On hand to discuss the book were the director of the Libraries of Dubrovnik Vesna Čučić, researcher Vesna Miović and the book’s editor Zrinka Podhraški Čizmek.
The presentation of the third volume of Nikola Čolak’s Hrvatski pomorski registry (Marittimi regesti croati, The Croatian Maritime Registers) was staged at the reading room of the Grad Public Library. On hand to discuss the book were Vesna Čučić, the director of the Libraries of Dubrovnik, researcher Vesna Miović from the historical science department in Dubrovnik of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts and the book’s editor Zrinka Podhraški Čizmek, a post-graduate student at the history department of the University of Split’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
In his afterword professor Josip Vrandečić writes: “For this work of a lifetime one requires all the virtues of a collector-historian: integrity, erudition and knowledge, to which professor Čolak has appended an emphasised love of the homeland. Encapsulated in his work is the entirety of our historical ideal of the Adriatic Sea, our sea, which, as he emphasises, makes us the only historical maritime nation in the full sense of the word in the great Slavic family.”
Čučić noted that the book has thus far been promoted in Zagreb, Pula, Rijeka and Split. In this work the author has navigated the expanse stretching from Istria to Boka kotorska. The burgeoning of Dalmatia in the eighteenth century was due, in fact, to seafaring and commerce, and Čučić spoke of the maritime tradition of the Boka region.
Besides being the book’s editor Podhraški Čizmek is also the author’s granddaughter. The registers are documents associated with Croatia’s maritime lines in the eighteenth century. The volumes comprise sixteen thousand documents from the archives of Venice and Ancona. Ms Podhraški Čizmek spoke of her grandfather’s life and of the content of the three volumes of the book.
The latest volume was published in 2017 by the history department of the University of Split’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, nineteen years after the author’s death.
The book presentation was hosted by the history department of the University of Split’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the historical science department in Dubrovnik of the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts, the Dubrovnik branch office of the Croatian Heritage Foundation and the Libraries of Dubrovnik.
Speaking on behalf of the Dubrovnik branch office of the CHF Maja Mozara thanked the Čolak family for their hospitality during the recent Meeting of Croatians in Padua, an event staged every year on the feast day of St Leopold Bogdan Mandić, the patron saint of Dubrovnik-Neretva County.
Nikola Čolak (1914, Janjevo – 1996, Padua) was a historian, archivist and publicist and worked professionally in the field of culture. He earned degrees in philosophy, classical philology, Italian and French language and literature and history. He founded the Centre for the Study of Croatian History in Venice and published over fifty original scientific papers in the relevant Croatian and Italian journals of history. He prepared the sixteen thousand documents for printing in the future three-volume tome covering the Croatian maritime registers of the eighteenth century, of which the third volume was published posthumously. He collected over one hundred thousand documents in Croatian and Italian archives during his forty years of research into the history of Adriatic seafaring in the eighteenth century. (https://dubrovacki.slobodnadalmacija.hr/)
Volume III of The Croatian Maritime Registers Presented
