page_title: Medo Pucić
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Medo Pucić / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Medo Pucić, beschnittenes Bild English: Medo Pucić, cropped image Српски / srpski: Медо Пуцић
context_page_description: Orsat "Medo" Pucić, was a Ragusan writer and an important member of the Catholic Serb movement.
context_section_description: Orsat Pucić was born on March 21, 1821 in Dubrovnik, then in Austrian Empire. He was descended from the House of Pucić, an old noble family of Republic of Ragusa. His brother was Niko Pucić. He attended the lyceum in Venice, where in 1841 he became acquainted with Ján Kollár. Pucić was impressed with his pan-Slavist ideas, and went on to join the Illyrian movement. Pucić's was a member of Serb Catholic movement.
  He studied between 1841 and 1843 in the University of Padua, and then from 1843 to 1845 he studied law in Vienna and was a Knight Hospitaller of the Sovereign Order of Saint John. 
  In 1841, Medo Pucić, a writer from an old Catholic noble family, became acquainted with pan-Slavists Ján Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik, and started to espouse a Serb national sentiment. Pucić lived in the cities of Lucca and Parma between 1846 and 1849, and after that usually in Dubrovnik. Pucić was in active contact with cultural and political circles of Central Croatia, the rest of the Austrian Empire, and different countries of Europe. In March 1848 Pucić threw his lot with Adam Mickiewicz who was in Rome at the time trying to convince Pope Pius IX to endorse a Polish national revolution against the Habsburgs. In 1858 Medo Pucić published the first volume Serbian Documents (Spomenici Srpski) in Belgrade which consisted of documents written by Rusko Hristoforović (1395-1423) of the Serbian Chancellery in Dubrovnik. After 1860 when the political life in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was revived, he took part in the Serbian and Croatian national movements in Dalmatia and the politics in Croatia proper. Pucić as a leader of the conservative faction wedded the theory of the Croatian historical right to the Dalmatia to the convoluted ethno-linguistic arguments originating in early Slavonic studies circles (Kollar, Šafárik, Dobrovsky,..) which considered all native Shtokavian speakers as Serbs; later that century the theories about linguistic demarcation of Serbs and Croats, and hence the ethno-historical "ownership" of Dubrovnik and Kotor, had been subsumed in the ideology of Serbo-Croatism, a sort of cover term which considered Croats and Serbs as tribes of a single South Slavic nation. Medo Pucić was a vocal supporter of the unification of all the South-Slavic lands within the Habsburg Monarchy around one nation, called later Yugoslavia.
  Pucić's pan-Slavic (or pan-South-Slavic) idea  was based on the principle of unification of Croats with the Slavic tradition in Dubrovnik.
  In 1868, he moved to Belgrade to become a teacher to the young prince Milan Obrenović IV until he came of age in 1872. He returned to Dubrovnik in 1874, and played an important role in the cultural life of the city in the 1870s. The Serb party had among its supporters in Dubrovnik, alongside Serbs (Orthodox), and some Catholics, who have since declared themselves Serbs of the Catholic faith (the so-called Serb-Catholics). The appearance of Dubrovnik Serb Catholics was based on Vuk Karadžić's assumption that all those who spoke Štokavian were Serbs. The first one in Dubrovnik to adopt and exhibit Vuk's idea was poet Medo Pucić, followed by professors of the Dubrovnik Gymnasium, linguists Pero Budmani, Stjepo Castrapelli and Luko Zore. In 1874 when the literary magazine Slovinac, founded by Jovan Sundečić and Vuk Vrčević, needed an editor it Medo Pucić, then president of the Serb-Catholic Circle, who chose Luko Zore for the post. Around the publication gathered were Serb and Croat intellectuals for the next seven years of its existence.
caption: Medo Pucić
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