The directory «Plots»

Grabovac Filip
(1697—1749)

Croatian poet. Matija Grabovac, the poet's father, moved to the area of Vrlika, to Podosoj, after the defeat of the Turks before Vienna in 1683. Filip was born in Podosoj in 1697. It can be presumed that he received his first education in the monastery of Visovac, and he subsequently entered the Franciscan order. His collection of Croatian essays «Cvit razgovora naroda i jezika iliričkoga aliti rvackoga» or, roughly translated «The best of folk speech and the Ilyric or Croatian language», was published in Venice in 1747. In the first part of the collection Grabovac goes on to offer religious-moral instruction, both in verse and prose; in the second part he describes some current events in his native country, presenting the hard life of the Croatian population under the Venetian rule. Grabovac wrote his «Cvit» both in prose and verse, using the religious octosyllabic distich, the typical verse of the medieval folk poetry, but when writting about the heroic past in the second part, e.g. about the battles against the Turks in 1715, or about the warrior, Father.

Croatia, 1997, Closed Book