COURAGE

connecting collections

Ivo Banac was born on 1 March 1947, in Dubrovnik. In 1959 he emigrated to New York where he finished the Jesuit Loyola High School. Later, he studied at the Jesuit Fordham University where he graduated in 1965. He obtained a master's degree in 1971 and completed his doctoral dissertation in 1975 during postgraduate studies at the University of Stanford in California. From 1977 to 2009, he taught the history of East and Southeast Europe at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. There he retired in 2009 as a professor emeritus at the department tied to a special foundation named after Bradford Durfee. He worked as a university professor at the Central European University in Budapest from 1994 to 1999, where he managed the Institute for Southeast Europe. Since 2008, he has been a university professor at the Department of History at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and since 1990, he also has been a corresponding member. Banac is the author of numerous books, essays and articles such as The National Question in Yugoslavia. Origins, History, Politics (1984, “Wayne S. Vucinich” Award, American Association for Promoting Slavic Studies), With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (1988, the “Josip Juraj Strossmayer” Award at the Interliber Book Fair in Zagreb) and Hrvati i crkva : kratka povijest hrvatskog katoličanstva u modernosti (Croats and the Church: A Short History of Croatian Catholicism in Modernity) (2013).

In his young years, Banac frequently met up with Radica in New York, while living among the Croatian diaspora in that city. After Radica left New York and went to Stanford University in California, they rarely kept in contact. However, when Banac wrote his first book on the issue of Croatian statehood within Yugoslavia and started working at Yale University, they again came into contact with each other. Radica praised Banac's historiographical work and wrote very positively about him. Subsequently, he decided to donate a part of his collection through Banac to the Yale University Library. After Radica's death, that part of the collection in the Yale University Library was digitised while the hardcopy materials from the collection, thanks to Banac, were transferred to the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb.

Ivo Banac originated from those families that did not get along with the communist regime. His grandfather (on the mother’s side) perished in prison at Lepoglava in 1948, after the authorities sentenced him twenty years in jail. Because of all this, his family left Yugoslavia, first his father in 1947, and then he and his mother in 1959. Banac was under the surveillance by the Yugoslav Secret Police because of his work as a historian. At the time of the Croatian Spring in 1971, Banac resided in Zagreb doing research for his dissertation. Nevertheless, because of his career as a historian, he did not speak out against the regime publicly. This did not that mean that he did not oppose the Yugoslav communist regime, as he did meet privately with émigrés like Radica and dissidents like Tuđman. His book National Question in Yugoslavia was translated into Croatian in 1988 and lead to a negative reaction by the Communist Party and its Marxist intelligentsia. Even some people in the Yugoslav government wanted to ban the book. However, they relented, and finally, the book was printed. Milošević's Belgrade and Šuvar's Zagreb noticed the deconstruction of Greater Serbia and the Yugoslav idea in Banac’s book.

Banac believes that exiles had a significant role in the democratisation of communist regimes in Croatia and in the rest of Eastern Europe as played a role as the cultural opposition, especially regarding the work of the Polish émigrés. He also asserts that it is not possible to view post-WWII Croatian history without referring to the political activity of the Croatian diaspora. He thinks that the influence from the Croatian diaspora was crucial in nurturing the idea of an independent and democratic Croatian state. Likewise, the dissident Franjo Tuđman, from the early 1960s began communicating intensively with Croatian émigrés, both openly and secretly. Banac divides the history of Croatian political emigration into two periods: from 1945 to the Croatian Spring of 1971 and the period following that year. There appeared in the Croatian diaspora a new generation raised under strict Marxism, which was not the case with the previous generation. Given that talking about Croatian history in the communist regime period after 1945 is not possible without politically referring to the Croatian diaspora, Banac concludes that Radica is one of the central figures of postwar Croatian emigration. For this reason, he regards the collection as crucial for researching the history of cultural opposition because Radica had a lot of contact with the political world of the Croatian émigrés and dissenters.

Mrs. Dr. Sándor Olasz, (maiden name Éva Berta Baranyai) widow of Sándor Olasz, teacher at secondary school

Mrs. Dr. Sándor Olasz was born on 5 September 1956 in Orosháza. She graduated as a biology and chemistry teacher from the University of Szeged and later finished postgraduate training as an environmental specialist. She has been working as a teacher at a secondary school in Szeged since 1981. She married Sándor Olasz the same year. In 1982, their son, painter Attila Olasz, was born.

Alexandru Barnea (b. 1944, Bucharest) is a university professor specialising in ancient history and archaeology, in particular the Roman and Byzantine periods. Between 1996 and 2004, he held for two mandates the position of Dean of the Faculty of History of the University of Bucharest. He has also served as Head of the Department of Ancient History, Archaeology, and Art History within the same Faculty of History. He has carried out and coordinated archaeological excavations at some of the most important sites in Romania. He has authored, co-authored, or contributed to over 100 volumes of studies in his field, and has participated in over fifty national and international colloquia and conferences.

Having had a passion for photography since he was a young child, he is the author of several thousand photographs, covering a wide range of themes. One of the areas covered by Alexandru Barnea’s photographic passion is the recovery of the recent history of Romania, with a focus on the project of demolition of the centre of the City of Bucharest in order to rebuild it in accordance with the demands of the communist architectonic vision. His activity of immortalising on slides images of a Bucharest about to disappear is described by Alexandru Barnea without any kind of emphasis, without attempting retrospectively to lay claim to merits that he considers undeserved, although there were very few who dared to embark on something that involved risks: “It was not in fact, insuperably difficult to take photographs. Almost everything I have in my photos was taken from the hill side of the area. It’s probably for that reason that I got in reach of them. In fact they were only guarded at a distance and with minimal personnel. Anyone who was seen could be stopped for questioning and the film could be pulled out of their camera, but that probably only happened at the more important sites – as was the case of the Sfânta Vineri area, where there were also protests. As far as I was concerned, I never had an experience of that sort, but I know friends who got asked what they were doing with the photographs and why they were taking them. There was just one personal experience that didn’t fit the pattern: the case of Văcăreşti [monastery]. They wouldn’t let me in there, into the immediate vicinity, but I have a photo of the site all the same – the man who was guarding it took the photograph for me. The greater part was already demolished and they were working, in a great hurry, on the foundations. The foundations were made from perfectly preserved bricks. As I said, I have a slide of that site – but it’s not completely my own work. I enjoyed, so to speak, a little complicity on the part of the man who was on guard duty in the area at the time. In fact there was another delicate moment: in 1986, when I took photographs in the area from which the House of the People could be seen, and when I was a little afraid. Elsewhere there were soldiers guarding the perimeter – but far fewer. As a rule, it wasn’t visible, they weren’t ostentatious; the guarding was done much more discreetly.”

Alexandru Barnea was a member of the Romanian Communist Party. He does not hide this, but tries to explain the significance of this institutional belonging to something that had become a mass organisation and had come to include almost four million members by 1989. “A radical opponent I could not be. It was risky. I was a party member, without having any particular activity along that line. I decided to become a party member on the advice of a good friend, for pragmatic reasons, because in that way I could advance in the university system. So, there was no way I could be a dissident and I was not one. I was somewhere on the edge of the system, and didn’t stand out very much either one way or the other. I could see what was happening, I could see that it was bad, that what the people of the regime were doing was harmful, and my photographs are a manner of speaking about the truth of that period,” he says, summing up the that attitude that he had towards the communist regime. On the one hand, belonging to the RCP had become a necessity for people in the university system, because enrolment for a doctorate was practically conditional on accepting this step. On the other hand, belonging to the RCP no longer brought any kind of advantages now that it was no longer an elitist organisation but a mass one, but remaining outside the formal framework of the Party was a disadvantage in any career, because all promotions were made in the first place on political criteria and only after that on professional criteria.

Zuzana Bartošová is a researcher at the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and an expert on 20^th-century fine art. She studied art history at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava (1969). In 2006 she defended her dissertation “Unofficial Slovak art scene of the 1970s and 1980s” at Palacký University in Olomouc (2006). 

From 1970 she worked in the Slovak National Gallery (as the curator of the 20^th-century sculpture collection), later she was a director of the Slovak National Gallery (from 1990 to 1992).

She is the author of essential studies and exhibitions related to the issues of Slovak fine art from 1900 to 1948, including catalogues and monographs for exhibitions presented in the Slovak National Gallery. She promoted artists of the unofficial art scene in Slovakia and abroad, and published in samizdat catalogues. She played an active part (from 1979) in the shaping of a plural form of Slovak fine art of the second half of the 20th century through projects, publications, lectures, studies, articles, exhibitions, and catalogues, with an emphasis on the personalities and tendencies of the 1960s and the unofficial scene of the 1970s and 1980s. She represented the unofficial art scene through lectures (in Paris, Vienna, Glasgow, Poznan, Londonderry, Bratislava, Krakow, Warsaw, Budapest, Esztergom, Krakow, Ostrava, and Prague) as well as exhibitions in state and municipal galleries and museums in Slovakia and abroad (Esslingen, Krems, Copenhagen, Paris, Seville, Passau, Vienna, Krakow, Budapest, Gyor, Ljubljana, Sibiu, Bucharest, and Prague) and at the Embassy of the Slovak Republic in Washington, D.C.. She cooperates with many magazines (including Slovenské pohľady from 1989 to 1993; Revue svetovej literatúry from 1986 to the present). She is a curator of the First Slovak Investment Group´s collection (from 1993).