"Obscure Figures"

Those who categorized the historical Croatians honored on Croatian currency as "rather obscure political figures or poets whose fame never extended beyond Croatia," raised an interesting point. Why would any country select portraits for their banknotes based upon the person's fame outside the country? If that criterion had been used, Croatia's banknotes would have predominately pictured tennis and basketball players.

It is unlikely that many people outside the United States know who is depicted on the U.S. ten dollar note. In fact, it is unlikely that the average American can correctly identify the role of Alexander Hamilton in American history. The same might be said of some Croatians about those pictured on their currency. However, the portraits on Croatia's kuna notes depict some of Croatia's greatest historical figures.

The portraits of the Ban Petar Zrinski and Duke Fran Krsto Frankopan appeared on the five kuna note. The Croatian noblemen were leaders of a failed revolution against the Habsburgs and were beheaded on April 30, 1671. The Zrinski family was subsequently wiped out and their lands were seized. Petar Zrinski's last letter to his wife (Moje Drago Zercze), the sister of Frankopan, was written on the evening of Apri1 29, 1671. It was one of the most deeply moving texts ever composed and was immediately translated from Croatian into all major European languages and published around the Western world. The first English translation was produced in London in 1672. The opera about the Zrinski family and the defense of Szeged in 1566, titled Nikola Subic Zrinski, written by Ivan Zajc in 1876, is the most famous and revered opera of the Croatian nation. It has been performed around the world by Croatian, German, and Hungarian casts including the Munich Choirs which toured North America under the sponsorship of the Government of Ontario.

The ten kuna nute depicted Juraj Dobrila (1812`1882), a famed Croatian Bishop who championed the Croatian language and culture over those of Austria, Hungary, and Italy. The twenty kuna portrayed Ban Josip Jelacic (1801-1859), the military hero of the revolution of 1848 who saved Vienna. He also abolished tenant farming ("share cropping") seventeen years before slavery was outlawed in the United States. His equestrian statue, banished by the communists as a rallying point for independence, was restored in 1991 as the centerpiece of Zagreb's main square which bears his name.

Ivan Gundulic (1589-1638), the greatest Croatian poet of the 17th century was depicted on the fifty kuna note. A citizen of the city-state of Dubrovnik, Gundulic was famed for his love poems, mythological plays, and for his translation of king David's Psalms of Repentance. His play Dubravka and specifically the poem Suze sina razmet noga ( Tears of the Prodigal Son), and his unfinished epic Osman are ranked among the most important works in all of Croatian literature.

The one hundred kuna note honored Ivan Mazuranic (1814-1890), the first non-noble to be selected as Ban of Croatia. He formed the Independent National Party which sought a compromise with Vienna to fashion a federal model for Croatia's autonomy within the Empire. The two hundred kuna note featured Stjepan Radic (1871-1928), the pacifist leader of the Croatian Peasant Party who was the most revered Croatian leader of the twentieth century. He was jailed by both the Hungarians and the Royalist Yugoslav governments before being assassinated by a Serbian gunman on the floor of Parliament in 1928.

Pictured on the five hundred kuna note was Marko Marulic (1430-1524), the greatest Croatian poet of the 15th and 16th centuries. Croatian historiography was born with his 16th century Latin translation of a 12th century chronicle of the Croatian people. It was Marulic's epic poem Judith, first published in 1521 and translated into virtually every European language, for which this son of the city of Split is most famous. However, another lesser known work may have influenced the world far more. The book, De institutione bene vivendi per exempla Sanctorum (Venice, 1506) held up the lives of the saints as an example for those who wanted to live a life of virtue. When the great Jesuit missionary and explorer Saint Francis Xavier left Rome in 1540 on his epic journey to India and to Japan in 1549, he took with him only his own prayer book and Marulic's De institutione.

Marulic was truly a Renaissance man and as such wrote most of his work in Latin, but he was the iirst leading writer to also use the Croatian language and to urge other scholars to do so. Upon his death in 1524, he was known throughout Europe, and his fame would continue for centuries beyond.

Finally, the one thousand kuna note featured Ante Starcevic ( 1823-1896), the "father of his country." Starcevic sought complete independence of a united Croatia within the framework of the Habsburg Empire. He rejected the notion that Croatia had anything to do with Austria and Hungary other than a shared monarch and founded the Party of (Croatian State) Right. That party was the first truly national party for Croatian independence.

Non-fascist currencies

Perhaps the greatest irony surrounding the entire issue of the Croatian kuna as a "fascist currency" was that few in the media mentioned the mark, the lira, or the yen; the three basic currencies of fascism. In some way these currencies, along with the French franc and a dozen others that were used by collaborationist regimes, were able to shed their fascist links even though the lira and the mark were not universally used in Italy or Germany until the late 19th century.

Also unnoticed was the Serbian dinar which proudly displayed the same coat of arms used by the proAxis Nedic regime. The arms used on the bank notes of Serbia ("Yugoslavia"), occupied Croatia, and occupied Bosnia in the 1990s were identical to those used by the Nazi regime of the 1940s.

Finally, no fascist finder pointed out the single coin in the world in current use that bore the most fascist of Fascist symbols. The symbol of a fasces in the clutches of an eagle with open rounded wings was the personal insignia of Benito Mussolini, the founder of Fascism. It was on his personal flag, on the left sleeve, on the hat of each of his many uniforms, and on Fascist coinage. Few photographs of Mussolini can be found without this insignia. While a Croatian Kuna coin does bear the likeness of a bird, a nightingale, the coin which still carried this symbol of true Fascism, was circulated by the millions and was known to every journalist in the United States. The offending coin, almost identical to the Fascist coinage of the 1930s, was the United States twenty-five cent piece known as a "quarter." Fascist finding, it seemed, was a very selective business.

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