Danijel Uvanović 1927. Source: Archive of the Faculty of Philosophy Zagreb
Danijel Uvanović
Danijel’s father Ivan Uvanović came to the Blaca hermitage on the island of Brač from Prik in Poljica, and married Marija, the sister of Don Niko Milićević Jr. As an excellent and educated astronomer, Niko Jr. maintained scientific connections with famous astronomers, some of whom were in Blace (Prof. Graff, Prof. Hillebrand, Prof. Wolf, Prof. Schwarzschild, Prof. Baade). Ivan Uvanović opened an inn in Trieste, and his sons Danijel (1908) and Dragutin (1910) were born there. When World War I started, Marija and her sons settled in Blace with their uncle, Don Niko Milićević Sr., uncle of Don Niko Milićević Jr., while her husband Ivan was mobilized into the Austrian army. After the war, they moved to Slavonski Brod, where they were also supported by their mother’s uncle. Danijel attended high school in Slavonski Brod, but he was under threat of expulsion for serenading, so he transferred to the Križevci high school on his own initiative, from which he finally graduated. After that, in 1927, he enrolled in the study of mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. Keeping up to date with the latest scientific literature, Uvanović successfully engaged in scientific work after training at the astronomical observatory in Blaca on the island of Brač. Due to the circumstances that prevailed at the Croatian University during the dictatorship of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he devoted himself to journalism, investing a lot of effort in it, even though he was not very interested in politics as a discipline. Uvanović supported his brother Dragutin, who had just begun studying law at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, because their poor father could not afford to do so.
After the war, he took refuge in Rome, where he was arrested on March 26th, 1947, by the British special police, and on April 27th, 1947, extradited to the Communists. He was sentenced to death by a kangaroo court in Zagreb. The indictment was signed by the State Attorney of the city of Zagreb, Vlado Ranogajec. The Communist issued a pre-determined ideological verdict: “The accused, Danijel Uvanović, is to be punished with death by firing squad, permanent loss of political and certain legally defined civil rights, as well as confiscation of property taking effect as of April 10th, 1947.” According to the official records on the execution of the death penalty, compiled by the Department of Internal Affairs of the Zagreb City Executive Committee – Department for the Execution of Sentences, on January 30th, 1948, at 1:00 am, the “sentence” was carried out and Daniel Uvanović was shot. He was shot after inhuman torture, but his small surviving family never received his dead body or learned of the whereabouts of his remains.
Prior to that, his wife, Zlata Uvanović (Ćubelić), was also sentenced to death in the kangaroo trial no. 369 on July 10th, 1945. The execution was carried out on the day of the sentencing, which speaks volumes of the hurry the communists were in!
Uvanović was an integral member of the Croatian scientific community in the 1930’s. In his texts in “Hrvatska Straža”, he wrote about all scientific events in Croatia, and provided a decent, often the only insight into everything that was happening at the time. He was very well informed about the global scientific events of that time, and he thoroughly informed the Croatian public about it. He was extremely talented and very educated.
Finally, it should be noted that Uvanović was mentioned completely one-sidedly in Croatian literature during the communist rule. If he was mentioned at all he was portrayed as an opponent of Marxist ideals. However, the idealist thinkers of the 1930’s played an important role in Croatia, and were not subordinated to dialectical materialism, as Marxists claimed. Uvanović was considered backward by dialectical materialists because he advocated idealism and Catholic philosophy.
Danijel Uvanović published a series of discussions of a scientific nature, which aroused special interest at the time. Uvanović’s strident critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity provoked great controversy in India. His discussion of Einstein’s theory was once quoted by Mahatma Gandhi personally.
Source:
Branko Hanžek, Physicist and publicist Danijel Uvanović – addition to the scientific and political CV with bibliography of works, Zagreb, 2011.
Editorial board/crimesofcommunism.net
