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- Dec 22, 2023
- 9 min read

Marija Zagorka - Croatia's first political journalist

Women's rights and gender equality

Marija Jurić Zagorka was born on March 2, 1873, in the noble Negoec mansion near Vrbovac, Croatia. She consistently championed Croatian political independence, the rights of women and workers, as well as encouraging social justice of her time. A declared feminist, she mobilized the political activity of working women and led the first women's protest in Zagreb in 1903. In 1925, she founded the Ženski list (Women's Paper), Croatia's first women's magazine. She was also the founder of another feminist magazine, Hrvatica (Croatian Woman), in 1938.

During World War II, under the government of the collaborationist Nazi State of Croatia (NDH), her assets were confiscated and she was banned from publishing. After the war, she continued her feminist activism, even though male colleagues mocked her.

Until recently, critics regarded her work as rubbish. Her works have not yet been completely re-evaluated. In many ways, advanced writers despised her and considered her a masculine woman. At least in part, this attitude was caused by her feminist involvement. In 1910, she participated in the founding of the Association of Croatian Journalists. Along with other female writers, she participated in the founding of the Croatian Writers Society in 1936, which existed until 1939.

Journalistic and literary career

During high school, Zagorka edited the Samostanske novine (Convent newspaper), her first newspaper. In 1891, under the pseudonym M. Jurica Zagorski (suggesting that she was male), she edited Zagorsko proljeće (Zagorje Spring), the only student newspaper in Krapina, a city in northern Croatia and the administrative center of Krapina-Zagorje county. After the publication of the first issue, the newspaper was banned for writing the introduction entitled The Spirit of Matija Gubec Accuses - Later generations did not use spilled blood and are still slaves. In 1896, she wrote unsigned articles for the newspapers Hrvatski branik and Hrvatska Posavina.

Her extensive journalistic career began in 1896 at the important Croatian newspaper Obzor (Horizon), as a proofreader because she was a woman, the editor-in-chief, Šime Mazzuro, prevented her from being a copywriter, considering that having a woman in the newsroom was a cultural and moral scandal. He classified her as a grandmother without a name and reputation, nobody and nothing, a cowgirl from Zagorje and also infected by the socialist mentality and feminist innovations.

Thanks to the intervention of Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, she moved to the newsroom, but she had to stay in a room separated by a curtain so that no one could see her. There she faced gender discrimination, contempt from peers, accusations of immoral behavior, political persecution and low wages. The fact that she was extremely popular as a writer did not help either. She was thus doubly insulting the establishment, both as a woman and as a popular authoress. However, through her hard work and incredible persistence, she became Croatia's first female political journalist, although she often had to write under pseudonyms, mostly male.

Publication of her first article as a journalist

On October 31, 1896, his first article entitled Egy percz (Hungarian for a brief moment) was published. Ingeniously, she wrote about the exclusive use of the Hungarian language in Croatia's train stations. As the Hungarian language was unknown to most Croatians, passengers did not know from where and where the trains were running. She later reported on the political developments of the Croatian-Hungarian Parliament in Budapest, adding commentary, interviews and notes on unofficial political conversations, which contributed significantly to the increase in Obzor's circulation.

In 1903, during the period of popular uprising against the Hungarian ban of Károly Khuen-Héderváry, a Hungarian politician banished from the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia at the end of the 19th century. Khuen's reign was marked by strong Magyarization (the act of giving a Magyar character or making it similar to Hungarian). After a series of riots broke out against him, Khuen was deposed and appointed Prime Minister of Hungary. Zagorka organized a women's protest against Khuen's ban and gained international fame as a foreign correspondent, reporting directly from the Croatian-Hungarian Parliament in Budapest.

After the editor-in-chief of the Obzor J. Pasarić and his deputy M. Heimerl were arrested in 1903 during the heaviest oppression of the Croatians, Zagorka edited the paper alone for five months. For organizing demonstrations, she was held in solitary confinement for ten days. At this time, she also wrote articles for the Hungarian opposition newspapers Népszava and Magyarország. However, her editorial work on Obzor was not mentioned in Obzor's Memorial Book in 1936, which deeply offended her.

In 1917, Marija left Obzor and launched her own magazine, Zabavnik. From 1925 to 1938, she edited and published the first Croatian women's magazine Ženski list (Women's Role), personally writing most of the articles, which had a feminist and patriotic note. She left the magazine because she was dissatisfied with the majority of the editorial staff who became partisan of conservatism and clericalism, contrary to her original support for liberalism and feminism.

From 1939 to 1941, she edited and published the magazine Hrvatica (Croatian Woman). He has also written articles for dozens of other prominent newspapers, including Vijenac and Novi list. In 1936, she participated in the founding of the Croatian Writers' Association.

Fascist Persecution during World War II

During World War II, the Ustaše, members of the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement, the Croatian Nazi and paramilitary terrorist organization, active between 1929 and 1945, persecuted her. Ustaša members murdered thousands of Serbs, Jews, gypsies as well as political dissidents from the regime and defenders of Yugoslavia during the war. The movement's ideology was a mixture of fascism, nazism and Croatian religious racism. She was banned from publishing the magazine. All existing copies, subscription money and even furniture in her apartment were confiscated. With no means of livelihood, she attempted suicide but survived thanks to the spiritual and financial support of her faithful readers.

In 1944, she tried to join the Yugoslav partisans, but was rejected. Partisans were Jewish guerrillas who managed to escape from ghettos and concentration camps and formed their own fighting groups concentrated in forested areas. After the war ended, she was excluded from the cultural scene for which she blamed some of her former misogynist colleagues at Obzor for believing that women should only write novels.

Historical novels

Around 1910, out of love for her mother tongue, Croatian (which in the early 20th century was suppressed from the public due to the official use of Hungarian and German) and under the patronage of Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, she began to write historical novels. , published in periodical volumes. As the number of readers increased with each publication, she discontinued her journalistic work and is now best known for her literary work, which is still extremely popular.

Her writing did not have a moralistic and pious tone; on the contrary, it was politically subversive. The female protagonists were strong and independent and struggled against various patriarchal and moralistic social pressures. They not only participated in the plot, but also in significant historical events. Literary twists often featured transvestites and other ways of playing with traditional gender roles.

These novels vividly evoked the forgotten Croatian past of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and were published as supplements in daily newspapers, skyrocketing their circulation and popularity. In the archives of Zagreb, Vienna and Budapest, she researched documentary material and used her literary imagination abundantly to construct moving plots and stories, with a rich gallery of characters.

As the authoress of popular historical novels, journalists and literary critics who proclaimed her novels as “garbage for peasant women frequently attacked Marija Jurić”. In her autobiography Kako je bilo (As it Was), she safeguards her writing in defense of her wide audience, who have always loved her books. In her writing, she strove to educate her readers about Croatian history, the struggle for national independence, as well as women's and workers' rights, always presenting these important political issues in the form of moving adventures and moving love stories. Her readers, particularly women, recognized and appreciated her books.

Marija also wrote novels with contemporary themes, such as Roblje (Slaves) in 1899 and Vladko Šaretić (an original story of life in Zagreb) in 1903. She produced one-act plays for amateur theater companies, short stories and humorous plays, and polemical texts in which she defends gender equality and women's rights to education, the profession, property and universal suffrage.

As a writer, she used different pseudonyms, often masculine, such as Jurica Zagorski, Petrica Kerempuh and Iglica. The most famous, Zagorka, was chosen because of her love for the Croatian people, with whose difficulties in life she had sympathized since childhood, despite coming from a wealthy family, with a way of life close to the Hungarian nobility.

As she became a Croatian writing and reading phenomenon, she received nicknames from the people such as the Greek Fairy by The Witch of Grič and Queen of Croatians by Gordana.

Main books

Kneginja iz Petrinjske ulice (The Countess of Petrinjska Street) - the first Croatian detective novel.

Tajna Krvavog mosta (The Secret of Bloody Bridge Street) - published in 1911, later to become part of her most famous seven-volume novel, Grička vještica (The Witch of Grič), which deals with the persecution of so-called witches in Croatia XVIII century.

Crveni ocean (Red Ocean) - first Croatian science fiction novel, published in 1918.

Gordana - novel consisting of 12 volumes and nearly 9,000 pages. It is the longest novel written in the Croatian language and among the longest in the world.

Literary recognition and evaluation of Zagorka's journalistic work

Wider social recognition of Zagorka's work and its place in Croatian culture only came gradually in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1960s, her professional journalistic work was highly valued (J. Horvat). Her Complete Works (I. Hergešić) were published in the 1970s. In the 1980s, she was valued as an important writer for the history of national Literature (S. Lasić). The strengthening of feminism as a new social movement led to the first feminist reception (L. Sklevicky).

In a monograph on the history of Croatian journalism, historian Josip Horvat highlights Zagorka's European reputation as Southeast Europe's first political journalist in the early 20th century, as well as its modern way of reporting. Political news was served in a completely new way, which contributed significantly to the modernization of Croatian newspapers. This was followed by the publication of the Complete Works by the publisher Novinska Tstvalnost, with a preface written by his colleague Ivo Hergešić and supplemented for the new editions (1973, 1976).

With a wealth of information and testimonies about Zagorka and the compilation of a bibliography of thirty-five titles, this preface is not only Zagorka's professional rehabilitation, but also a human one, with an understanding of the journalist and writer's feminism as necessary in a period hostile to women in public. There was also the first biography of Zagorka, written by journalist Bora Đorđević, written in a conversation with the author before her death in 1957, and documented by her own memoirs.

IMAGEM

Analyzing the phenomenon of Zagorka's writing and reading from the perspective of the history of Croatian literature, literary critic, and historian Stanko Lasić writes the first scientific monograph about her. In the first part, he explores significant data for her biography until 1910, when the novel Kneginja iz Petrinjska Ulica was published, whose literary structure is discussed in the second part of the monograph.

For Lasić, this novel means a break with Šeno's writing present in Kumičić and Gjalski, but also in Zagorka's debuts. By turning to the plot novel model, typical of contemporary crime genres, Zagorka tapped into the reader's passion for storytelling and energized the novelistic structure of the Croatian novel.

Biography

Marija Jurić was born on March 2, 1873 in the village of Negovec in the family of Ivan Jurić and Josipa Domin. She had two brothers and a sister. Baptized in a Catholic church on March 3, 1873, she received the baptismal name Mariana.

She spent her childhood in Hrvatsko Zagorje na Golubovec, owned by Baron Geza Rauch, which her father managed. Private tutors alongside the children of Baron Rauch educated her. Zagorka attended elementary school in Varaždin, where she stood out as very smart and talented, finishing all grades with the highest grades.

Although her father wanted to send her to Switzerland to attend high school, her mother was opposed and she ended up attending an all-girls high school at the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Zagreb. In late 1891, at her mother's insistence and her father's objection, she married the Slovak-Hungarian railway officer Andrija Matraja, 17 years her senior.

Zagreb disapproved of her husband's chauvinism (excessive enthusiasm for what is national), and systematic contempt for what is foreign, of her husband against the Croats. The couple lived in the Hungarian town of Szombathely for three years, during which time she suffered a mental breakdown and they eventually divorced. She managed to get a divorce with the help of her father. However, was found guilty of marriage failure after her mother testified against her. As a result, her ex-husband was under no obligation to pay alimony or return his personal belongings.

During her time in Hungary, she learned telegraphy and Hungarian, which helped her later in her career as a journalist. After dramatically escaping her abusive husband in 1895, Zagorka first lived with her uncle in Srijemska Mitrovica and later in Zagreb. Her ex-husband accused her of being mentally unstable and for that, she was kept in an asylum, but was eventually released when doctors realized she was healthy.

Zagorka died in Zagreb in 1957. Her apartment was turned into a museum. Subsequent feminist scholarship has largely embraced Zagorka's populist legacy (Kolanović 2008), with Lydia Sklevicky dubbing her the little Amazon of Croatian feminism.

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