COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

Emil Filla was a Czech cubist painter, graphic designer and sculptor. He was influenced by the work of Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. He was a member of the Osm (Eight) group, who he exhibited with in 1907 and 1908. From 1909 he was a member of the Mánes Association of Artists. Before the First World War he travelled to Paris and spent the war in the Netherlands. During the interwar period he was one of the most important representatives of the Czechoslovak avant-garde. He spent the Second World War in German concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald. After the Second World War he worked as a lecturer at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague.

Olivija Fištrović was born in the village of Reka near Koprivnica in 1931. She is the daughter of Ustasha soldier Stjepan Fištrović, who, along with his son, left Croatia and settled in Peru at the end of World War II. Olivija remained with her mother in their homeland. She studied medicine, and occasionally worked for a publishing company. After receiving permission to visit a book fair in Greece on the behalf of the publishing company, she legally left Yugoslavia in the mid-1950s. For several years she lived with her father and brother in Peru, and then went to the United States and settled in Chicago, where she still lives today. She has been variously employed in her life, among other things as a librarian at the St. Mary Hospital, developing a love for books that is best reflected in her library, most of which she donated to the Fran Galović Library and Reading Room in Koprivnica.

Frane Franić, archbishop of Split and theologian, was born on December 29, 1912 in Kaštel Kambelovac, not far from Split, where he attended primary school (1919-1923). Then he went to Split, where he was educated first in the public, and then diocesan classical gymnasium (1923-1931). His theological-philosophical views were formed at the theological college in the central theological seminary in Split (1931-1937). He was ordained a priest in 1936, and thereafter he went to Rome   to study dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, obtaining the title of Ph.D. in theology in 1941. After returning to Split at the beginning of the Second World War, he accepted numerous duties in the area of pastoral care and education. He served as a chaplain in the Sveti Rok Prison in Split, where he also worked as a professor at the public and diocesan gymnasium. After the war, he began to preside over the Central Theological Seminary of his diocese (1945-1956).

Franić was ordained a bishop in 1950, when he became auxiliary bishop and general vicar of the Archbishop of Split, Klement Kvirin Bonefačić. After the death Archbishop Bonefačić in 1954, the Holy See appointed him the apostolic administrator of the Split-Makarska Diocese, so he became the official bishop of the diocese of Split-Makarska only in 1960. His appointment to the bishop’s see was welcomed by the Communist Party in Split, because Archbishop Franić, as a prison chaplain, had in various ways aided the detained communists during the Italian occupation of Dalmatia and Split. However, as soon as Franić's agitation against clerical associations acting under a governmental initiative arose, without any connection with the ecclesiastical hierarchy, a lawsuit was filed against his diocese. In that trial in 1956, which was a precedent throughout Croatia and Yugoslavia, the communist authorities forcibly banned the operation of the bishop's seminary and its educational institutions. Apart from the seminary buildings and its school facilities, such as the archdiocesan boy's seminary, the authorities even nationalized Franić's palace. From that point forward, as Kovačić says, Franić lived in a small flat which had been under regime surveillance that entire time. At the same time, Franić began to publish the ‘Official Bulletin of the Split-Makarska Diocese’ with a Cyclostyle copier, in which he published texts in which he criticized the possibility that any members of his clergy could be found in clerical associations under state control. Because of this, the authorities seized the first issue of this journal.

In Franić's time, more precisely in 1969, his diocese was elevated to an archdiocese by a papal bull issued by Pope Paul VI. Franić headed his own archdiocese until 1988, when he withdrew from active service. In that period, he was vice-president of the Conference of Bishops of Yugoslavia. As a Split bishop, he was very active in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) by participating in the emergence of two significant dogmatic constitutions, the Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium. Interestingly, he insisted on the expression Ecclesia militans in the parliamentary commissions to point out the combative character of the Churches in Eastern of Europe under communism. Franić's speech in defence of that statement was held at the conclave meeting on October 2, 1963, when he emphasized that "the Church cannot offend any reasonable man in the world with that expression Ecclesia militans, not even Marx himself" (Moro 2007: 149).

Later he participated in the work of numerous episcopal synods in the Vatican in the 1970s and 1980s, and became a member of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Noteworthy among Franic's works are the two editions Putovi dijaloga (The Ways of Dialogue, Split 1973, reprinted in 2000), which describe the attempts at dialogue with the communist regime and its intellectual class. His work as a bishop during the socialist period is documented by the collection of texts Bit ćete mi svjedoci (You Shall Be My Witnesses, Split, 1996), while his recollections of the Second Vatican Council are recorded in the book Crkva, stup istine – sjećanja na moje doktrinalne aktivnosti na Drugom vatikanskom saboru (The Church, Pillar of Truth - Memories of My Doctrinal Activities at the Second Vatican Council II, Split, 1998). He died in Split on March 17, 2007 at the age of 95.

Kurts Fridrihsons (1911-1991) was a Latvian painter, a personality venerated for artistic quality and intellectual independence of his work. Before the WWII he spent some time in Paris, where he made friends in artistic circles, among them with writer André Gide and painter André Derraine. K. Fridrihsons and a group of his friends in Riga in autumn 1945 initiated  informal meetings, a kind of the literary salon, on Mondays to discuss literature and art. These meetings continued until approximately mid-1946. In January 1951 13 people were arrested and sentenced from 7 to 25 years in Gulag, among other indictments they were accused of establishment and participation in the above-mentioned meetings named by čekists as "reactionary anti-Soviet group". K. Fridrihsons was sentenced to 25 years. K. Fridrihsons spent his imprisonment in 1951-1956 in Gulag camps in Omsk oblast. Here he made friends with his co-inmates of artistic and intellectual background, such as Russian Nikolai Gumilev, Lithuanians Antanas Kučingis and Vincas Steponavičius. He used all possibilities to elaborate his professional skills and to maintain his intellectual integrity. He asked his wife to send materials for drawing and painting in water color. It has been told that he made a lot of portraits of his inmates in a post-card format that they sent home instead of photographs. And he made 3,5 thousand water color paintings. 1474 of them in 2003 and 2006 were donated to the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia by his heirs Gundega Repše and Jānis Spalviņš. Fridrihsons' water color paintings in part were inspired by environments of the camp, but the most part of them reflect associations created by literature and drama, his images about Middle East, Native Americans, Scandinavia, memories about France and Latvia.  After his return to Riga K. Fridrihsons was largely ignored by Soviet Latvian art authorities, he had his first personal exhibition only in 1969. But he was always in center of intellectual life in Latvia, and he had quite considerable informal intellectual influence.