Original scientific paper
LIKA AND SENJ IN 1914 BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR
ŽELJKO HOLJEVAC
Abstract
A hundred years ago Lika and Senj as part of the Lika-Krbava County found themselves at an historic crossroads between peace and war. In subsequent months the Senj and Modruš or Krbava Bishop Roko Vučić and the Gornji-Karlovac Bishop Mihajlo Grujić died. In the Lika-
Krbava interior there appeared printed leaflets in Cyrillic with an invitation to the emigration of the Orthodox population to Macedonia and other new Serbian acquisitions, whilst a society for the landscaping and beautification of the Plitvice Lakes and surroundings requested the Croatian Parliament not to build a water-powered electrical plant on the lakes via a petition in Zagreb. The
assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo reverberated greatly through all layers of the people of Lika of Croatian and Serbian nationality. Anti-Serb demonstrations erupted in Senj, and Mica Kranjčević from Brlog was suspected of approving the assassination by firing a pistol. When Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia, with which the First World War started, a group of mobilised soldiers of Orthodox faith pulled
down the Croatian flag in Otočac, and the governing commissioner in Gospić requested the urgent strengthening of the weapons’ stations in Lika-Krbava County. Whilst the home soldiers of the 79th Regiment of Count Jelačić from Otočac and the home guard of the 26th Home Defence Regiment from Karlovac spilt their blood “for king and country” on the battlefields of the Balkans and Galicia in the first months of the war, many politically suspicious and untrustworthy
individuals in the Lika-Krbava background were arrested and detained, wherein 128 politically dubious and unreliable people of the Orthodox faith were interned in Udbina alone. The flare-up
of war by the end of the year worsened the economic and social conditions in Lika-Krbava County, and the set-up of martial law remained in place here due to security reasons.
Keywords
Lika; Senj; 1914; First World War
Hrčak ID:
153591
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2014.
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