Medo Pucić


Orsat "Medo" Pucić, was a Ragusan writer and an important member of the Catholic Serb movement.

Biography

Orsat Pucić was born on in Dubrovnik, then in Austrian Empire. He was descended from the House of Pucić, an old noble family of Republic of Ragusa. His brother was Niko Pucić. He attended the lyceum in Venice, where in 1841 he became acquainted with Ján Kollár. Pucić was impressed with his pan-Slavist ideas, and went on to join the Illyrian movement. Pucić's was a member of Serb Catholic movement.
He studied between 1841 and 1843 in the University of Padua, and then from 1843 to 1845 he studied law in Vienna and was a Knight Hospitaller of the Sovereign Order of Saint John.
In 1841, Medo Pucić, a writer from an old Catholic noble family, became acquainted with pan-Slavists Ján Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik, and started to espouse a Serb national sentiment. Pucić lived in the cities of Lucca and Parma between 1846 and 1849, and after that usually in Dubrovnik. Pucić was in active contact with cultural and political circles of Central Croatia, the rest of the Austrian Empire, and different countries of Europe. In March 1848 Pucić threw his lot with Adam Mickiewicz who was in Rome at the time trying to convince Pope Pius IX to endorse a Polish national revolution against the Habsburgs. In 1858 Medo Pucić published the first volume Serbian Documents in Belgrade which consisted of documents written by Rusko Hristoforović of the Serbian Chancellery in Dubrovnik. After 1860 when the political life in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was revived, he took part in the Serbian and Croatian national movements in Dalmatia and the politics in Croatia proper. Pucić as a leader of the conservative faction wedded the theory of the Croatian historical right to the Dalmatia to the convoluted ethno-linguistic arguments originating in early Slavonic studies circles which considered all native Shtokavian speakers as Serbs; later that century the theories about linguistic demarcation of Serbs and Croats, and hence the ethno-historical "ownership" of Dubrovnik and Kotor, had been subsumed in the ideology of Serbo-Croatism, a sort of cover term which considered Croats and Serbs as tribes of a single South Slavic nation. Medo Pucić was a vocal supporter of the unification of all the South-Slavic lands within the Habsburg Monarchy around one nation, called later Yugoslavia.
Pucić's pan-Slavic idea was based on the principle of unification of Croats with the Slavic tradition in Dubrovnik.
In 1868, he moved to Belgrade to become a teacher to the young prince Milan Obrenović IV until he came of age in 1872. He returned to Dubrovnik in 1874, and played an important role in the cultural life of the city in the 1870s. The Serb party had among its supporters in Dubrovnik, alongside Serbs, and some Catholics, who have since declared themselves Serbs of the Catholic faith. The appearance of Dubrovnik Serb Catholics was based on Vuk Karadžić's assumption that all those who spoke Štokavian were Serbs. The first one in Dubrovnik to adopt and exhibit Vuk's idea was poet Medo Pucić, followed by professors of the Dubrovnik Gymnasium, linguists Pero Budmani, Stjepo Castrapelli and Luko Zore. In 1874 when the literary magazine Slovinac, founded by Jovan Sundečić and Vuk Vrčević, needed an editor it Medo Pucić, then president of the Serb-Catholic Circle, who chose Luko Zore for the post. Around the publication gathered were Serb and Croat intellectuals for the next seven years of its existence.

Literary works

Pucić wrote lyrical and epic poems, patriotic lyric poetry, political essays and historical studies. The preferred motive of his work was the history of Dubrovnik and the Republic of Ragusa. He also translated literary works from several European languages into his own Dubrovnik dialect of Serbo-Croatian, which he called Serbian. He translated various Croatian and Serbian works into Italian, which is when he used the name Orsatto Pozza.
Pucić started writing poetry in 1840. He was initially writing romantic lyrics, but later moved towards a more national epic style. Some of his more important works include: