HISTORY OF THE CROATIAN HERITAGE FOUNDATION

The Croatian Heritage Foundation was founded in 1951. The founding assembly of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia, which today bears the name Croatian Heritage Foundation, was held in Zagreb on February 12, 1951.
The attempt to encourage the mass return of emigrants after the war failed infamously in the late 1940s. Abandoning the policy of mass return, the government turned towards an institutional form of cooperation with emigrants, which was conceived to take place through organizations from the different republics, the so-called “matica iseljenika” (heritage foundation) organizations. During the 1950s, in addition to Zagreb, these organizations were established in other republican centers of the SFRY, so that, along with the Heritage Foundation of Croatia, also in existence were the Heritage Foundation of Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

DIVISION OF EMIGRATION

Pursuant to the principles of the Yugoslav regime, the Heritage Foundation of Croatia was tasked with establishing cultural and educational cooperation with organizations of emigrants deriving from the territory of Croatia inclined towards the new Yugoslavia and the communist regime. This position initiated a division of the Croatian diaspora into suitable/friendly and unfit/hostile, which characterized the policies and scope of activities of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia, with slight deviations, until the fall of the communist regime.

Appointed as the first president of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia was Dr. Zlatan Sremec from Gradište near Županja. For the first few years, this institution, which was founded as a “cultural and educational association with the intention of maintaining cultural and friendly ties between emigrants and the homeland”, was mainly engaged in organizing individual visits of cultural organizations from Croatia and visits of emigrant groups, and a certain share of its efforts was dedicated to assisting the return of emigrants. The Heritage Foundation of Croatia developed its publishing activity, and as early as the end of 1951, Matica magazine was launched, which developed into a monthly magazine, and in 1955, it began publishing its annual publication, the Emigrant Calendar.

COOPERATION WITH THE CROATIAN FRATERNAL UNION

Establishing cooperation was easiest for the Heritage Foundation of Croatia with organizations of the older diaspora, i.e., the second and third generation of Croatian immigrants, in the victorious countries of the Second World War that supported the Partisan movement. This included the Croatian Fraternal Union (CFU) in the USA, the Croatian diaspora organization with the largest membership, positioning itself as the Matica’s main partner in its efforts with the diaspora. Their members, American citizens born in the USA, who at that time already spoke Croatian poorly, sought cooperation with the country of their ancestors due to nostalgia for the “Old Country”, primarily through folklore, tamburitza music, tourist visits and concert tours, while skillfully avoiding topics related to ideology and politics. This cooperation intensified as it was mutually beneficial.

The CFU, as well as a number of other diaspora organizations that mostly characterized themselves as Yugoslav or regional (Dalmatian, Istrian…), from both Americas, Australia, New Zealand…, represented the base on which Matica developed its activities at the time. Language, tamburitza and folklore seminars and workshops organized by the Heritage Foundation of Croatia, Emigrant Week celebrations every year and the monthly magazine Matica during the 1950s significantly contributed to the popularization of the Heritage Foundation’s work at home and abroad. “The tours of the Heritage Foundation have become a new form of Yugoslav tourism,” said Vicko Krstulović, President of the Heritage Foundation at the time at a press conference on the occasion of the Emigrant Week in 1962.

The Heritage Foundation also began to establish regional organizations – it had its own district committees, the most active of which were in Pula, Split, Rijeka and Makarska. Starting in 1961, it shifted towards the organization of municipal committees as a more suitable form of work.

BURGENLAND CROATS

In addition to traditional overseas emigration, the Heritage Foundation also established cooperation with a first Croatian minority in the mid-1950s: the Burgenland Croats in Austria. This was possible after the adoption of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, which guaranteed minority rights to Burgenland Croats (and Carinthian Slovenes) even after the ensuing withdrawal of the Soviet army from Eastern Austria and Burgenland. The Heritage Foundation of Croatia brought groups of Burgenland Croat teachers, cultural workers and students to Croatia for language learning.

In the early 1960s, the Heritage Foundation of Croatia partially liberalized its policy in order to expand its activities to as many Croatian emigrants as possible, to stimulate interest in visiting the “Old Country”, and at the same time, to weaken the negative propaganda among the political emigration because “when emigrants see the true state of things here for themselves, they are the best propagators of the truth and, upon returning home, the best interpreters of the Yugoslav reality”. The new extended concept of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia’s work also encompassed, as explicitly stated in the program, the “amnestied emigration”.

The crown of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia’s activities up to that point was the opening of the new Home of Emigrants in Zagreb, an attractive and spacious building partly financed by emigrants, in March 1964. At the same time, the beloved former mayor of Zagreb, Većeslav Holjevac, was appointed as the new President. “The Home of Emigrants in Zagreb is an expression of our love, feelings and gratitude to those who have shown and proven in a foreign world, confirming even today, that they are members of a brave and honorable people”, wrote Matica magazine on the occasion of the opening of the Home of Emigrants. With the construction of the new headquarters of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia, where its offices are located to this day, the technical and spatial prerequisites for the expansion and improvement of activities were satisfied. At that time, the Heritage Foundation of Croatia also strengthened its staff, which then numbered 25.

HOLJEVAC AND TUĐMAN IN THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION OF CROATIA

The Presidency of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia included prominent intellectuals, among whom was the historian Dr. Franjo Tuđman, who first visited our emigrants in the USA in 1966. On the other hand, the monthly magazine Matica, under the editorship of journalist Danilo Čović, experienced its most fruitful period up to that point in terms of design and content. Then, the History Department of the Croatian Heritage Foundation became the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies. In 1967, Većeslav Holjevac published the book Hrvati izvan domovine (Croats Abroad), which, as president of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia, laid the foundation for Matica’s work on promoting a scientific approach to the issue of Croatian emigration and Croatian minorities.

In the second half of the 1960s, the communist regime increasingly criticized certain “nationalist phenomena” in the Heritage Foundation of Croatia. As a result of his fruitful and “excessively” patriotic efforts, Većeslav Holjevac had to leave the Heritage Foundation of Croatia in 1968. After the collapse of the Croatian Spring in 1971 and the repression against the leaders of the Croatian national movement, apathy, fear and the already characteristic “Croatian silence” prevailed in Croatia, including in the Heritage Foundation of Croatia. Numerous participants of the “Croatian Spring” sought refuge abroad.

During the 1970s and 80s, when several presidents were appointed to lead the Heritage Foundation of Croatia: Oleg Mandić (1970 – 1978), Vanja Vranjican (1978 – 1985) and Stjepan Blažeković (1985 – 1990), the Heritage Foundation of Croatia continued its fruitful cooperation with the CFU and its legendary president Bernard Luketich. The crown of the cooperation was the CFU Tamburitza Festivals held in Zagreb in 1976, 1981 and 1986 with the participation of thousands of members of the CFU from the USA and Canada. At that time, the first contacts and cooperation were established with all Croatian minorities, with Molise Croats in Italy, as well as with other Croatian minorities in the Eastern Bloc, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

 “ON TEMPORARY WORK”

The fact that hundreds of thousands of Croats had left the country since the mid-1960s in search of work, who were then, according to official terminology, “temporarily working abroad”, had an impact on the Heritage Foundation of Croatia. For them, the Heritage Foundation of Croatia organized, together with Yugoslav diplomatic and consular missions and “Yugo-clubs”, concert tours of popular singers of folk and pop music. However, this new Croatian diaspora, the popular “gastarbeiters”, was brought together mostly by the Croatian Catholic missions, which appear everywhere where larger Croatian communities are located.

The outbreak of the long-term economic crisis after Tito’s death and the easing of political discipline in the second half of the 1980s announced new opportunities for the Heritage Foundation of Croatia as well. Increasingly, there was public talk and writing about the fact that emigrants and their homeland have a common scientific and artistic interest, that the Croatian written word exists outside the circle of homeland literature and so on. In the last years of socialist Croatia, there was also the integration of the Center for Research on Migration and Ethnic Studies from 1984 and the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies within the Heritage Institute of Croatia into the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, which exists under that name since 1987.

POLITICAL EMIGRANTS AT THE HELM OF THE CROATIAN HERITAGE INSTITUTE

With the victory of the HDZ in the first multi-party elections in Croatia in 1990, the former President of Matica, Blažeković, resigned and retired from his position. Boris Maruna, a poet and long-time political emigrant from the United States, became the first Director in democratic Croatia, allowing all employees at the time to continue working in the new Matica. The independence of the Republic of Croatia not only enabled a change of the name of the Heritage Foundation of Croatia to its current name, Croatian Heritage Foundation (CHF), but also opened the way to all aspects of cooperation with the entire Croatian diaspora throughout the world, Croatian minorities in Europe and Croats in BiH. During the time of the Homeland War, an unprecedented wave of diaspora activity and togetherness – political campaigns to end the aggression against Croatia, campaigns for the international recognition of Croatia, humanitarian and volunteer drives to collect and send aid to our country, when many young Croats born abroad became directly involved in the fight for the liberation of their homeland from the aggressor.

In 1993, Maruna left the director’s position prematurely due to disagreements with HDZ policy. Matica was then briefly headed by Vinko Nikolić, a prominent Croatian emigrant writer and publicist from Argentina. In mid-1993, Ante Beljo, a former emigrant activist from Canada and director of the Croatian Information Center (HIC), an organization for informing the foreign public and emigrants about the war in the Republic of Croatia and BiH, assumed the position of director. His seven-year term in office was marked, among other things, by an effort to harmonize and integrate the activities of both institutions, the CHF and HIC, which, at the time, had its offices in Matica’s premises. After the victory of the SDP-led coalition in the 2000 parliamentary elections, Beljo was replaced by Maruna, who returned to the helm of the CHF.

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Leading the CHF in the new millennium are the following directors: Nikola Jelinčić (2003 – 2006)), Katarina Fuček (2006 – 2008 and 2009 – 2012), Danira Bilić (2008 – 2009), Marin Knezović (2012 – 2016), acting director Mirjana Ana-Maria Piskulić (2016 – 2017) and Mijo Marić since 2017. Directors are appointed and dismissed by the CHF’s Management Board at the proposal of the Government of the Republic of Croatia. The Board supervises the work of the CHF and consists of five members appointed and dismissed by the Government of the Republic of Croatia.

Today, the CHF’s operations are systematized according to functionality and similarities within two departments and subsidiaries: Department for Culture, Education, Science and Publishing, and Department for Legal, Personnel, General, Technical and Accounting Affairs. HMI has branches in Pula, Rijeka, Split, Dubrovnik and Vukovar.

Among the programs and events traditionally organized by the CHF, standing out are the University School of Croatian Language and Culture (since 1991), the Little School of Croatian Language and Culture (since 1993), the restoration and environmental project Eco-Heritage Task Force (since 1993), the Summer and Winter School of Croatian Folklore (since 1994), the Forum of Croatian Minorities (since 1994), the Days of Croatian Folk Theater (since 1995), the Days of Croatian Film (since 1995), the Croatian Ethno Treasury – a workshop for the production and reconstruction of Croatian folk costumes and traditional textile skills (since 2002), the Goldfish Competition for Literary and Journalistic Works of Croatian Learners from Abroad (since 2003), the Festival of Klapa Groups from the Croatian Diaspora (since 2006), the Exhibition of Diaspora Publishing Activities at the Interliber Fair (since 2006), the Most Beautiful Croatian Woman in Folk Costume Outside the Republic of Croatia (since 2014), organization of tours of diaspora groups throughout Croatia, etc. In addition to periodicals and books, the CHF publishes various serial publications that accompany its traditional programs and events. The website www.matis.hr has been available since 1998. Since 2005, the website has grown into an electronic journal, informatively connecting Croatian communities in about thirty countries worldwide. Keeping up with the times, the CHF also has its own Facebook profile.

CROATIAN HERITAGE FOUNDATION AND CROATS LIVING ABROAD

The Republic of Croatia regulated its relations with Croats abroad in 2012 with its Act on Relations of the Republic of Croatia with Croats Abroad, which also defines the role of the CHF in these relations. In the same year, the State (later Central State) Office for Croats Abroad was established as the central state administration body responsible for relations between the Republic of Croatia and Croats Abroad. In relations with Croats outside of the Republic of Croatia, the state has been using the term “Croats abroad” since that time,  and the Act explains that this term refers to three categories: Croats in BiH, Croatian minorities and the Croatian diaspora. The Act defines the CHF as one of the pillars of cooperation with Croats abroad; furthermore, that the CHF “is focused, through its activities, on the preservation and development of the Croatian national, linguistic and cultural identity of Croats abroad”.

In practice, based on experience in the past period and on changes that have occurred in the country, the immediate surroundings and the world, as well as adapting its activities to processes in diaspora communities, the CHF prepares specific cultural, educational, sporting, publishing and informative programs intended for all Croats abroad. The CHF focuses particular attention on each and every Croatian community outside the homeland, regardless of the period or reason for emigrating; social, cultural or other criteria. Namely, the CHF does not consider emigrants with Croatian ethnic and cultural roots –  estimated to number about 3.5 million in some fifty countries –  as a single, unique group that can be approached and communicated with in the same manner. We are aware that this corpus consists of a mosaic of diverse communities living in harmony with the conditions of their new homeland while, at the same time, striving to preserve a part of their inherited identity.

That is why the CHF, by fulfilling its mission of being a gathering point for Croatia’s diaspora, strives to develop and motivate a strong, multi-levelled and consistent dialogue with Croats abroad and their descendants in an attempt to deliver facts that speak about the elements of our identity: historical events and figures, natural beauties and monumental heritage; contemporary events and the people that drive and achieve them… everything that occurs or is done that constitutes the Croatian homeland and people as the focal support of our identity. At the same time, the CHF acts to preserve our national heritage and the ethnic and cultural identity of Croatian minority communities in other countries. It strives to respond to specific requests and demands by Croatian organizations and individuals outside Croatia, adapting to the needs and wishes of our people throughout the world.

Furthermore, based on contemporary, current challenges, the CHF partakes in humanitarian, environmental, reconstruction and development programs initiated through civil society, state administration and regional/local self-government units, contributing to the diversity and dynamics of social dialogue in Croatia and between the homeland and Croatian diaspora communities.