Professional paper
https://doi.org/10.63714/issn.3029-4339.2025.25.1.187
Literacy among Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the first half of the 20th century
Darko Zorić
; Tuzla
Abstract
In the peasant schools of Fra Didak Buntić, during their six years of existence (1911–1917), around 14,000 Herzegovinian Croats learned to read and write. This truly popular movement, born out of the hardship and poverty of the disenfranchised Herzegovinian peasants, laid the foundations for the mass literacy of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Napredak would continue three decades later. In the mass campaigns carried out by Napredak in cooperation with Zagreb’s Seljačka Sloga between 1937 and 1941, around 100,000 people in Bosnia and Herzegovina became literate. The success of these undertakings is all the greater because, through the persistent efforts of all participants, a close relationship of trust was created between the intelligentsia and the peasants, which ultimately evolved into a general idea of national unity and progress during times of extremely unfavourable economic, social, and political circumstances before and during the two world wars. Based on archival material, publications, statistical data, and previous research, the author examines the causes of illiteracy and the efforts to combat it within the Croatian community in the context of the broader socio-political conditions of that period.
Keywords
literacy courses; Fra Didak Buntić; Napredak; literacy; Rudolf Herceg; Peasant Unity; Peasant Schools;
Hrčak ID:
344235
URI
Publication date:
30.11.2025.
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