400TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CLASSICAL GYMNASIUM IN ZAGREB

Motif: Open book with engraved latin number CD (400) In the year 2006 the Classical Gymnasium has celebrated a rare and more than significant jubilee: four centuries of its existence and continuous activity. This fact alone would suffice to turn our attention to this school but nowadays its significance has been developing in national proportions because this school with its activity has essentially participated in the development of Croatian culture. Having been founded by the endeavours and merits of the indefatigable Jesuit brothers of Družba Isusova [The Society of Jesus], it inaugurated and sustained the consciousness about the crucial importance of classical education and all the things it included, particularly the significance of the Latin language in the creation and strengthening of the Croatian cultural and specifically national identity. This is the reason that the oldest Croatian school has for a long time enjoyed the reputation as a cult educational institution in Croatia. The cultural and political history of the Croats has been inseparably bound to the Latin language and the west-European humanism. Having emerged from the darkness of its pre-history, after arriving in their present homeland, the Croats started building their culture depending on their script and their own language. At the same time they have embraced the Latin language as the language not only of Christianity but as the language of science, culture, literature and politics of the whole western world. The Latin language had then already permeated the consciousness of the Croats as a parallel language of their culture and increasingly as the language of their political and public life which is why the language continued as the official language all through to the time of the Croatian National Revival. Written in the Latin language were almost all historical documents relating to public law, registers and monuments upon which the uninterrupted statehood of Croatia since the 9th century up to the present has been based. It was Latin that helped the Croats successfully withstand the long-term attacks of Germanization and Hungarization and defend their statehood singularity in terms of public law. Croatian representatives have given many important political speeches in Latin both in Croatian and international institutions (Šimun Kožičić Bernja, Bernardin Frankapan). Latin was used to write the most important Croatian programmatic-political written documents of that time (Vitezović). Numerous Croatian writers wrote many varied poetic and prose works in Latin (from Šižgorić and Marulić to Katančić), so there is a justified assertion expressed in the critique that the Croats at the time of humanism “had the richest and aesthetically most precious Latinist literature”. The rich Latin tradition of the Croatian medieval literature had not been interrupted even after the period of humanism: all through to the present time Croatian literature could record bilingual writers, mostly poets, who wrote simultaneously in Croatian and Latin. Finally, it was in the Latin language that Croatian science started to be created, not only humanist but natural sciences as well (Getaldić, Bošković and Vrančić). All this should tell us that the Croats, by simultaneously using the Croatian and Latin languages, both in public life and in literature, have built the foundations of their identity. When using Latin they were the active builders of European humanism which means that they have been European citizens for centuries, citizens of Europe at its starry moments. Moreover, they were the participants and builders of the European spiritual world from the very beginnings of their history because they had, by the mediation of the Latin language, come into contact with the Bible, the foundation book of the western-Christian circle that had a crucial influence upon the overall European spiritual life, supplying it with a recognizable system of moral values. It is the great merit of the Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb that for four centuries it has been keeping alive and perpetually expanding our knowledge and deepening our conscience about it.