The Feast of St Blaise celebrated on 3rd February is kept throughout the Catholic Church, with the blessing of throats as an accompaniment, but in Croatia it is, primarily recognised as the feast-day of Dubrovnik’s patron saint. The history of Dubrovnik’s attachment to St Blaise (Sveti Vlaho) is otherwise fascinating, but it is perhaps the continuity, stretching over centuries, that is most historically significant.
Dubrovnik: too bourgeois, too self-confident, potentially disloyal
One might imagine that the Partisans who “liberated” Croatia in 1945 would have been reluctant to encourage the ancient practice. That was, however, far from the case. The reasoning of the Communist authorities provides an instructive insight into the mixture of brutality and subtlety with which the Catholic Church and ancient custom were treated in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
In October 1944 the Partisans arrived. The secret police, OZNA (Odjeljenje za zaštitu naroda – Department for the Protection of the People), came, as elsewhere, with previously prepared lists of those who were to be eliminated. The killings were conducted quickly, either without trial, or with summary justice. In some cases, entirely fictitious proceedings were retrospectively invented and posted on public notices. Those killed on the nights of 25 and 26 October on the island of Daksa, who included the famous Jesuit hymn-composer Father Petar Perica, fall into that category.
Dubrovnik was regarded with deep suspicion by the Party. It was too bourgeois, too old fashioned, too self-confident, potentially disloyal. A letter dated 25 October 1944 from Ante Jurjević “Baja”, Organising secretary of the Regional (Oblast) Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia for Dalmatia, which refers en passant to extra-judicial killings, also observes:
“The people in this city are odd and to some extent incomprehensible, starting with the nobility (gospari) to the common folk. They are full of their own peculiarity, which is very close to that of our enemies, and indeed for those reasons Dubrovnik has become, and will remain unless we purge it and commit our full attention to it, the centre of spies not only for Dubrovnik or the Southern part of Dalmatia but for a large part of Yugoslavia, especially Montenegro, Dalmatia and Herzegovina.”
The authorities in Belgrade clearly thought that OZNA was too lenient in Dubrovnik. In early December 1944, they complained: “Our institutions (organi) are inactive in Dubrovnik, ustaše, četniks i mačekovci do whatever they want. Increase your vigilance there.”
Selective terror and systematic liquidation
OZNA, however, understood that it was possible to practise selective terror and systematic liquidation, without trampling upon local feeling. Accordingly, when advice was sought whether the Feast of St Blaise should go ahead, Nikola Sekulić “Bunko”, undoubtedly reflecting the judgement of Ivan Krajačić “Stevo”, head of the Croatian OZNA, replied on 20 January 1945:
“Allow the Dubrovčani to celebrate the Feast of St Blaise as they have done hitherto. Avoid measures which distance us from the people…We shall hold to account anyone who because of his behaviour weakens the people’s sympathy for the People’s Liberation Struggle (N.O.B Narodnooslobodilačka borba).”
Paradoxically, it was a section of the clergy who opposed conducting the St. Blaise celebration and procession with what the Communist authorities interpreted as a new normality. How much the subsequent accusations against them were well founded, and how much they were an excuse for supporting flimsy charges of hostility to the People (and the Party), it is now impossible to tell. But pressure was clearly placed by some of the clergy upon the acting Bishop of Dubrovnik, Pavao Butorac, to refuse to accommodate the Party’s wishes and cancel the event – pressure which he resisted.
Feast of St Blaise “as though nothing had happened”
Butorac, as subsequent reports from OZNA suradnici (collaborators) testify, was personally hostile to Communism, but he had no faith in the possibility, either inside Yugoslavia or in the international sphere, of resisting it. In the event, the proceedings on the Feast went off quite smoothly, despite some attempts at disruption. Allowing for the political slant, the report from Major Ljubo Krstulović “Šimić”, deputy head of OZNA for the Region of the VIIIth Corps of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOVJ – Narodnooslobodilačka vojska Jugoslavije) of 10 February, can be taken at face value:
“At the time of the celebration of St. Blaise there were no shows, posters, declarations, recitations etc. recalling the People’s Liberation Struggle, nor any of the changes that the Liberation had brought to Dubrovnik. Everything passed as though nothing had happened. The Dubrovčani justify that, the celebration must be in the traditional spirit, without a trace of the new. They insisted that on the special leaflet for the programme there should not be the Star (petokraka) and that the Theatre was not that of the District (okrug), but the City etc.
The Friars, the Franciscans and Dominicans, and the nuns, sabotaged St. Blaise, they tried to get the bishop to do so, but he would not, and he acted according to the traditional Church custom. The celebration was organised by the institutions of our government, and afterwards there erupted commentary from the Reactionaries, to the effect that the Partisans had had to yield, but that it was just tactics. Others said that the Partisans went to the celebration, but they did not want to feed the hungry people, they just wanted to deceive them. They criticised the fact that our army which wore the Star was part of the procession with the symbol of Communism. Apart from that, the enemies of the People’s Liberation Struggle used the celebration to distribute leaflets, they did it three times…
“Nobody has yet spoken with the priests, although everyone maintains that all the hostility in Dubrovnik comes from them”.
The last quoted sentence of the OZNA report gives an indication of what would happen once the public events of the Feast of St. Blaise were out of the way. In Dubrovnik, as elsewhere in Dalmatia, a two-pronged policy was pursued by the Party authorities. On the one hand, a modus vivendi was sought with cooperative senior clergy, whose words and actions were closely monitored by a huge number of informers.
On the other hand, the process of liquidation or, now more frequently imprisonment of the uncooperative priests, mostly in Stara Gradiška, was pursued alongside a sustained focus on elimination of Catholic education and devotion among the laity, especially the young. A description of that process would lead far beyond the scope of this brief reflection on the events of 1945 in Dubrovnik, but some personal details about the victims must suffice.
Martyrdom of Fr. Dominik Barač and Ivo Bjelokošić
Among those arrested and sentenced to death for their participation in the movement to stop the Sveti Vlaho ceremonies going ahead – also for alleged communication with anti-Communist fighters (“škripari”) – was the Dominican priest Dominik Barač. A formidable intellectual, Barač was an inevitable target of Party revenge. His book, Socijalna filozofija boljševizma (The social Philosophy of Bolshevism) was deemed dangerous as a critical dissection of Communism from a Thomist perspective. Barač seems to have been possessed of extraordinary courage and serenity.
He encouraged the devotion of those incarcerated with him, first in Dubrovnik and then in Trogir, until he was led off to be shot. Another Dubrovnik priest there, Father Ivo Bjelokošić, was first tortured, then sentenced to death, but unlike Barač, had his sentence reduced to twenty years’ hard labour which he spent in Stara Gradiška prison. Leaving as a mental and physical wreck in 1957, he returned to his priestly vocation to end his days in 2001 as Rector of the Church of Sveti Vlaho in Dubrovnik.
The above account shows how, in Dubrovnik as elsewhere, the Partisans shamelessly dishonoured article 5 of the Declaration of the Third Session of ZAVNOH (Zemaljsko antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Hrvatske – The Country Antifascist Council of the National Liberation of Croatia) on the Fundamental Rights of the people and citizens of Democratic Croatia, adopted in Topusko on 9 May 1944, which reads:
“To all citizens is guaranteed freedom of religion and freedom of conscience”.
Sveti Vlaho is not the only martyr who should be venerated in Dubrovnik.
Author: Robin Harris, the President of COK and author of Dubrovnik: A History.
Sources and further reading:
– BJELOKOSIĆ, Ivo, Svećenik matični broj St. Grad. 2019. Dubrovnik: Hrvatsko društvo političkih zatvorenika Podružnica Dubrovnik,
2002
– MATKOVIĆ, Blanka; PAŽANIN, Ivan, prir. Zločini i teror u Dalmaciji 1943.-1948. počinjeni od pripadnika NOV, JA, OZN-e i UDB-e. Dokumenti (1. izdanje), Zagreb: 2011, https://znaci.org/00002/410.pdf
– RADICA, Joško, Sve naše Dakse, Hrvatski jug u vrtlogu Drugog svjetskog rata i jugokomunističke strahovlade, Doprinos istini. Dubrovnik: Matica hrvatska Dubrovnik, 2003
– RUPIĆ, Mate; GEIGER, Vladimir, prir. Partizanska i komunistička represija i zločini u Hrvatskoj 1944.-1946. Dokumenti, knjiga 4, Dalmacija. Slavonski Brod: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2005