Authors

Maciej Czerwinski ¹;  ¹ Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland

Discussion

In the introduction to the monograph Croatica. A Croatian Contribution to the World Heritage (Zagreb 2007), the editor of this two-volume popular monograph, Neven Budak, asks the following question : “Can we count into our national culture works created by Serbs, Italians, Jews, Germans and Czechs?”. This entails a more profound dilemma: is the Croatian culture a ‘national culture’ or rather a ‘culture of space’? Budak’s position, a medieval historian himself, is clear: Croatian culture inherits (or absorbs) both pre-Slavic cultural strata (Illyrian, Greek, Roman) and everything that has been connected to the Croatian lands. Thus, Diocletian’s Palace, as well as Nikola Tesla (ethnically Serb from Croatia) are taken as parts of the Croatian culture. But this vision is not exclusivist; as Budak states: “what is ours, can be also considered someone’s else”. Croatica is taken as a point of departure to deal with some dilemmas arising when Croatian national heritage is conceptualized in the Croatian cultural sphere and scholarship (strategies of including/excluding). Furthermore, I will provide Serbian counter-discourses in which such strategies of inclusion are brought into question. I will, in more detail, deal with concrete controversial instances (taken as ‘lieux de memoire’), as in the case of Nikola Tesla. Recently, there was a dispute between Croatian and Serbian politicians over his ‘real’ origins.