were two Croatian popes, without citing any specific names. However, based on other Croatian revisionist websites and common Croatian claims, it can be assumed that the author of this list is most likely referring to Pope John IV and Pope Sixtus V.
Pope John IV was born in Dalmatia in the 6th or 7th century to a Roman family. His father was the Roman advocate Venantius. After witnessing the Avar and Slavic invasions of Istria and Dalmatia in the 7th century, he fled with his father to Italy. In 641 he sent the Roman abbot Martin to Dalmatia to ransom local Christians who were kidnapped, enslaved and held hostage by the invading Slavs. Today he is often considered the “first Croatian pope” by Croats. According to this warped and deranged argument, this Roman who was fleeing from the Slavs was himself a “Slav”, merely because the land in which he was born is today occupied by the descendants of those same Slav invaders whom he was fleeing from.
Pope Sixtus V is universally recognized as an Italian. According to the first and official biography of the pope, written by his secretary Antonio Maria Graziani (1537-1611) and personally edited by Pope Sixtus himself, both parents of the pope were born in the Marche region of Italy (his father being from the village of Montalto; his mother being from the village of Frontillo), and therefore were of Italian origin. Despite Croatian pretenses, he was not Croatian.
Concluding Remarks
All of this once again demonstrates the blind nationalism and extremely low level of scholarship that infects the ex-Yugoslav countries, a situation which is both pitiful and tragic. These distorted claims and historical falsifications so widespread in the Balkans are precisely the kind which foster a mentality and sentiment which has led to numerous wars and genocides in the region in this past century. The perpetuation of this mentality will only lead to further alienation, war and destruction.
See also:
Croatia is Manipulating the History of Dalmatia, Istria and the Quarnero
Croats Using Wikipedia to Rewrite Dalmatian History
Education and Revisionism in the Balkans
German Saints Stolen by the Slovenes
Why do Some Countries Steal History and Heritage from Other Nations?
Italian Literature in Dalmatia: A Falsified History
Croatia Kidnaps Marco Polo
Marco Polo a Croat? A Ridiculous Thesis
So Now Marco Polo Was “Croatian”: Someone Failed Their History Test!
Pope Sixtus V: Another Victim of Slavic Revisionism
The Unfounded “Croatian” Origin of Pope Sixtus V
Ivan Golub Claims Pope Sixtus V was “Croatian”
St. Jerome and Slavic Myth-Making (Revisionism)
The Myth of the “Croatian Renaissance”
Rampant Croatization
